Harmony Wheel

A guide to the BKS Harmony Wheel — the real-time chord-to-function tool that names the chord you play and shows what it's doing in the key. Plus the Tetrachord Toolkit, Random Generator, and built-in guidebook.

1. 1. What the Harmony Wheel Is A tuner for chords — it names what you play and shows its function on a rotating wheel. The five surfaces at a glance, and how to read the wheel.
2. 2. Reading a Chord — Wedges and Function Each wedge on the wheel is a harmonic function in the key. How to read them — tonic, predominant, dominant — and what the colors and the lit wedge are telling you.
3. 3. Harmonic Spaces Home, Subdominant, Parallel, Relative, and Blues — the regions the wheel rotates between as music borrows and modulates. And the Lock button that holds it still.
4. 4. Finding the Key — Listen Mode and the Key Tracker How the wheel decides what key you're in: a live 12-bar confidence meter you can watch, commit, or override — and why locking a key is what lets the spaces rotate.
5. 5. The Keyboard and Enharmonic Spelling The on-screen keyboard shows a chord's notes with root and tones color-coded — and spells them the way a musician would, so E7's third is G♯, never A♭.
6. 6. Mic, Speaker, Bonus Wedges, and the Legend The small controls that decide what the wheel listens to and plays — the mic and speaker toggles — plus the bonus secondary-dominant wedges and the color legend.
7. 7. The Tetrachord Toolkit Build and hear any scale from two four-note halves. Pick a lower and upper tetrachord, step through the modes, harmonize the tones, and browse the scale library.
8. 8. The Random Chord Generator Roll up a fresh diatonic progression, play it, and rotate its voicings — an idea spark that shows each chord as a function card so you learn while you browse.
9. 9. The Built-in Guidebook The Musician Basics theory guide, built right into the app — so the wheel and the explanation of what it's showing you live in the same place.
10. 10. Options and Settings The settings page — a tuning offset for sources that aren't at A=440, Camelot key codes for DJs, and Reset All. Everything here persists across launches.