How to automatically recognize the chords in your favorite songs with Chordify [Tip]

Chordify

Most people like music in some way: some just like to listen to it, some dance to it and some of us want to go a little further by executing music with an instrument.

Chordify is an awesome tool able to identify and transform music from any source into chords! You just got an instrument and want to sing-along to your favorite trending song or just any music you want and can find or upload online.

HOW TO USE CHORDIFY

Just drop the URL of a source like YouTube or Soundcloud that contains music and in few seconds you will get the chords for any song you wish.

mainsite

I spent some time using the website and to be honest, when as a musician I say things like chord sites and tabs always make you limit your ear proficiency, Chordify is a tool that will probably help you in a hurry and when just starting into music. It is accurate with easy four-chord progressions and still competitive when detecting chords for more complex songs.

chordified

Chordify can distinguish between major and minor chords, however it won’t be able to define or show more complex chords present in a song (suspended, minor and major 7th, augmented, etc.). Here you can check out chords for It Will Rain if you want to see an example.

For beginners, there are chord diagrams available for guitar, ukulele and piano on every song you chordify that will be shown when clicking the diagrams button.

diagrams

As useful as it could be, there could and will be flaws when detecting the chords for a song. Here’s a brief text explaining how Chordify works:

Behind the scenes, we use the sonic annotator for extraction of audio features. These features consist of the downbeat positions and the tonal content of a piece of music. Next, a Haskell program HarmTrace then takes these features and computes the chords. For this to happen HarmTrace uses a model of Western tonal harmony to aid in the chord selection. At beat positions where the audio matches a particular chord well, this chord is used in final transcription. However, in case there is uncertainty about the sounding chords at a specific position in the song, the HarmTrace harmony model will select the correct chords based on the rules of tonal harmony.

CONCLUSION

So take note this web is just meant to be used as a reference and anything on the site should not be take for granted. I trust you won’t use the chords shown here as they are with any other purpose than fun and practicing. Chordify is overall a great tool especially for beginners that are willing to start playing without getting headaches of trying to locate the chords played in a song.

If you wish, try it out and leave your impressions in the comments below!

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