Motivation#
I need to improve playing chords on the piano, so I decided to write a simple tool to help me with this.
What it does#
The initial version was just a console app, and then I wrote a simple GUI for it. What I have now:
- generation of major, minor and dominant chords (half-diminished and altered soon);
- the randomly chosen chord has to be played starting from the third or the seventh (major and minor), without the root;
- played notes (read through MIDI) are compared with the generated ones.
Current GUI#
Version 2: in the browser#
In late 2025 I gave Pchords a web version. The backend is FastAPI with a music-theory core of my own for notes, scales, chords, voicings and progressions, and the frontend is React and TypeScript with an on-screen piano. In Chrome and Edge the page reads a MIDI keyboard directly through Web MIDI and checks the chord as you play, and if you’d rather practise full chords, there’s a root-note mode for that. The whole thing starts with Docker Compose.