"The Chorder" prototype

I wrote this program a few months ago. It's visually minimal, but it can generate over a thousand valid chord shapes. I wrote it in Ruby and wrapped it in Shoes. Instead of prettifying it, I decided to refactor the whole project and build it into a web app, while extending it's functionality to include Drop 3, Drop 2/3, and Drop 2/4 voicings and inversions. That's in the pipes.

I'm planning to use this as a base from which to write a program that can output properly voice-led arrangements of any jazz tune by reading charts from the iRb Jazz Corpus, which I'm making good progress with but will elaborate on in a future post.

If you'd like to run this version, you can download the shoes interpreter here and open the source in the shoes GUI. If you're command-line savvy, you could also clone the github repo and run a terminal interface via $ruby interface.rb that accesses the same logic.

The left hand side has five main groups of buttons:

• root note
• accidental
• chord quality
• inversion
• string set

The program will also accommodate open strings and notes that fall above the 12th fret.