ChordMaps2 4+

With great power comes... um... a really crowded interface! 😜

This is, by far, the best music theory/performance interface out there. Probably not just for iPad but in general. Unfortunately it’s not exactly a pick it up, poke at it, and enjoy kind of thing.

The documentation is there, it just verbose and not really set up for musical neophytes to be able to understand. Which is unfortunate and a bit weird as this has serious potential to be an amazing learning and teaching tool for music theory. Even more odd since that’s precisely why the dev built it...

Anyway, if you can trudge though figuring it out, it’s ability to control up to like 7 different synth voices playing everything from chords, bass counter melody, melody, lead, solo, etc. all from one interface, all in a “musically coherent” manner is pretty amazing.

It’s probably better served pairing with hardware though because it’s full screen (and even that’s not enough) and a lot of app switching would be needed to really go nuts with the thing.

Buy it, learn it, love it!

Developer Response ,

Thank you for taking the time to write. I should probably give a little explanation. The crowded interface is the result of a significant design decision. As a songwriting musician, there are many moments at the keyboard where I need to quickly move from one musical idea to another. For example, I might be thinking... "Let's try this chord progression in the key of F... no, maybe in Eb... or how about Ab... here's a melodic idea... how about this for a bass line... maybe the bass should be played in octaves rather than single notes... back to the chord progression... let's try the right hand chord notes up an octave." These kinds of thoughts can come quickly when exploring or improvising. So, when the app was being developed, I decided to make these musical thoughts correspond, wherever possible, to just one tap on the screen. It was important to me to be able to switch from one idea to the next without hesitation, and without the delays that come from searching through menus or submenus. So I intentionally placed all the musical options I could on the one screen. Did I want to switch to a different key, perhaps in the middle of a phrase? One tap gets me there. Did I want the bass note to play in octaves instead of single notes? One tap accomplishes that. Did I want to improvise bass lines and melodic lines spontaneously without having to reposition a keyboard? That would require two keyboards--one for bass lines and one for melodic lines. It takes up a fair amount of the screen, but both keyboards are always there. When finished, everything was all packed in tightly. The disadvantage is that it looks crowded and confusing. But the good thing is you can move like lightning from one thought to the next, exploring chords, melody lines, and bass lines very freely, changing keys at any time, going from major to minor and back, changing which synths apps are playing... all in real time. So, yes, it was a tradeoff, and I chose the path that would give me the musical freedom and spontaneity I experience when I'm playing a real keyboard. My hope is that as musicians explore the crowded interface, the various options will start to make sense, and the person playing will experience the musical freedom that I was searching for when making these decisions.

Access to Harmony & Melody

It’s great to be able to have access to tools which have organized harmony/melody theory in such a practical way that you can access it and incorporate it into your music creation process so seamlessly.

All of the chords in the app can be accessed from one page. You can select various chords, set the octaves for bass, chords, melody, and accompaniment parts plus set their MIDI destinations in the app.

Even though you may have limited knowledge of music theory, you can still connect the app to whatever MIDI compatible apps or hardware you have and try any number of combinations out and record what is of interest to you as a MIDI track and/or audio track in the DAW of your choice. From there you can do further editing and always return to the app for further exploration at anytime in the process.

This Is Great!

You need to write music but you don’t have great instincts to composing chords to make a song? Don’t worry, this will greatly help you in your quest for musical harmony! Love the program, love the fact that you can easily tie it to your DAW, trigger and record the chord structures in your sequencer. Would like it even more if Chordmaps 3 (hint) could stand alone and included a few premium built sounds (piano, strings, guitars, some pads, bells and whistles, lol) that could be linked to the different sections and would allow you to just compose songs without the linking process to another DAW, but please keep ALL the features of this app you currently have. Thank you.