ChordMaps2

I was a professional music producer for 10 years, and if i had discovered this app THEN… I literally don’t have to worry about my fingers’ ability to play what my mind is creating. This is hands down, the single greatest VSTi, ever…and nobody knows it. - J.Troup

Update: It’s working again. Thank you for the response. I changed my star rating to 5 stars. It stopped working... I can hear any sounds from it (Dec 2020, iOS 14.3).

It offers inspiration and a creative way to not only explore chords but serves as an amazing performance device through it MIDI support. I use it virtually every day!

Saw Doug at The Sound Test Room on YouTube give a tutorial...had to have it!

Watch the tutorial from The Sound Test Room on YouTube first, otherwise the interface can seem a bit overwhelming at first.

First off, this app is pretty useful and works well, but there are a couple peculiarities about it that bother me. For one, the 7th chord of the selected key is missing from most of the maps. But what REALLY irritates me is that you can’t select minor keys in any map except three (out of nine), and even then it’s a bit odd, because the 3rd chord is augmented. So you’re mostly confined to major scales, and only certain fixed chords within each map. This a huge bummer because the whole point of this app is exploring various chord combinations. It feels overpriced for what you're actually given to explore.

I probably should give it 5 stars because it does everything it is suppose to do and it is a very powerful songwriting tool. The reason I only gave it 4 stars is because I have a wish list and I'm holding 1 star for ransom😊. If it only had midi in, it could be an instrument instead of just a tool. Please add an in app purchase option for midi in with midi note and cc mapping. AUv3 and OSC support would make this app indispensable. It would enable musicians to play ChordMaps2 from their existing midi controllers or build custom midi controllers using arduino platform or software such as Lemur or Midi Designer Pro.

You need to write music but you don’t have great instincts to composing chords to make a song? Don’t worry, this will greatly help you in your quest for musical harmony! Love the program, love the fact that you can easily tie it to your DAW, trigger and record the chord structures in your sequencer. Would like it even more if Chordmaps 3 (hint) could stand alone and included a few premium built sounds (piano, strings, guitars, some pads, bells and whistles, lol) that could be linked to the different sections and would allow you to just compose songs without the linking process to another DAW, but please keep ALL the features of this app you currently have. Thank you.

This app is now an indispensable tool for me to make music. I can’t recommend this app enough.

This is, by far, the best music theory/performance interface out there. Probably not just for iPad but in general. Unfortunately it’s not exactly a pick it up, poke at it, and enjoy kind of thing. The documentation is there, it just verbose and not really set up for musical neophytes to be able to understand. Which is unfortunate and a bit weird as this has serious potential to be an amazing learning and teaching tool for music theory. Even more odd since that’s precisely why the dev built it... Anyway, if you can trudge though figuring it out, it’s ability to control up to like 7 different synth voices playing everything from chords, bass counter melody, melody, lead, solo, etc. all from one interface, all in a “musically coherent” manner is pretty amazing. It’s probably better served pairing with hardware though because it’s full screen (and even that’s not enough) and a lot of app switching would be needed to really go nuts with the thing. Buy it, learn it, love it!