Music teaching apps can help you learn about music theory, ranging from ear training to rudiments and chords. If you’re teaching music online for the first time, these apps should be on your phone or on your bookmarks bar.
Below, we listed our highly recommended music teaching apps for iOS and Android devices. We also included websites for music learning.
Best Music Teaching Apps and Online Resources
Music theory practitioners, learners, and experts use these music teaching apps. Some of them are 100% free to access or download, while others require a monthly or yearly subscription fee.
Nonetheless, these apps guarantee insightful learning for beginner to intermediate students. These applications and resources also cover the three categories in music theory learning—ear training, rudiments, and core theory.
Music Theory Examples by Women
Website | Free
Music Theory Examples by Women is a web-based database of music learning materials by women. It’s also free to access the website and those materials.
Historically, female composers are underrepresented. Therefore, by exploring their works and teaching them to young people, you can help bring justice to these talented women.
On this website, you will find music theory resources and compositions by women composers. You can explore lessons by category: Meter & Rhythm, Scales & Tonalities, Chords & Harmonies, Harmonic Progressions, Cadence, and more.
Besides a giant compilation of examples, they also have YouTube and Spotify playlists, and a store where you can buy posters of the women composers. You can also search for resources according to the theorists. If you have examples, you’re also free to submit and add them to their database.
Overall, this is a good resource you can use side by side with other music teaching apps.
Rhythm Sight Reading Trainer
iOS | $2.99
Rhythm Sight Reading Trainer can train students in sight reading through instant feedbacks on timing accuracy.
This is one of the music teaching apps that professionals highly suggest. It’s not hard to see why they would recommend it, though. With a size of only 15.1 MB, it’s full of features that a music teacher or student will surely need.
On the app, students can enhance their sight reading using the exercises divided into different difficulties. Beginners can start with the Simple stage until they improve enough to practice at the Professional level.
If students want a challenge, they can try more difficult exercises that have rests, duplets, syncopations, ties, and more.
Besides the diverse range of exercises, Rhythm is also jam-packed with other wonderful features. It has practice modes, a rhythm editor, extra challenges, a reporting feature for teachers, and added sounds and microphone controls. There’s also dark mode!
Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People
Website/Printable Posters | Posters’ prices start at $9.99
This is exactly not a music teaching app, but we just had to include it because it’s a good resource.
If you’re teaching music to freshman or sophomore students, you could check out this incredibly written and illustrated series of 18″ x 24″ posters. This is called Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People.
The PDF versions are free to download from the site; however, they are not commercially licensed. That means you can use or share them with your students, but you can’t resell them.
This series’ posters start at $9.99, which you could buy in bundles starting at $449.99. The poster sets cover the following topics:
- Notation
- Fundamentals
- Diatonic Harmony
- Development and Form
- Chromatic Harmony
- The Twentieth Century
- Species Counterpoint
- Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People
Meanwhile, you can download the PDFs of the posters for free. The topics of the single posters are more specific. For example, this topic is an overview of Music Theory.
The posters are pretty impressive since they teach you well-summarized basic and in-depth topics. They are also being updated by the creator, Toby W. Rush.
Ear Trainer
iOS | $7.99
Ear Trainer is one of the most impressive music teaching apps available on iOS. It focuses on honing students’ listening skill, which is imperative if they want to become professional musicians.
On Ear Trainer, 260 exercises focus on the nine areas of study. Students can use a virtual piano and analyze the notes they are playing.
The exercises, particularly, are comprehensive. You can train students in Interval Comparison, Interval Identification, and Chord Identification, Inversions, and Progressions. There are also exercises that teach about Scales, Note relative to chord, Relative Pitch, and Melody.
You can also create and share custom exercises based on your students’ pacing or skill. A free, lighter version of the app is also available if you want to give it a try.
This app indeed delivers what it promises—it trains a person’s ears, and it’s effective at that.
Ch!ear – Chord Ear
iOS | $2.99
If you’re teaching chord progressions, Ch!ear can assist you in class.
Ch!ear is a near-perfect app, with a heavy focus on teaching students how to recognize chord progressions and differentiating harmonies. The exercises are also based on classic songs, which have authentic voice guides as well.
With more than a whopping 1,500 exercises, your students can practice at a beginners’ pace, with four chords for each exercise. They can slowly progress to more challenging exercise levels, which include six chords per exercise.
