Twenty-four tiers, six real levels — Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Master, Grandmaster — and every one of them changes what you're actually up against in a different way. Here's the real breakdown, not a marketing gloss.
How you actually rank up (and down)
Ranked points move only on ranked 1v1 matches — solo practice never touches your tier. A win is worth 10 to 40 points depending on the rating gap (beat someone above you, earn more); a loss costs 5 to 30. Surrender and it's scored as a technical draw: zero change, no penalty either way. Points are floored at 0, so you can never fall out of Bronze IV entirely — and there's no decay and no seasonal reset: your rank only moves when you actually play. One more thing that's easy to miss: matchmaking always looks at the weaker player's tier, not the average, so playing up in rank never throws content above what your opponent can actually handle.
Bronze — the hand-designed curriculum starts here
Bronze through Gold aren't algorithmic — they're a genuine, hand-built curriculum, one new sound unlocked per tier. Bronze opens with the basics and adds a seventh-chord family by the top of the level, in the key of C only, at 60 BPM, with a root-note hint on screen and up to 180 seconds per round:
Silver — extensions and suspensions
New keys start appearing (D, then Bb, then A) and the tempo creeps up toward 95 BPM. The vocabulary grows into ninths, sixths and suspensions:
Gold — elevenths, thirteenths, and the last hint you'll see
By Gold you're playing in up to 8 keys, two time signatures (4/4 and 3/4), and the on-screen hint shrinks to just the first chord's root. Platinum removes hints completely, so Gold is your last level with any scaffolding at all:
Platinum, Master, Grandmaster — the deep end
Past Gold, the curriculum stops being a hand-designed sequence and becomes a genuinely huge pool — well over 300 chord qualities spread across the top three levels, all 12 keys, zero hints, and time signatures that get actively strange (5/4 at Platinum, 7/4 at Master, 12/8 and beyond at Grandmaster) on top of tempo climbing past 150 BPM. We're not going to pretend the exact chord that unlocks on tier 19 versus tier 20 is some deliberate pedagogical choice — honestly, it's a big catalog, sorted and split evenly across tiers. What's real is the ceiling: by Grandmaster I, every altered, upper-structure chord in our dictionary is in play.
- 9♯11 — Platinum
- Maj7add13 — Master
- 7alt — Master
- Maj7♯5♯9 — Grandmaster
- Minor-major 13th — Grandmaster
What to actually practice to improve
Solo training — the nine daily activities, see how the app adapts to you — tracks its own separate skill estimate and climbs the exact same Bronze-through-Gold curriculum on its own, independent of your PvP rank. Grinding practice alone genuinely teaches you the first couple dozen chord qualities without ever playing ranked. What it can't do on its own is reach into the Platinum-and-up catalog — those extra voicings only enter your pool once your PvP rank has actually earned them. Translation: practice gets you Gold-ready on your own terms, but climbing to Platinum and beyond happens by playing, and winning, real matches.
Every chord above has its own page in the full dictionary — notes, intervals, real sound. And if progressions are more your thing, the cadence encyclopedia has all 79 that Roman Cadences and Cadence Progression draw from.
