Writing on chords, harmony, and how WhatChord works.
Guides for musicians on naming, writing, and identifying chords, plus technical deep-dives into the analysis engine and the chord data behind it.
For Musicians
Why Chord Naming Is Harder Than It Looks
The inversions, extensions, altered tones, and enharmonic ambiguities behind real chord recognition, and how WhatChord handles them.
Read the article →Chord Naming Guide
How to move from notes to a chord name using default interval qualities, degree formulas, spelling, and candidate roots.
Read the guide →Chord Symbol Guide
How WhatChord formats chord symbols: extensions, added tones, alterations, parentheses, and slash bass, with the reasoning behind each choice.
Read the guide →Technical Deep-Dives
Under the Hood: Building a Real-Time Chord Recognizer
The bitmasks, chord-quality templates, scoring and ranking heuristics, and LRU cache behind real-time chord recognition.
Read the article →What We Learned From 1 Million Chord Annotations
How a large public chord corpus helped validate WhatChord's chord vocabulary and guide future recognition priorities.
Read the article →