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Ask HN: Software for interpreting analog music chords?

1 points by achillesheels ↗ HN
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.

7 comments

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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.
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

ksherlock
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