About Chord Colors

The colors

Every one of the twelve notes keeps one color everywhere it appears. The colors are based around the circle of fifths, so you can see harmonic relationships, like perfect fifths and perfect fourths, that are hard to see with note names or standard notation. I think the colors also make chords and scales more interesting, and as you memorize them, you can see at a glance where the perfect intervals are and where the tritones are.

Who makes this

I'm Ross Miller, a software engineer who plays guitar and piano. Getting deeper into music theory has given me a deeper appreciation for music, and I built Chord Colors to try to make music theory more exciting and approachable for everyone.

How the pages are made

I used AI to help generate the descriptions on these pages, while curating and checking things by hand. The musical data itself, the spellings, intervals, chords, and fingerings, comes from the same dataset that powers the Chord Colors iOS app, all generated by code with tests.

Getting it right

I aim for everything to be perfect. I know I won't always meet that mark, so if you see any mistakes, please let me know at [email protected] and I will fix them ASAP. Thank you!

I worked very hard to make sure the spelling of every chord and scale is accurate. For instance, an E augmented chord has a B♯ in it instead of the enharmonically equivalent C that other resources mistakenly report.