ChordLab for Pc

Agree with another reviewer. Promising by the description, but once installed is lacking in so many areas it is utterly useless for anyone needing to go beyond the basics in theory. This app may be for an absolute beginner in music theory, but if you are hoping for more, pass it up and look elsewhere.

I was under the impression from the screenshots and verbose feature list that this application would allow you to construct chord progressions--that is, a sequence of chords that you could cycle through. However, the musical staff you see only contains a single set of notes across multiple inversions. Most of the screen hardware seems to be dedicated the displaying these different inversions and their fingerings for guitar or piano. My main complaint is that you can only really work with one chord at a time. Sure, you can change the root or the chord type, but if you wanted to hear how several chords played in sequence sound, you are out of luck. Each chord must basically be dialed in manually. I was hoping for something that could construct even the most basic of chord progressions. Other negatives: -Extensive use of drop-down menus, yet no interactivity with the musical staff -The history feature only stores the notes of the chord and not even the inversions. It is also unclear what one must do to commit a chord to the history window, which it turns out only stores 16 recent chords. -The chord finder is cumbersome, helpful if you know the notes of a chord and want to know the name of it, but does not inspire chord discovery as I hoped it would -Circle of fifths is not very interactive-- clicking on other chords relative to your current chord only changes the root note of the chord. So say you have C minor selected and you see F Major is your IV chord. When you move the wheel to F, it selects F minor instead of F major, since all it does is shift the root note. There is definitely a lot of wasted potential here. I realize now that this application is really just a chord lookup app, but I was mislead by the description's emphasis on 'harmony'. Though the overly verbose description would have you believe that this is an incredible creative tool, it is really little more than a very expensive (at $12!) and simple chord-finder, with no more features than you could find on any old chord-finding java applet web site. I wish i wasn't the first person to review this :P

I purchased this app after looking at about 50 different apps. Admittedly my review is somewhat biased because the feature I was looking for is an app that could tell me what the chord intervals for the 7 Modes of C in both the key of C as well as in the other major and minor keys. I am a guitar player / musician studying the modes and need a reference for identifying chords appropriate for each mode. EG: if I want to improvise a song in F Aeolian - I need to be able to quickly determine which chords are appropriate for using the Aeolian mode in the key of F. This app has a circle of fifths feature that does exactly that. It is fast, easy, self explanatory (if you understand modal theory), and perfect for that purpose. As for the chords that are highlighted on the fretboard - there is nothing wrong with the way it works except that it seems to be based primarily on triads which is somewhat basic and limited. I have other software that I use for chord fingerings. I simply needed the circle of fifths and this was the only place that I could find that feature. If you are looking for a chord progression tool that works with modal theory this app has that capability. 14.00 for that single feature may be a little pricey - I would have bought the circle of fifths app by itself had it been available - but at the time this app was the only place I could find it.