I'm more and more amazed by what you can do with music apps. A few years ago, I was on a long, boring flight to Europe and the movies were either horrible or I'd already seen them. So, I pulled out my iPad and started fiddling around. Pretty soon I had composed
a brand-new song before we landed, which amazed the French guy sitting next to me. We recorded it immediately after landing and to this day it's one of my favorite compositions.
Now, Yamaha has created an extremely handy new FREE App called the Chord Tracker for Android, iPhone iPod touch, and iPad, which discovers the chords for you in audio tracks instantly and should be very useful for any hard-working musician short on time.
The powerful App helps you practice and perform songs by extracting the chord sequence from an audio song track stored on your device. Simply download the free Chord Tracker App from the App Store and install it. After launching it you can import music from your library and the Chord Tracker analyzes the chords and the chord progression of each song.
There are additional useful functions when playing back audio such as transpose or pitch changing the song and even tempo adjustment. With the melody suppressor feature, you can reduce the volume of the lead line or vocal to create
a backing track by using the UDWLO1 Wi-Fi adapter. With your Yamaha Keyboard or Clavinova, you can even playback music in the Chord Tracker App through the instrument speaker system via your wireless network.
But that's not all: You can transfer the chord progression to your instrument and play it using your chosen style. Now you can concentrate on perfecting the melody line with the right hand and then learn the chords afterward. If there's a chord you don't know it's no problem. The Chord Tracker can display the notes and all the
keys you have to play on the keyboard. In addition, the Chord Tracker offers a recording function to save to your favorites folder.
This is an incredible tool for those who always wanted to know those Steely Dan chords.
The most amazing aspect of this App is if you have a Yamaha keyboard that's compatible with their Bluetooth device, you can record your own chord progression into Chord Tracker, beam it back to your keyboard, open it, and then not only re-arrange the chords but choose different styles of music, which it can playback. Pretty amazing!
But what I love the most about this App is that it will show you the chords not only as they go by in the song by letter, but you can choose to see the actual notes in the chord or displayed in tablature. Another great use for this is how many times have you been playing alone late at night or even in band practice and come up with a great progression only to forget it the next day? Instead, just record it in the Chord Tracker and let it do the work for you. You can even share your work via email with your bandmates.
For an app that seems so simple on the face of it, the Chord Tracker has many, many uses beyond the obvious. And again, it's free!
