Did you ever want to play songs that only have specific chords you’ve chosen? Your search is over! Or actually, it’s about to start… because from now on, you can search for songs based on their chords. How did this brand new feature come about? We spoke with Martijn (our master Android developer) about this big project in Chordify’s backstage area, that we call the office.
Congrats with this awesome release! Do you want to give an award-like speech?
Yes! I would like to thank the team of five colleagues who made it all possible. It took a year to build, so I’m proud that we pushed through and made it happen.
Who was the ‘search songs by chords’ feature built for?
We have a lot of beginners within the Chordify community, so the original plan was to create a tool that helps them practice. If you find songs with chords you know, it’s easier to keep on playing. For example, my son has some friends that are learning to play guitar. They take lessons from a music teacher and use Chordify as an accompanying app to play the songs they like.
We know it can be frustrating to find a song you want to play, but then discover that the chords are not in your repertoire. This tool will counter that frustration by focusing on the chords you do know. Now that it is live, we see that it is also helpful for more experienced musicians.
How did you rearrange a 36 million record collection?
This was probably the most difficult part… The chordify song database contains indeed almost 36 million songs, nicely stored and categorized by artist and song title. For this project, it needed to be rearranged by chords. Going through the whole archive quickly without overloading the system took quite some backend work. It was a bigger challenge than we anticipated, but in the end everything works, hooray!
What’s next?
We want to see how the tool is being used. Does it indeed help beginners to play more songs? The first results look promising. But we also want to look into how other users work with the tool.
Producers might also like it, for example. In the future we would like to integrate selecting chords in Chordify’s main search engine and show more personalized results, based on your music taste. Currently, the songs that are most popular on Chordify show at the top of the page. It would be awesome to tweak that towards the genres you like best, for example.
Try it out yourself, it’s available for free.
Are you an Em, A and D chord lover? Check out what songs are built around those beauties. Or just play around with random chord progressions and see what songs emerge from that 36 million record collection. Happy jamming!
Let us know what you think! You can drop your comments here. Thanks!
