Attention lonely teenagers and the musically proficient adults they become: you can now learn to play any song on YouTube using one of the simplest interfaces I’ve seen in a while. Called Riffstation Play, it is an online app by the makers of Riffstation that gives you the chords and notes for almost any song on the Internet.
Like the Capo 3 I looked at last year, the system is very simple. Complex tunes will probably be lost on the app but most rock and roll hits should work just fine. There is a search engine complete with pre-rendered chord patterns and, for the professional, this on an iPad could be a nice alternative to a Fake Book while on stage.
The best part? It also supports ukulele chords so you and your friends can start a twee, quirky string band. They even did a shameless demo video to show off some of the basic features.
“Not only are we able to provide chords for any version of any song in the world, we also get to collect the data on what songs are most popular within the guitar player community,” said Dan Barry, co-founder of Riffstation. “Furthermore, the fact that our chord recognition is automatic, means that the size of our catalog is limitless. Our index already has over 10 million songs listed.”
The company also offers a “pro” version of the software that can analyze songs in more detail and slow things down so you can learn riffs, leads, and other git-fiddle frippery. However, as a chording platform I think the free Play service is quite fun and quite solid. KARRANG!
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John Biggs is a writer, consultant, programmer, former East Coast Editor and current contributing writer for TechCrunch. He writes mainly about technology, cryptocurrency, security, gadgets, gear, wristwatches, and the internet. After spending his formative years as a programmer, he switched his profession and became a full-time entrepreneur andwriter. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Laptop, PC Upgrade, Surge, Gizmodo, Men’s Health, InSync, Linux Journal, Popular Science, Sync, and he has written a book called Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age.