About Anychord
A free tool that listens to a recording and works out the chords, so you can play along without buying a tab or guessing by ear.
What this is
Anychord takes a song — a YouTube link, a title to search for, or an audio file from your own machine — and returns the chords in the order they are played, with the timing of each one. You get a guitar and a piano diagram of the chord sounding right now, the next one announced with a countdown, and a lane that slides past the playhead so you can see what is coming while your hands stay on the instrument.
There is no account, no trial and no paywall. Ads pay for the servers that do the listening, and that is the whole business model.
How the chords are found
The audio is run through a neural network trained on recordings that musicians labelled by hand. For every fraction of a second it estimates which chord is sounding, and those estimates are smoothed into segments with a start and an end. The result is the same list you would write down by ear, arrived at the same way — by listening — only in seconds rather than an afternoon.
From that timeline the site derives the rest of what a song page shows: the key the chords agree on, whether every shape is one a beginner can hold, and whether a capo would turn a set of barre chords into open ones. Those are calculated per song, from that song's own chords. Nothing on a song page is copied from anywhere.
What it does not do
It hears harmony, not words. There are no lyrics on this site and no tablature — Anychord does not reproduce sheet music, lyrics or any other part of a published work. What a song page holds is a chord analysis of a recording plus that recording's own embedded player, served from YouTube.
It is also not infallible. Dense arrangements, heavy distortion, key changes and quiet passages are where it slips, and the page says so on every song. Treat a result as a strong first draft: check it against your ear before you commit it to paper.
The tuner
The site also carries a chromatic tuner that runs entirely in the browser, on your own microphone. Nothing is recorded and nothing leaves the device — the pitch is read on your machine, window by window, and each reading overwrites the last.
Who makes it
Anychord is built and run by one developer, self-funded, out of a frustration shared by anyone who plays: the song you want is never the song somebody has already transcribed. It began in Serbian and now runs in nine languages, on the web and as an Android app.
Questions, corrections, a song page you would like taken down: write to maidr52@gmail.com. Mail gets read.