I’ve dabbled with tablature and chord software on and off for many years, and I’ve been consistently struck by an unfortunate fact: There is no public source for programmatic chord data.
So I started building one.
The following JSON file should meet almost every need for standard guitar tuning (EADGBE) and ukulele tuning (GCEA). But I want it to include other instruments like Mandolin and other tunings like DADGAD.
It should, with very little tweaking, be compatible with the chord.js chord chard rendering library (making my own tidier version of this library is also on my agenda).
hopefully there can eventually be a canonical source for chord data online.
James says:
I’m looking for a similar kind of database for a project I’m working on. Have you seen: https://github.com/tombatossals/chords-db ? it looks like he is trying to do the same thing as you so maybe collaborating would be more productive?
gschoppe says:
That’s a really interesting codebase, and I might see if I can convert his data, but I’m not exactly certain why the key, barre, and capo options exist, as multiple keys will contain each chord, any set of strings played by the same finger can be considered a barre (unless forced by position to be a bridge, but that can be inferred by the other finger positions), and capos arent added or removed on a per-chord basis, so that can be better handled by transposition.
Seems like the format could be significantly compressed