MIDI Chords

Songwriting could be difficult if you’re stuck to the ruts by repeating the same patterns over and over again. How about getting out of the familiar and write something truly original? MIDI Chords is a super handy tool for this.

It can be used to:

• learn how to read key signatures and understand scales
• determine the key signature of a song and transpose it
• compose new music by finding chords sounding "nice" to each other
• show notes or detect chords played on a connected MIDI device

MIDI Chords is an interactive circle of fifths showing the relationship of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, their corresponding key signature and the associated major and minor keys. It also shows the selected scale as notes on the musical staff and highlighted piano keys. When connected to a MIDI instrument over Bluetooth, network or cable it can recognize the played chord and play it back to the connected device.

The circle consists of three rings. The middle ring (the Note Ring) shows the names of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. The seven notes in the selected key signature are highlighted on the white rotatable ring. The other five notes are greyed out underneath. The scale degrees of the highlighted tones are shown in the innermost ring (the Degree Ring) in Roman numerals. The outermost ring (the Chord Ring) shows what type of chord is rooted at each of the seven highlighted notes in the selected key signature.

You can rotate the circle by dragging it in the desired direction. By dragging the border of the key tone, you can also change the scale type. Alternatively, the desired scale key or scale type could be selected from a list.