Chord Tracker - US

The previous version of Yamaha Chord Tracker allowed a device’s microphone to listen to music in real-time and identified the notes/chords being heard, even allowing for capo adjustments to see how best to play a song. Their most recent update removed this feature, so now it is only useful to identify songs you own, loaded into the app in MP3/4 format, although some users are reporting they can’t even get this feature to work now. Super disappointing, Yamaha, please bring back the chord identifier/analysis functionality, if you are indeed truly interested in helping guitar players improve their playing skills! Right now, I’m considering deleting this app to make space for better and more useful ones.

I play the piano, organ, bass and drums, all by ear, at my church. I am very well acquainted with music. I use this app when I don’t really have time to sit down and 100% dissect a song and see exactly what chords the artist is using in their song. This gives me the extreme very basic chords. It would be GREAT if this was more advanced than just giving the major and minor and the occasional diminished chords that it picks out. Major 7th, 9th, 11th and 13th would be absolutely amazing! But I do feel like the 9th on would be difficult to detect. Anyway this app is not 100% accurate. Even after the update so just be warned this app will get you relatively close to what the song is doing but you have to use some music theory to ‘translate’ what it’s saying to do. It would be great if with in the app you could change the key with out effecting the tempo. But over all if you’re just starting out this app does have what you’d need to play along with the song or even memorize the chord progressions.

I realize that it is geared to keyboards and guitars, but it would be nice if there was Bb and Eb instrument notation transcription for horn players. We need to practice playing over the changes, and if the chords shown were keyed to our instruments that would be greatly helpful. There is a transpose feature, but it actually transposes the audio, too, which is only helpful when you want to play in a different concert key. So I request a button that would change the notation for each instrument key. C, Bb, Eb, and why not throw F in there for the those horns, too:)