Ch!ear does a good job of providing feedback to the users, too. On the app, you can see the solution in chord symbols and musical notes. You can also see the tones you heard or missed and analysis for each note. There are also built-in guidelines and explanations about the concepts.
Other perks of the app include detailed statistics that show your performance. This app supports dark mode, too.
Perfect Ear – Music Theory, Ear & Rhythm Training
Android | Free with in-app purchases
Like the previous music teaching apps, Perfect Ear trains ears in recognizing melodies, but it will also teach you how to sight-read. In here, you will also learn about solfège lessons, music theory, and note reading lessons.
This could be a good all-in-one companion for your classes and your personal studying on music theory.
It has daily ear and rhythm exercises, which you could perform with a piano. You can also personalize those exercises with rhythm patterns based on your students’ skills.
Other wonderful tools on the app include a pitch trainer and a note-singing trainer. If you need references, the app also comes with music theory articles and a scale dictionary.
The app can be essential for beginners, but it works best if you have basic music theory knowledge.
Tenuto by musictheory.net
iOS | $3.99
Tenuto offers exercises that will improve a person’s musicality. It will teach you how to sight-read and recognize keyboard chords and intervals.
There are six musical calculators as well, which can help you compute scales, chords, intervals, matrices, accidentals, and analysis symbols. For each musical calculator, you can display the element for a note and key.
One notable asset on this app is the flexibility of the quizzes and exercises. That truly helps if you’re teaching a class where everyone doesn’t have the same learning pace. It can even allow you to learn in Solfege.
Plus, if the students want to study on their own, they can also manage with the set of tools in the app. Whether a student wants to sharpen their skill in notation reading or get better at ear training, they can do it here.
Theory Lessons by musictheory.net
iOS | $2.99
We also like this another app by musictheory.net. This time, it’s the well-known website in the form of an iOS app.
As an app, we’re impressed by its compactness. This is a huge database of music theory lessons. So, if you get this app, you will have a small, virtual library of lessons you can access anytime and anywhere.
The list of lessons is diverse, too. You can access topics like Note Duration, Triads, and Neapolitan Chords. As for the interface, clunky is what you would not describe it.
The lessons are concisely written in bullet forms, but they aren’t short of information either. Visual presentations are also included in each lesson.
All in all, this is one of the music learning apps you’d be a fool not to install.
ChordProg Ear Trainer 2 – Perfect Ear Training!
Android | Free with in-app purchases
Don’t have the wrong idea about this app’s fun colors and clean, minimalist interface. This is another type of those beefier music teaching apps.
ChordProg has ear and chord training, interval training, scale training, note clusters, and examples of chord progression.
Your students can learn from over a thousand audio clips, which were composed by pro musicians.
It also has a larger collection of ear-training games and exercises, which the app boasts to help you get into music school. Ah, those nerve-wracking entrance tests.
Our take? Give this app a try in your online music classes, and you might get used to using it to streamline your personal learning sessions as well.
Complete Ear Trainer
Android | Free with in-app purchases
Like its name, this gamified ear training app is indeed complete.
There are progressive drills, sound banks, sound banks, and custom drills and training programs. Each drill will require you to earn three stars so that you can unlock the next exercise.
You can access intervals, chord types, inversions, and progressions, scales, and melodic dictations. There’s also a feature that teaches you how to read music on a staff. In every chapter, you will also learn about written music theory.
The app’s interface has a clean, even vintage feel to it. You can also choose from two themes: light and dark.
Overall, this app is packed. You might want to try this on your own first before you can incorporate it into your online classes.
Conclusion
These music teaching apps are just several of the great music apps today. The internet, App Store, and Google Play Store have lots of underrated apps for music learning. Try these apps first and see what works best for your online music class. Good luck!
Related questions
What is the best app for teaching music online?
We highly recommend Tenuto, Perfect Ear, Ch!ear, and Theory Lessons by musictheory.net. You may not need all of these, but any two or three of those apps we mentioned will prepare you for battle in your online music classes.
What are the best music apps for kids?
We suggest an app that has well-crafted songs and nursery rhymes like Zoolingo. It’s free to download and has a myriad of preschool games, puzzles, and exercises for children. It’s also available in 16 languages.
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