What you're training
Every question in this drill holds the root note dead still — C4, every time — and changes only the color built on top of it. That isolates chord quality as the one thing your ear has to catch: no register shift, no contour, no inversion to lean on. Just the interval stack above one unmoving root.
Two levels, one skill
Level 1 plays a single root-position triad — major, minor, sus4, or augmented — and asks which color it was. Major and minor differ by one half step on the third; sus4 removes the third entirely for a perfect 4th instead; augmented stretches the fifth a half step sharp. Level 2 keeps the same major triad underneath and adds one more note four different ways: add9, 6, maj7, and 7 — four extended colors built from the identical C–E–G base, distinguished only by that fourth note.
Go deeper
This drill is Trio 6 of the cross-domain chromatic-harmony series — instant recognition of chord color, the skill underneath every other drill in this series. The theory: chromatic harmony → covers how these colors function inside real progressions. For the real-world payoff, Find color chords in real music — 243 across 44 pieces, Liszt's Liebestraum leads, playable → lets you hear every one in context. Another kind of color — the parallel-minor loans → is the other lane of this series, if you want color that comes from a whole borrowed scale rather than one extra note.
Where it fits
Comfortable with chord quality and borrowed chords already? Color chords sharpens the same instinct down to a single fixed root, so the color itself — not the register or the voicing — is doing all the work. The full drill ladder has everything else.