Chords Weaver
Pads for progressions by ear
Free · In‑App Purchases
Pick a note, pick a chord, and weave a progression by ear, then shape every voicing and let it play with arpeggios, grooves and drift.
Chords Weaver is a hands-on chord instrument you play by ear.
Pick a note on the keyboard and it filters to the chords that fit. Choose one, and two pads open up: one shapes its voicing (spread, inversion, octave) while the other suggests where to go next, the right side resolving, the left adding tension. Build a progression on the timeline, and a live piano roll shows exactly what will play.
Press play and the progression comes alive with arpeggios, block grooves and strums, each chord ringing in time. Turn on Drift and the voicings slowly wander on their own, so the loop keeps evolving.
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- Rich arpeggios: ascent/descent, ternary grooves (waltz, shuffle, jig 6/8), a lilting 7/4, and sparse syncopated patterns (charleston, tresillo, offbeat, push).
- MIDI Out to your synths, DAW or hardware, with a 24 PPQN clock.
- Four scenes, copy and paste, and a "roll a matching bridge" helper.
- Optional cloud save: sign in and your progressions follow you to every device. The app works fully offline.
- Five languages: English, Français, Español, Русский, 日本語.
Free to download. Weaving, voicings, playback and saving are all free. A one-time Pro unlock adds MIDI/WAV/text export and live MIDI-out. No ads, no subscriptions. Signing in is only for optional cloud sync.
more • Fixes a crash at launch on the latest version of iOS.
1.7.11 Oct 19
• The request to rate the app now comes at a better moment: right after you save or export a progression, or when you stop playback after letting it loop for a while. It never appears while something is playing, nor over the tour, the unlock screen or an open panel.
1.7.9 Oct 17
• Roll starts from the ghost chord: the notes you hold on the keyboard, or the chord picked in the grid, open the progression instead of a random chord.
• New drift mode under the drift speed: each chord drifts on its own, or the whole progression shares one drifting voicing.
• New installs open in your device's language (English, French, Spanish, Russian or Japanese), and I translated much more of the app, down to tooltips and error messages.
1.7.8 Oct 4
• Arpeggios have their own subdivision, under the ascent and descent controls: quarter, eighth or sixteenth. Every pattern is scaled to the one you pick, and it is kept per chord.
• Playback no longer clicks or pops between chords. The sound output was being allowed to fall asleep between notes, and crackled on waking.
• A note that has finished ringing is released instead of being held until the next chord.
1.7.5 Sep 19
• Scenes 2 to 4 no longer vanish after you load an older save. They stayed tappable, but the app quietly kept only the first one, so whatever you put in them was gone on the next launch.
• Playback survives a chord that fails to sound. One bad chord used to leave the transport stuck until you restarted the app.
• Exporting from the Mac app writes a real file and asks you where to put it. The file went nowhere while the app said it had been saved.
• A purchase that takes a while is no longer reported as a failure. Face ID and the confirmation sheets could outlast an internal time limit, so you were charged and then told it had not worked.
• The keyboard stops resizing and sliding as the chords change. Its range only widens now, and it still centres on the chord being played.
• You can reset a forgotten password from the sign-in panel.
• Signing in with a method your address is not registered with says so, instead of claiming your password is wrong.
1.7.4 Sep 12
• The suggestions on the tension side are no longer missing. On some chords every suggestion landed on the resolving side and the other half of the pad was empty; both halves are now guaranteed a couple of chords.
• The suggestion pad spreads its chords over the whole surface instead of packing them into the middle, so they stop overlapping each other and the tension and resolve labels.
• The top of the suggestion pad is named. It is the pole opposite the tritone: the chords up there keep the same root and only change colour.
• The coloured glows on the pads have no visible edge any more. They were cut off by the shape that drew them, which left a hard rim around each one.
1.7.3 Sep 3
• The app keeps playing when you leave it. A sequence that is running carries on driving whatever is receiving its MIDI, so you can switch to the app hosting your synth without the notes stopping. It still suspends the moment you leave it while nothing is playing, so it costs nothing at rest.
