ProChords

Posted on January 31st, 2010. Written by Trevor.

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with this website that I am a big fan of music apps for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) and so i couldn’t wait to check out an app which claims to make writing music on a piano easier.

ProChords is published by Groundcontrol ApS and does exactly that, select a starting chord and ProChords will give you a selection of chords that work, some obvious, some not-so obvious. With a library of over 8000 chord progressions stored in the app and more being added to the database all the time this is a great tool to spark inspiration and help you steer clear of getting in a rut when it comes to your chord choices.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this app won’t write your music for you, but is built to provide inspiration wherever you go and helps you push your music in new (and hopefully) interesting ways. I’ve spent some time with this app over the past few weeks and have been really inspired and impressed with this app.

The design is extremely polished, and a pleasure to work with, from the moving of the chord progression around the screen to the selection and editing of new chords, clearly a lot of time and effort went in to ensuring that the design matched the functionality here.

I imagine at this point a lot of you are saying “that’s all very well, but I know nothing about writing music”, but fear not, therein lies the beauty of this app, even if you aren’t a virtuoso musician (and I would never claim to be anywhere near such) you can hear each chord played by touching it and once you have a starting chord you like the sound of the app won’t let you go far wrong with your additional choices. This really is suitable for everyone with an interest in music.

If you feel slightly more adept at knowing what chords work, you can also tweak the chord suggestions by changing the bass note, the octave or the inversion. You can also edit the chord sequence at anytime by adding filler chords or deleting chords that no longer ‘fit’ with what you want to accomplish.

Along with the ability to save your newly created masterpieces, the app also comes with the ability to export them as a midi file by sending it to your email address. Then, for the more musically inclined amongst you, you can import that into your music editing tool of choice and from there the possibilities are near endless.

I really hate writing reviews without finding any fault with an app, it makes me feel that I’ve missed something or not looked hard enough, but there really doesn’t seem to be any flaws in the execution here, from the quality of the piano sound to the lush UI, this app really has been built to perfection, it knows what it wants to achieve and delivers it flawlessly. Now, if only we can get one for guitar.