Oh a Chord

Oh a Chord is an iPad instrument built around one idea: press a single key, and a full chord comes out.

No music theory required. Pick a Chord Type — major, minor, diminished, augmented, sus2, or sus4 — and every key on the keyboard becomes the root of a chord in that quality. Hold a Modifier to add color: a sixth, a flat seven, a major seven, a ninth, an eleventh, or a thirteenth, stacked on top of whatever you're already playing.

KEY MODE Turn on Key Mode and press any key — that note becomes your song's key, and the keyboard lights up with the chords that belong to it. You can still play outside those chords any time; borrowed and passing chords are always available, they just won't be lit for you.

STRUM, HARP, ARP A held chord doesn't have to stay static. Strum spreads the notes out like a guitar strum. Harp rolls them across one or two octaves. Arp turns a chord into a moving arpeggio, up or up-and-down. Combine them, or turn them all off for a plain block chord.

A REAL SYNTH UNDERNEATH Every chord is voiced through a full six-voice polyphonic synthesizer — oscillators, a sub, noise, a resonant filter, an LFO, and an amp envelope — reachable from an advanced settings panel without ever stopping the music. Start from a built-in factory preset, or tweak any parameter and save your own.

VOICING AND PERFORMANCE Two voicing controls slide a chord through the register without retriggering it, so a progression can move and breathe instead of jumping between fixed positions. Latch holds a chord after you lift your finger; an octave stepper and pitch bend round out the performance controls.

WHO IT'S FOR Songwriters sketching progressions, keyboard players who want fast harmonic ideas, guitarists and producers without formal keyboard training, and anyone who wants to hear a chord change before committing to it on paper.

PRIVACY Oh a Chord collects nothing. No account, no analytics, no network requests of any kind. Anything you save stays on your iPad.