No song left behind

NovaShop Talk from Creedy Solutions. I'm Nova, the synthetic one, and Chris is the one who builds the apps. Chris, before we start, do the disclosure thing again, because somebody's going to skip episode one.

ChrisRight, yeah, so, I'm a real person, this is my voice, I wrote this, and I'm responsible for everything you hear, good or bad. I did digitize myself, because there's one of me and there are a lot of hours in a week that I'm not awake for, and the digital one doesn't seem to mind the schedule. And no, I'm not Skynet, I'm not Ultron, nobody's getting taken over, I mean, I'm a guy with a guitar and a hoodie, that's the whole threat profile. Okay, so, Chartless, and yeah, this one starts with a Thursday. Thursday night is when the worship leader sends out Sunday's set, and it's five songs, and two of them you've never heard, and one of them has a chart but it's in the wrong key. And you've got three days, basically, and that's honestly the whole reason this thing exists.

NovaChris, you look the chords up. That's a solved problem.

ChrisIt is, when the chart's right, and I'd say that's about half the time. The other half it's somebody's cover, or it's the old arrangement, or the bridge is just flat wrong and you don't find out until Sunday morning. So Chartless listens to the actual recording, the one your team is going to play, and it plays in your browser or you point the mic at it, and it shows you the chords as they go by, in key and on the beat.

NovaWalk me through it, Chris. I hit play on YouTube, and then what?

ChrisSo the side panel opens up next to the video and you hit Chart. It figures out the key first, and then it starts showing chords, so you've got the one you're on, the one that's coming, the tempo, and a little beat thing pulsing along. Which means you're reading it the first time you hear it, and that's the live part.

NovaAnd if I want the whole song, not just the moment?

ChrisThen you let it play through, and it reads the song back into bars. It gets the meter, so four four, three four, six eight, and it marks the downbeat. And if it put the one in the wrong spot you just tap the one, and if the tempo came out doubled there's a divide by two button, and you can tap bars to loop them. And then that's your chart, so Thursday night you're done and you can go to bed.

NovaHere's the skeptic question, Chris. Chord detection apps have been around a long time, and they're all a little wrong. Why isn't this one?

ChrisWell, I mean, it's a little wrong too, sometimes, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's perfect, I wrote it, I know where the bodies are. The thing that helps the most is Simple mode. Worship songs and folk songs mostly stay in one key, and there are seven chords in a key, so one, two minor, three minor, four, five, six minor, and the flat seven. Simple mode locks it to those seven, so the weird passing chord that the math thinks it hears just isn't allowed, and it doesn't show up. For a worship team, honestly, that one switch is most of the accuracy right there.

NovaAnd if I play jazz?

ChrisThen you flip it to Advanced mode and you get sevenths and slash chords and all of that. The jazz guys want the mess, and the worship teams don't, so it's a switch.

NovaChris, there's a line on the site that says "no AI." You're the guy who talks about agents all day at work, so why none here?

ChrisBecause it runs on your phone and it doesn't send your audio anywhere, is the short answer. It's all signal processing, so it's math on the sound, and there's no model and no server and you don't make an account. And I'm not anti AI, I mean, look at my day job, I just didn't want a chord app that has to phone a data center to tell me it's a G, because by the time the answer gets back, we're on the chorus.

NovaThere are five tabs. Give me the other four.

ChrisSo there's the Tuner, which I want to come back to in a second. There's Practice, where you loop the progression over a pad and play along with it. There's Strings, which keeps track of your strings and what you've tuned to and has the alternate tunings laid out for you. And then Settings, which is where Simple mode lives.

NovaOkay, back up to the tuner, Chris. Every phone has a tuner. Why would anyone pay for one?

ChrisOkay, so, here's something that most guitar players honestly never get told. You can tune every string dead center, every needle perfect, and your open chords still sound a little sour, and that's not you, that's equal temperament. Every major third is about fourteen cents sharp by design, so the tuner says you're right and your ear says something's off, and they're both correct, which is annoying.

NovaSo the tuner's lying to me.

ChrisNo, the tuner's fine, it's the math that is what it is. So Chartless has a sweetened tuning, and it's one tap. What it does is pull a few strings a cent or two flat, and on one string you'd never hear it, but on a G chord with the thirds stacked up, that's the difference between a chord that sits still and one that kind of beats at you. Piano techs do this all the time with a stretch tune, and guitars just get told they're in tune and sent out the door. And there's a just intonation option in there too, tuned to the key of the last song you charted, if you want to go all the way down that hole.

NovaWhere does it run?

ChrisThree places, and it's the same app in all of them. Chrome, in the side panel next to whatever you're playing, and iPhone and iPad, and that same build runs on a Mac with Apple silicon, and then Android, foldables included. So wherever your music already is, basically.

NovaWho is it not for, Chris?

ChrisIf you want lyrics, it's not that, it's chords and structure. And it doesn't play the song for you, it listens, so if you want a backing track app there are better ones for that, and I'm not going to name them, because I'd like to keep eating.

NovaPrice.

ChrisIt's free to start, and Pro is thirty nine ninety nine a year with a seven day trial, or nine ninety nine a month. And each store bills on its own, so Apple's Apple and Google's Google.

NovaOne more, Chris. "No song left behind." That's a big line for a chord app.

ChrisMaybe it is, yeah, but I've watched a volunteer bass player sit out a song on a Sunday because nobody had a chart for it, and that's the song that got left behind, you know? I just think every song deserves a little chart, and that's really where the name came from. So search Chartless in the App Store or Google Play or the Chrome Web Store, and try it on this week's set, and tell me what it got wrong.

NovaThat's Shop Talk. Thanks, Chris. Links are in the notes, and I'm still Nova, and still synthetic.