Find the chords from your own recording

01The one search where having no catalogue helps

Most chord sites are libraries: you type a title and get a page somebody already made. That breaks the moment the music is yours, because nobody's catalogue contains your voice memo. There is no page for the riff you hummed into your phone at midnight, and there never will be.

kords.in has no catalogue at all, deliberately. Nothing is looked up — everything comes from the file you hand it. An unreleased song, a rehearsal take and the way your church actually plays a hymn are all as workable as a chart-topper. The limitation is the advantage.

02Who ends up on this page

• You wrote something and cannot remember it. You recorded thirty seconds, and now your hands will not find it again.
• A band with a rehearsal recording. The phone was on the amp, the new part happened, nobody wrote it down.
• A teacher with a backing track from a producer rather than a songbook, and a student who needs the chart.
• A church or worship team with last Sunday's recording, where the arrangement in that room is not the one anyone published.
• Anyone whose music is not indexed — regional, devotional, folk, instrumental, a cover you recorded, a demo you were sent.

03What you can upload

Whatever your phone, recorder or laptop produced.

The size limit is 40 MB — well over half an hour of MP3. WAV catches people out: uncompressed stereo eats roughly 10 MB a minute, so it hits the ceiling in about four. Export a compressed copy; the chords are none the worse for it.

04Getting a phone recording that reads cleanly

You do not need a studio. You need a take where the harmony is the loudest thing in the room.

• Quiet room, door shut. A fan, a fridge or traffic sits in the same frequency range your chords live in.
• Phone a metre away, not touching the instrument. On a guitar body or a piano lid it picks up thumps and a boomy low end that swamps the root.
• Hold a steady tempo. Bar lines come from your own timing, so a take that drifts badly gives a grid that drifts with it.
• Count yourself in for four bars. It gives the timing something to settle on, and you can loop past the count later.
• No backing track playing in the room. The mic hears both, and two harmonies fighting in one file is the hardest case there is.

And if you want chords, play chords: strum the harmony rather than picking out the topline. A melody over an imagined accompaniment does not contain it.

05What comes back

Not a list of chord names. A map of your take, laid on its own beats.

• Chords on a beat-locked timeline — each block as wide as the chord is long, over the bar lines found in your recording.
• The key and the tempo of the take as played, not as intended.
• Bar and beat numbers, so "the change in bar 12" means something to the band.
• Shapes for guitar, ukulele and piano, with the chord playing now and the one coming next.

Then it is the practice room: slow the take down without changing its pitch, loop the bars nobody can play yet, add a capo, or move the whole recording into a key that suits the singer.

06What makes a recording harder to read

Said plainly, because knowing it saves you a re-upload.

• Heavy distortion. High gain piles extra harmonics on the notes you fretted, and power chords compound it: a root and a fifth with no third is genuinely ambiguous, neither major nor minor.
• Very dense mixes. Pads, doubled guitars and a cymbal wash all compete for the same space.
• A solo melody with nothing under it. One note at a time does not determine a chord: a held C belongs equally to C, Am, F and Dm. Not a shortcoming — it is what a single line is.
• Unusual or drifting tuning. An instrument a quarter-tone flat reads as sitting between two keys, and every chord inherits the confusion. Thirty seconds with the tuner is the cheapest accuracy you can buy.
• Very quiet or clipped recordings. Too quiet and the harmony sits in the noise; clipped is worse, because a phone against a loud amp red-lines.

Why an empty bar beats a guessed one

Where a passage does not carry enough harmony to name a chord, you get a gap — nothing carried over from the bar before, nothing invented to fill it. Only chords actually detected in your audio are shown. A gap tells you the truth, so you listen once and write it in; a wrong chord costs you an hour and makes the whole chart untrustworthy.

07Your unreleased song stays yours

This matters more here than anywhere else: people upload work nobody has heard yet.

Full detail is in the privacy policy.

08A note on what this is not

Files you upload, and nothing else — no streaming or video links, deliberately, which is why your own recording is treated exactly like everything else. It does not separate stems, remove vocals or produce staff notation.

09Common questions