The key to Chordify is the belief that everyone can become a musician. That’s the tagline on Chordify’s website, and that’s the essential message that Chordify founder Bas de Haas wants to convey.
“We make it as easy as possible to play along with whatever you want to play, and we make it fun. That’s what’s important,” said de Haas. He began giving guitar lessons as a computer science graduate student but found himself spending lots of time researching chords.
“I really hated to figure out the chords all the time,” he said. “I could do it by ear, but it took me a lot of time and I found it a tedious thing to do. Meanwhile, while doing my phD, I happened to work in a field called Music Information Retrieval that allowed me to develop an algorithm to figure out chords automatically for an arbitrary song. Having finished my phD, I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be nice to share this work with a lot of other people? And I finally founded the company Chordify.”
While de Haas notes that scientific research into algorithms that automate chord recognition continues around the globe, he noticed his work could have some commercial possibilities. While his background is in both music and computer science, he reached out to friends from his music network to find graphic designers and site builders.
“I played with them in bands, and now we are five founders who created Chordify,” he said.
The Chordify interface is very simple; de Haas said “it’s almost like karaoke.” In the lower left portion of the screen, you can see the Youtube video you’ve chosen. You can hear the song’s audio, and you can see the black square move, indicating exactly when to play a chord at what time in the video. While you need to know what each symbol means, Chordify also has a Diagrams button that shows you exactly how to play the chord at hand: you can see the fingering for guitar, ukelele, or piano.
“So of course, you have to practice these chords,” de Haas pointed out. “There’s no way around it. If you want to play an instrument you have to practice. But we try to make it as easy as possible.”
Users can also use the chords to navigate to any particular section of the song, or loop a section until they get it just right.
As to Chordify’s distinguishing features over other standard tabs websites, de Haas points to two.
“We can really get the chords of any possible song, no matter how local or unfamiliar or strange. Just find the song on your computer, on Youtube, or on Soundcloud and we’ll figure out the chords for you automatically" he said. “ [Also] our interface is just very intuitive. If you go to a tab website, you just get a plain text, C-minor, B-flat, and you have to figure out where to play these chords exactly in the song. So we really align the audio and the chords in a very intuitive way, making it even more easy to play along.”
More than just making it easy, de Haas hopes to actually gamify the Chordify experience one day.
“If you added a song, you get an achievement, maybe have some feedback so we actually listen to what you’re playing on the guitar and show you whether you actually play it right. That offers the possibility to compete with your friends, so you can show who can play this song the best way," he said. "Those kind of things make it even more fun, and those are all plans for the near future.”
You might even be able to compete with yourself and see how you stack up against your own personal best, improving Chordify’s use as a self-education tool while keeping users on the site simply because it’s fun.
Services differ according to price, as Chordify has both a Free and Premium tier. Some premium features include the ability to play back the chord separate from song audio, to hear whether or not it actually matches; the ability to transpose chords, with capo hints; and the ability to change playback speed. PDF and MIDI downloads are available at a nominal fee for Free users, and free for Premium users. Premium user also have the ability to print out chords as seen on screen.
But one of Chordify’s most interesting features is actually community-based: the ability to edit the chords Chordify has automatically generated for any given song if the chords are incorrect. In conjunction with research done at Utrecht University, Chordify merges all edits made to their songs using an information fusion model in order to improve the overall quality of the database. If a chord is late, early, extraneous, or missing, users can simply make the edit, improving Chordify with every small change.
Chordify, which started in 2013, currently boasts 1.5 million monthly visitors, and de Haas ascribed this success to Chordify’s ease and simplicity of use.
“Of course, you can just go to our site and look up a song and play along. But you can also create an account, and then you can collect a library, and this is still all free. So we have already over 260,000 users, and every time we Chordify a song, of course, we store it. So far we have Chordified over 2.5 million songs,” he said.
Because Chordify functions with any song, and because Google indexes the Chordify archive, this means that people searching for tabs for lesser-known songs and artists get directed to Chordify, increasing the site’s traffic.
While Chordify is currently web-based only, de Haas stated that Chordify will launch for tablet and mobile devices in early 2016. Once Chordify hits mobile, it will never be easier to be that one guy at the party with a guitar; just prop your phone on the coffee table by the PBR and start strummin’.
Next on the horizon for Chordify? Apart from a well-publicized collaboration with Chordify’s US ambassador Marcus Henderson, one of the founding members of Guitar Hero and creator of the tracks behind the game, de Haas states that the recent launch of the Chordify 2.0 user experience redesign is just the beginning. New song discovery, multiple time signatures, Facebook integration are now a part of Chordify, but de Haas hopes to add lyrics to chords as well, to make singing and playing at the same time even easier. With Chordify’s robust database rapidly expanding, that database itself may one day be exploited for the benefit of the userbase as well.
For more information about Chordify, check the website with Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus pages also available as well.
