Chord Room, written by Erik van der Neut, displays guitar chords and scales in various keys. It's is versatile, speedy and well designed, with an interface that's logical and attractive. In addition to conveying a wealth of information for standard tuned guitar, Chord Room covers chords and scales in sixteen predefined alternate tunings. And if that's not enough, you can easily retune each string in Chord Room, so you can create and explore any tuning you please.

Many people have attempted to write "electronic" chord and scale books for guitar. (I've done so myself — and I promise to finish my version someday! Anyone out there well versed in C++, Java, JavaScript or Pascal interested in collaborating? My project always tells the truth and has perfect musical grammar — unfortunately is has a face only a mother could love, and I have little expertise or interest in writing the user interface, thus the project remains stalled.)

Chord Room greatly exceeds other attempts that I've seen. And I've looked at several over the years. At first glance I thought "Finally! Usable chord and scale software for guitar." But alas, Chord Room isn't perfect. In fact it has some significant flaws. Still, what I would have given for a resource like this twenty-five years ago!

As with most efforts in this area, Chord Room's Archilles heal is poor musical grammar. You'll find lots of notes, chord formulas, and scale formulas misspelled enharmonically. These oversights were apparent after just a few minutes of use. (I've listed a few instances in a chart below. Unfortunately, you're sure to find many more.)

As it stands, despite it's shortcomings, Chord Room does an admirable job and should prove useful to inquisitive guitarists. It reveals a bounty of information about guitar. It's a great resource for chords and scales. And it provides extensive insight into alternate guitar tunings. No doubt the grammatical mistakes could be quite misleading for beginners. But for those who know most of the rules, Chord Room can easily opens lots of doors. And the grammar errors aren't a big problem when using Chord Room's "interval" mode — my preferred view.

And you can't beat the price! Chord Room is free. It runs online over the Internet on any computer with a current browser. Just go to van der Neut's web site and use it. At present there is no version for the Macintosh or PC. (See the author's note below which addresses this point.) Chord Room is available for use only on the author's web site. If you visit van der Neut's site, look around. It has lots of useful information, including some interesting links.

To use Chord Room, go to: http://looknohands.com/chordhouse/. Then from the pop-up menu, choose: Guitar Room (Advanced)

Or just go directly to:
  http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/guitar/index_rb.html

Once the page is loaded, you can log off and still use most of Chord Room's features — so if a person in your home needs to use the phone, it won't interfere with your studies and rapid ascent into the list of world's top-ten guitarists.

While off-line you can use Chord Room:
     • view and explore all chords and scales
     • switch between "notes" or "interval" view
     • change tunings

However you can't change between right-handed and left-handed views, or invert the display with the bass strings at the top while off-line.

Here's an especially interesting, potentially useful, and slightly arcane tip. If you want to show someone a particular chord or scale, just send them the URL! As you use Chord Room it loads various bits of information into the URL: the chord or scale formula, the guitar tuning, and other parameters. And as with any URL, you can copy it and e-mail it. When the recipient clicks on the URL that you've embedded in their email, their browser takes them to the Chord Room web site. Then Chord Room reads the parameters in the URL. After a few calculations, it displays the chord or scale, just as you saw it. Slick. **

Following is a list a few oversights I've encountered (mostly grammatical) in using Chord Room:

• In "notes" mode Chord Room displays lots of incorrect enharmonic spellings. For instance, in the display of Dm7b5 the b5 is spelled G#. But in the key of D the b5 is Ab. G# is a #4. Granted (on tempered instruments) G# and Ab are the same sound, and they occupy the same physical spot on the guitar fretboard. But in the context of a chord or scale, only one name is grammatically correct, the other is not.

