Piano chord finder
Drop a track and get the chords with a keyboard diagram for each one, so you can see the notes before you play them.
Why piano reads well
Piano is close to ideal for pitch-class analysis. The notes are exactly in tune with each other, the harmonic series is clean, and the left hand usually states the root plainly. Solo piano recordings tend to produce the tidiest chord timelines of anything you can feed this tool.
The complications are pedalling and voicing. A held sustain pedal smears one chord into the next, which shows up as a short wrong chord at the boundary. Wide, rootless jazz voicings are harder still: with the root left for a bass player who is not in the recording, the closest major or minor triad may not be what a pianist would write.
Reading the diagrams
Each chord expands into one octave of keyboard with the chord tones marked and the root marked more strongly. Left to right the notes are the root, the third and the fifth - the third is the one that decides major or minor, and it is worth checking by ear when a chord looks surprising.
Questions
- Does it show inversions?
- No. A chord is named by its root regardless of which note is lowest, so a C major triad with G in the bass is reported as C.
- Will it detect seventh chords?
- Not in this version. The vocabulary is 24 major and minor triads, and a seventh chord is reported as the triad inside it. Widening the vocabulary measurably degrades ordinary pop and rock, so it is not a free change.