Chord-Scale Practice
Teaches musicians to improvise
Introduction
Chord-Scale Practice is an app for musicians who are practicing improvisation. The application prompts the user to practice improvising over a wide variety of chord symbols, eventually allowing a musician to play over every possible mode and chord change. The application has a metronome and a large pool of chord-scales to choose from, as well as short lessons describing each chord and its purpose.
Challenge
How does a musician get comfortable improvising over all possible chords in all keys?
How does a musician learn how to play over all possible chord changes?
How does a musician know what the most important scales to learn are?
The Solution
The app allows you to select scales, and then play a metronome. Every time the metronome counts a new bar, a chord symbol from one of those scales but from a random key will be displayed. There are also lessons in the app about how to play the chords and scales.
Technology
This app was built in Xcode and written in Swift. The app uses AV Foundation to create a metronome that can produce sound and count at a specific BPM as well as random number generation and mutable arrays to produce the randomized chord symbols.
Language
Swift
Editor
Xcode
Result
The app is the perfect tool for musicians to learn and practice how to improvise. Enough practice with the app should prepare a musician to comp and solo over almost any song no matter what chord changes the song contains.