For you music theory fans

This won't be another long post about chord theory, although that one was surprisingly well-received, and I may delve into that topic again sometime soon. This is just a link to a great new site I found while browsing Digg.com.

It's musictheory,net, and it's got lots of great lessons. Everything is done in Flash, so the interface is nice and very useful. The best part (to me at least) are the trainers:

• Guitar trainer, where you the computer displays a mark on a fret and you have to tell it what the note is. This will be awesome for me, because I pretty much suck at that, and it is starting to inhibit my playing. There is also a cool brass trainer that displays a note and asks you to press the arrow keys the way you'd press the valves to make that note on a given instrument. Since brass instruments are an offense against the ears of God, I'm not sure why anyone would go here, except that it's a cool idea.


• Interval ear trainer, which plays two notes and asks you to identify the interval. I used to have one of these on my old PDA, and it's the feature I miss most since i dropped that sucker on a concrete floor a few years back. I kept screwing up on the minor sixth for some reason.


• Chord ear trainer, similar to the interval ear trainer except it plays a chord. This one is hard but useful if you're the type of person who tries to make chord charts from recordings.

All these trainers keep track of your accuracy. I ran about 95% on the guitar trainer (restricted to the first five frets, though), 75% on the intervals, and a paltry 40% on the chords (even with the weirder ones removed from the equation).

There's a ton of other interesting and useful content on that site, and it runs from very basic to rather advanced. Cool stuff.