HACKER Q&A
📣 achillesheels

Software for interpreting analog music chords?


Greetings,

I happened to get into music (specifically guitar) during the pandemic and have had a blast recording my riffs. However, I leave the music recorded on my iPhone and have a hard time remembering or reconstructing the exact notes/chords I discover.

Does anyone know of any chord/notes interpreter on the web or for sale? I’d love to feed in the guitar lines and have a time-dependent output of the notes I had been fooling around with :)

Thanks in advance! -Joseph A.

  👤 ksherlock Accepted Answer ✓
Apple used to have a "Music Memos" app for recording musical memos. It also identified chords and allowed you to add auto-generated bass and/or drums. Sadly it was removed a year or two back and users were told to use garage band instead.

For iPhone and Mac, there's Capo which will identify chords and gives a pretty spectrograph for identifying individual notes and tabbing it out.

http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/capo/

Another option (windows, mac, linux) is Transcribe!

https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html

👤 fiedzia
There are midi pickups (or midi guitars) which you can use for this purpose (for future sessions, not for reconstructing existing recording).
👤 CrypticShift
this is often called “audio to midi" or "Music Transcription".

In term of simplicity, Decoda [0] is supposed to give chords even for full songs. It is not precise though.

FYI, the best precision out there on polyphonic guitar audio seems to be with Jam Origin [1]. It aims to feed live guitar to midi synths, so you will have to fiddle around on a DAW with another plugin to analyze your midi as chords.

AI solved this recently to a higher accuracy, but there is no user friendly guitar audio in -> chords list out, app yet (to my knowledge)

[0] : https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/3-Studio-Tools/93-Mus...

[1] : https://www.jamorigin.com

👤 pinewurst
You should still be able to find the free (on discontinuation) Fender Riffstation Pro software out there. That’s what I’ve been using for a long time now.