• Unfortunately, in "notes" mode, Chord Room offers no means of displaying Bb, Eb, or any other flat chord or scale! You always get the enharmonic equivalent. When you click on a Eb/D# root, Chord Room always displays the D# chord. If you click on or Bb/A#, it displays A#. Even though an Eb chord is much more common than D#, and Bb is more common A#. *

Worse, Chord Room operates in the same manner when you view scales. Click on A#/Bb (with the scale type set to "major") and Chord Room shows you an A# major scale, badly misspelled: A#, C, D, D#, F, G, A. Spelled correctly the A# scale is: A#, B#, C##, D#, E#, F##, G##). Contrary to popular believe, A# is legitimate scale. But because its key signature requires three double sharps, it is rarely used in notation. The enharmonic scale Bb is preferred as it has just two flats — so obviously, it's much easier to read.

• Lots of the scale and chord formulas are grammatically incorrect. For instance, the formula for a diminished 7 chord is 1, b3, b5, bb7; not 1, b3, b5, 6 as shown in Chord Room. I suppose this is a minor point. Many people prefer to think of the diminished 7th degree (bb7) as a 6. Still, in chord Room's "Details" window van der Neut spells the formula with a bb7. So Chord Room's display is inconsistent with it's own formula.



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NOTE: It seems that a central design flaw impairs Chord Room's logic. A musical note may possess several numeric names. But it appears that Chord Room statically identifies each half-step from the root (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11) with the corresponding scale degrees (1,b2,2,b3,3,4,b5,5,#5,6,b7,7). But list of scale degrees is incomplete. Insensitive to musical context, it can't encompass even the very common reaches of music grammar.

The 8th half-step is the note most frequently caught in conflict.

Augmented chords call the 8th half-step #5, while most minor chords call it b6. But Chord Room always calls it #5. As a result, the formulas for Chord Room's minor scales and minor chords are grammatically incorrect — they write b6 as #5.

Other conflicts exist between b5 and #4, 6 and bb7. Also there are octave equivalence issues, like 4 and 11, or b3 and #9. The list goes on. I know. I struggled before resolving such conflicts when I wrote my own software.

The following chart illustrates a few of Chord Room's incorrect formulas. The errors are marked in bold, with the corrections directly below.


Chord Room "Pure" Minor:	1	2	b3	4	5	#5	b7
Correct:	1	2	b3	4	5	b6	b7
Chord Room Lydian:	1	2	3	b5	5	6	7
Correct:	1	2	3	#4	5	6	7
Chord Room "9" chord:	1	3	5	b7	2
Correct:	1	3	5	b7	9
Chord Room A# major scale:	A#	C	D	D#	F	G	A
Correct:	A#	B#	C##	D#	E#	F##	G##




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• Some scale formulas are incorrect. Chord Room shows the Aeolean Mode with nine tones: 1,b3,4,b5,#5,b7,7,b9,#9, but of course it has only seven tones: 1,2,b3,4,5,b6,b7. Many of the modes and scales are misspelled for the reasons mentioned above.

• The Most of Chord Room's scale formulas end with an 8th degree. (For example: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8). The "8" simply restates the root. This redundancy is just a bit odd. *

• Chord Room always displays the guitar fretboard horizontally, which is great for scales. But a vertical orientation would be more in keeping with traditional chord diagrams. (Nice though, there are several options for the horizontal view.

Whatever you think of it, Chord Room clearly demonstrates that the larger promise of the Internet is at hand: that we all benefit from people's willingness to share their knowledge and interests; and thanks to languages like Java, many types of software will indeed become platform independent. And for a creative, curious, and serious guitarists, a resource like Chord Room is a windfall of information, and definitely better than a stack of your average chord and scale reference books.

Hats off to van der Neut for his talented and artistic efforts. I look forward to seeing an updated Chord Room that addresses some of the current problems. A more accurate Chord Room would be a truly impressive piece of music education software.

Author comments: "[Chord House is] not available for download other than through your Internet browser. Chord House is meant as a free online quality resource, available for everybody anywhere in the world, independent of what platform they're running on their computer. It's not for sale, you don't have to register for it, and most likely I will never devote my time to building a stand-alone executable version.

NOTE: van der Neut claims that he will continue to update Chord House, so I feel it is important that I date this review: 3-3-00.