Help

New user tour

A guided walk through the actual lesson screens: examples, playback, score navigation, note entry, checks, singing and saved progress. Pause whenever you want; your place is saved.

The tour changes the view to show controls. It does not fill answers or award lesson credit. Anything you choose to enter or answer is ordinary saved practice.

Lesson formats

Use Foundations to learn the rules. Each bass then offers three ways to work.

In Practice, work through With a guide, Less help, On your own, then A new bass. Explore opens the full exercise. Compare and the supplementary Alternatives offer further study.

Reading and navigating the score

The four staves are Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass. Figures sit below the bass; functional harmony sits below the figures. The note outline identifies the selected voice; the pale column identifies its time.

• Click a visible note to hear it. In Practice, select a slot to enter or change its pitch. Supplied notes remain protected.
• Click a measure number to hear its measure, or a thin beat rectangle to hear one beat. Use the steppers to move through the score.
• Underlined musical references in the text select the corresponding chord, note, voice or passage. Space plays that highlight; Escape restores the previous playback context.
• Up to four measures fit in view. Narrower screens show as many as fit, and the view follows playback.

Click a figure for its meaning. Figure & doubling and Register provide contextual help without leaving the lesson.

Keyboard shortcuts

The footer shows the active target and useful keys. Outside text fields, 1 selects Playback, 2 Score, and 3 Notes. / enters a pitch when an editable note is selected. Space plays or stops.

Press ? in a lesson for the searchable shortcut palette. Text fields keep their normal editing keys. Settings can disable single-key shortcuts or keep standard Tab navigation everywhere.

Entering notes and harmony

Type a pitch letter and octave: d4. Include its accidental every time: f#4 or bb4. An omitted accidental means natural, even in a key containing that sharp or flat. The octave number changes at C.

Typing the octave commits the note. By default, entry moves down the upper voices and then into the next chord, skipping givens. Turn off Advance down columns to stay on the current note. Tab and Shift+Tab move between slots; Escape leaves entry.

From Less help onward, enter functional harmony too. Major triads use uppercase Roman numerals; minor triads use lowercase: I, V, ii, vi. Use the harmony-entry help for inversion, seventh-chord and applied-function conventions. The opening studies check their reviewed diatonic triads.

Playback and voices

Play operates on the current example, phrase or selected text highlight. Space stops and starts that scope. Shift+Space plays the current beat. In Explore, the full-bass option switches between the whole exercise and the selected measure.

Each available voice has a checkbox, Solo and All except. Solo selects one voice. All except selects its accompaniment. s, a, t, b solo and play once; Shift with the letter plays all except that voice. All voices restores the ensemble.

The tone selector offers Chorale, Piano, String quartet, Wind quartet and Brass quartet. Voices… assigns an instrument to each part. Tone choices persist across pages. Tempo remains beside the player; check its displayed pulse unit.

If nothing sounds, check the selected voices, whether notes are masked or unanswered, and the device volume. Press Play to allow the browser to start audio. Sample sources and licences.

Singing practice

Sing creates a checklist for the example’s available voices. Listen to a part, sing it alone, sing against the bass, then sing against the other parts. Choose a comfortable octave.

• A singing step begins with a one-second starting tone and two count-in clicks. The conductor shows the 4/4 beat from the orchestra’s view.
• Loop repeats on a 4/4 boundary, with clicks filling unused counts.
• Alternate reference / silence alternates hearing the sung part with supplying it yourself.
• Autoplay starts the next step when you press Next. Left/Right move between steps; Space plays or stops.
• The checklist and passage choices are saved per example. You can mark steps yourself; the site does not listen to or grade your voice.

Singing is optional for unit completion. In a listening challenge, reveal its score before opening Sing.

Hidden notes, hints and Reveal

A question hides information that would supply its answer. Construction tasks replace selected notes with ? and silence them. Listening tasks keep the sound while concealing the score. Notation-reading tasks retain the marks you need to interpret and may withhold the relevant sound.

The prompt states the task and its clues. An incorrect response keeps the mask. A correct response or Reveal restores the material and explanation. Reveal alone does not count as answering correctly.

Try again starts a fresh attempt and retains earlier earned progress. Foundations keeps its rules available and asks you to apply them to new examples.

Checks and canonical solutions

Check this phrase reports missing notes, chord membership and spelling, required functional harmony, voice ranges and order, upper-voice spacing, parallel fifths and octaves, large leaps, and the exercise’s supported leading-tone rules.

Hover, focus or tap a correction for guidance. Select an issue in the list to return to its note or harmony box. Editing clears the old marks; check again after revising. * in the music shows or hides the results.

Passing the phrase unlocks Reveal one canonical solution note. It selects the first differing editable pitch and names the source’s choice. A valid realization can differ from the canonical solution. Checks report when its pitches match; the full source may also have rhythms and phrasing beyond the teaching realization.

The checks cover the rules described in the exercise, not every stylistic judgement. Use the source comparison and a teacher’s review for musical choices beyond those rules.

Completion and saved progress

Understand, Make, Hear and Transfer are required. Make includes every required practice phrase. Transfer includes the new bass and its reflection. Compare and singing are optional. A passed phrase shows a continuation button; the progress row identifies unfinished work.

Progress is saved in this browser for this site address. It does not automatically appear on another device, browser or site. Settings → Progress exports all work or imports a saved file, including older individual lesson exports.

Export before moving between the local site and Netlify. Import shows what will change, keeps a local pre-import backup, and leaves records absent from the file alone. An exported file is the portable copy.

Musical terms

Sources and alternatives

The course pairs Bonet’s The Fundamental Principles of Harmony with two figured-bass problem books and their two solution books. Source controls show the relevant printed material. Teaching realizations, analysis and original transfer exercises are identified separately.

Supplementary Alternatives in Basses 2 and 3 lets you hear and compare source versions, reconstruct selected hidden notes and write an observation. These studies are separate from required unit milestones. Documented corrections preserve the original printed reading.