Harmonic Sense Blog

Most corporations offer perks to their employees.  Harmonic Sense is no exception.

As appreciation for my good work as head of the marketing department (and wife of Ilya, the lead developer), I was recently awarded a chord option.

Chord options are similar to stock options, only they sound better.  As a musical software company, Harmonic Sense has a lot of musical IP.  This includes a vast body of knowledge on chords, chord voicings, and chord progressions.  A few days ago, Ilya developed an interesting new never-before seen chord and named it after me.

Even though this chord now technically belongs to me, this is such a great chord that I have decided to place it in the public domain.  Feel free to use this chord in your music any way you want.  Ilya recommends the following chord progression:

Ok, all joking aside, the point of this post is to let everone know that ChordMate now supports custom chords.  (As always, this update is free for existing customers).  Go to the Chord Progression menu and select Custom Chord.  Just enter the fingering for your chord [X 0 2 2 2 0] and the name of your chord.  That’s it!  You can play your custom chord, drop it into the chord progression window, or drag it into your favorite text editor. 

By the way — thank you everyone who took the time to write to tell us how you use ChordMate and what features you want.  And a special big thank you to the folk who sent us your songs, annotated with ChordMate diagrams!  I hope that the new custom diagrams make your life even easier.

“That’s ridiculous!  Stop that,” and with those words, the Harmonic Wife was forced to stop playing with ChordMate.

It all started the previous week when we did a promotion with MacZOT.  Along with many new customers, we got an interesting request: to play chords on the trumpet.

THE TRUMPET????

How on earth do you play a chord on the trumpet?  Even I, despite having much less musical training than Ilya, can tell you that you that you cannot play chords on the trumpet.  A trumpet plays only one note.  A chord consists of three notes.

Turns out our user had three trumpets.  Or, more precisely, he hand an entire school orchestra, of which trumpets played a role.  He wanted to use ChordMate chord diagrams to teach his students about chords.

Here is where it gets more interesting.  Upon further research, Ilya discovered that all our users had trumpets.  Or at least a trumpet sound on the MIDI sound card that comes standard with every computer.  So a week later, Harmonic Sense released an update to ChordMate.  Now you can listen to chords played on almost any instrument.

Ilya’s favorite instument is the Marimba.  I like the Orchestra Hit, which, Ilya says, “sounds ridiculous.”

ChordMate recently got a review at MacApper. Unfortunately, by the time I noticed it, the video part was no longer available. After reading the comments, I was very curious about the price and e-mailed Tim Cox, who did the review, for a suggestion. He responded that after some thought he decided that the price was a good deal. He also explained that having 3 versions of ChordMate was unnecessary and could easily get confusing. What he said was very logical, and I decided to retire ChordMate Standard (almost all customers buy Pro, some buy Express, and very few buy Standard).

This was also a good time to reconsider prices. Now that ChordMate supports chord progressions, I decided that ChordMate Express should be $20. ChordMate Pro is still $40.

Hi! This blog is about to become more active. Up until now, all the posts have been by Ilya, the lead developer at Harmonic Sense. This meant that Ilya had to split his time between developing ChordMate and blogging.  Fortunately for our users, blogging lost.But the vision of an exciting blog about music and software development lived on. At least it lived on in my mind. Because every night, Ilya would tell me about ChordMate, the programming issues he encountered, and the decisions he made about the music engine.”You should write a post about this,” I kept telling him.”No time, I have to code,” he’d say. “Besides, I’m no good at writing.”Today, we have reached a historic compromise. Ilya will tell me what he thinks, I will write it down, and you will read it.I hope you will like what you see and keep coming back.Harmonic Wife.