• MIDI notes now carry the time they are meant to sound, and the system delivers them at that time instead of the app pushing each one out by hand. Timing holds up when the app is busy or in the background.
1.7.1 Sep 2
• The chord grid is back, as a second view of the chord picker rather than a separate screen. Switch between the pad and the grid with the strip down the right edge; the next-chord suggestions have a grid too.
• The grid keeps every chord in view and uses colour for how well each one follows, instead of hiding what it does not recommend. Columns stay grouped by chord type, and it scrolls sideways when it runs past the edge.
• Picking a note on the keyboard narrows the grid to the chords that contain it, wherever that note sits in the chord, not only the ones built on it.
• The root is now an axis you can slide, coloured and named like the chords themselves, sounding each root as you pass it. Roots that hold nothing under your current note selection go dark.
• The voicing pad's horizontal axis walks three octaves instead of looping inside one, so it changes the register of a chord and not just the order of its notes. It reaches an octave below the chord as written, and the octave is shown as you move.
• Holding the pad while the sequence plays re-voices every chord it passes through, and a chord that starts under your finger takes the new voicing immediately rather than on the next pass.
• Block mode can alternate the bass and the rest of the chord, on a handful of rhythms: boom-chick, waltz, a 3+3+2 pattern and a steady eighth pulse.
• The suggestions follow the chord being played, so during playback they show what could come after where you are, not after where you last clicked.
• The landscape layout was rebuilt. Play, undo and export sit in the header, the scene buttons ride the timeline, the chord pad fills the row instead of a small box adrift in the middle, and the picker's two tabs stand beside the pad rather than under it.
• An empty timeline offers a roll, so a scene can be seeded without picking a first chord by hand.
1.7.0 Aug 31
• Reordering chords by dragging them works on phones again. Hold a chip for a moment and it lifts; swipe quickly and the timeline scrolls as before. There is no separate grab handle any more.
• Fixed the pads drifting away from your finger at the normal and large display sizes. The further you moved from the top-left corner, the wider the gap, so a chord could look selected and stay silent. The compact size was never affected.
• The next-chord pad now glows exactly where it responds. Its lit halo used to be larger than the area that actually sounded, so chords near the edge looked live and stayed silent.
• The cursor dims in the gaps between chords, so a spot that picks nothing now looks like one.
• Louder output, about 4 dB across the board.
• The drifting dot can be moved by hand without leaving drift, and drift carries on from wherever you put it.
• Pressing play with nothing selected now shows the voicing pad following the chord being played, instead of an empty panel and an invitation to pick something.
• The app name no longer paints over the toolbar buttons, and the header no longer sprawls over several rows, at the normal and large display sizes. On a tablet, where normal is the default, that happened without you changing any setting.
1.6.7 Aug 21
• Fixed the share buttons, which pointed at the wrong app.
• Fixed: if you had already bought Pro and reinstalled, tapping unlock showed an error instead of restoring what you own. This affected every device not set to English.
1.6.4 Aug 17
• Fixed: "Load from cloud" no longer overwrites your current in-progress work — it only ever restores saved progressions.
• Fixed: chord voicings could sound thinner right after switching between scenes; note density is now consistent across all four scenes.
• Clearer first-time guidance pointing new users toward voicing and the next-chord suggestions.
1.6.3 Aug 1
• **Reroll now cycles in place.** Rerolling the same chord keeps replacing it with a new option instead of stacking a fresh chord each time, so you can quickly try different possibilities before moving on.
• Fixed the export menu (MIDI/WAV/text) sometimes appearing in the wrong spot at some display-size settings.
• Updated the help guide and welcome tour.
1.6.2 Aug 1
• In-app purchase integration for Pro unlock available across all platforms.
1.6.1 Jul 31
Chords Weaver is now free. There is a one time Pro unlock for exporting to MIDI, WAV and text, sending live MIDI out, and creating your own custom chords. Everything else is free. The app is now a single focused panel, and building a chord it does not know is easier: play something new and it offers to save it. Let me know what you would like next.
1.6.0 Jul 24
• Fixes a crash at launch on the latest version of iOS.
more Version 1.7.11 Oct 19
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