No GYM #4: New Web service for musicians: ChordGrid

Interesting, but what makes that a web service?

And it doesn’t look half as useful as http://www.chordfind.com – which I’ve used for ages

The Chord Grid is tuned so that you can very quickly hear the aural sensation of various kinds of chords. It usually begins to play the chord in a second or two if your web browser is set to play MIDI as a background sound. The music notation for that chord appears in the chord grid window as it plays.

Because it lists 44 types of chords on the left side of the grid, and lets you hear each type built on any of the twelve possible roots, you can switch between different chords in a fraction of a second and start to hear what changing the chord means musically. If you touch a different grid cell, the newly selected chord starts to play, interrupting the playback of the previous chord.

With 528 chord links arranged in a tight grid, you can audition five or six chords in quick succession and keep them in mind, so that if you are composing you can decide if you enjoy the harmonic effect that they create. It’s great for harmony experiments.

Finally, you can arrange the roots in the grid to cycle by the 12 different kinds of root motion that are possible. This lets you hear what those different cycles mean musically. Also, if you are new to music, you don’t have to memorize your interval addition tables to remember what the next root in one of those cycles is, in order to experience this sensation.

Since each possible rearrangment causes a different root to become a particular root’s neighbor in the grid, you can use this to hear a particular kind of chord transition more quickly. You can follow a particular kind of cycle by quickly clicking from column to column in the grid.

ChordFind is a fine web service which endeavors to help guitarists figure out how to play a particular chord on their instrument. It displays a guitar neck which shows how to play a chord that a user specifies by manipulating chord root and chord type controls and pressing a Play button.

It’s definitely great to use when you’re trying to learn how to fret a new kind of chord on guitar and hear what is sounds like to make sure you’re performing it correctly.

It’s not very suited for auditioning a chord sequence to hear what it sounds like, since it takes five or six seconds to go through the chord selection process before a new chord plays. The last chord the user auditioned has nearly completely decayed from aural memory by time the next one starts to play.

ChordFind also slowly arppegiates the chord so that you hear each note in the chord in ascending sequence, again a great advantage when you are learning to play the chord on guitar. The Chord Grid plays the notes of the chords all at once like a comping pianist and may revoice a chord if the user repeatedly presses a particular chord’s grid square.

The next post I do on SongTrellis will describe the site’s Workscores, a service that benefits from the chord finding prowsess provided by a ChordGrid. In that setting, grids have extemely high utility. Check out http://www.songtrellis.com/workscore

A ChordGrid seems like a very simple service, but that simplicity allows it to do powerful things quickly that greatly increase the user’s understanding of musical harmony.