Help create a chord difficulty scale

[jorivirtanen]

Hi all y'all!

 

My name's Jori Virtanen, and I'm in a company called Ovelin that develops guitar tutorial softwares disguised as games. You learn to play a guitar for real while playing our games, as the guitar itself is the game controller. Our aim is to make the learning process entertaining, and as people discover the joys of playing a guitar, we take a lot of pride in what we do.

 

While I can't go into detail, our project will feature several difficulty levels, interchangeable even in the same song, but, in order to define what is difficult and what is not, we need your help.

 

So, we created a simple chord vs. chord mashup we call Chord Genome Project. You'll presented with two chords -- pick out which one's more difficult, and move on to the next set. Simple as that.

 

With enough entries, we'll know which chords you guitar heroes find the hardest, and which the easiest, and implement that data in designing difficulty levels. This will make the game immensely more enjoyable, which, in turn, results in more people playing a guitar.

 

Although we firmly believe that the world needs more music and we can help make that happen, we'd like to not starve in the process. That is why this game is, ultimately, a commercial product. However, there's a single reason why I dare post about this, despite the commercial relations of it all.

 

We want to do this right. And we can't do it alone.

 

Here's the link for the Chord Genome Project. Feel free to spread the word.

 

http://mash.ovelin.com/

 

 

Oh, and if you're interested in playtesting the beta version of the game later on, let us know. We know what we're doing, but we could always use a few pointers

 

 

 

Thank you,

 

Jori Virtanen, community manager, Ovelin.com

 

Doing our very best to make learning to play guitar as entertaining as possible.

[stomias]

Physically or mentally difficult?

[1001gear]

Seriously. Chord are cake until you try them on a guitar.

[c+t in b]

This is dumb. None of these chords are really that difficult physically or mentally as they're mostly basic open position chords. There are some voicings that are a real bitch i.e. 1st inversion of a drop 2 major 7 on the ADGB string set. Its not hard to do but more of a hard chord to jump into form somewhere else

[mosiddiqi]

I think it's accepted by most players, that for beginners, "F Major" is the most difficult chord because of the mini barre. However, after that, I think it's more a question of which chords are hardest to change into. If you've been playing a while, the only chords that are "difficult" are the ones you don't know. I appreciate anyone trying to do something to make guitar more fun to learn..but I'm not sure I can add much to this really.

[JonR]

There is no absolute spectrum of difficulty for chords, at least not for experienced players.. F and B are hardest for beginners, that's true. But is F harder than B? Not for everyone. Fm is probably actually harder than F (in its full 1st fret barre).

And there are many different ways of playing any given chord, some easier than others. Not just different fingerings for the same shape, but different shapes.

Even extended chords are not necessarily any more difficult to play than simple (triad) chords.

Then you have personal variation between players, and between guitars.

 

I think there might be a case for a spectrum of difficulty for beginners (which seems to be the target market). It would depend on how many fingers are used, and how far they need to stretch away from one another - and whether a barre is involved. You would probably get reasonable agreement about the easiest (Em?) and the hardest (F or B? Fm or Bb?), at least among the usual beginner shapes. But in the middle I doubt there'd be any conclusive result. Is C harder than G? A harder than D? Who can say?

 

In fact, you should not be asking "guitar heroes" (by which I presume you mean experienced players); you should be asking beginners, those who are still struggling to get their chords to work.

[halfwhole]

your database is mad slow. took at good 15+ secs for some of them to load.

 

get the old scott henderson voicings book. there's your hard mode.

 

mark the chord degrees if you're going to do this: root, 3rd, etc. where's the standard notation? a short mp3 of each voicing would be sweet, too. i did something like this with a "chord of the day" facebook app a few years ago, but got bored with it.

 

random: are guitarists the only ones who use that "add2/6/9/13" nomenclature nonsense?

[jorivirtanen]

Hey all,

 

Awesome answers! Thanks a lot

 

Yeah, we know that this isn't a complete set of chords, and it's not that the chords themselves are that hard if you have the time to position your hand right (and know the chord in the first place). What defines difficulty more properly is where any given chord changes into, which is actually the next step of the project. All this phase is doing is gather baseline data, and evolve that scale into chord changes, versatility, and so on.

 

All this feedback will be taken to the team. We really, really want to make this work -- all too many beginner players quit soon after picking the hobby up, and we want to make the learning process fun and entertaining, so practicing would be motivating and rewarding. One of the keys here is the difficulty scale, which we have create one seemingly stupid step at a time.

 

Things like this -- the suggestions, the observations, the insights -- are worth a lot to us, so... Thank you.

 

 

Halfwhole: That's odd. We'll look into it. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

 

-Jori Virtanen, community manager, Ovelin.com

[JonR]

random: are guitarists the only ones who use that "add2/6/9/13" nomenclature nonsense?

"add9" makes sense and is conventional (means omit the 7th); "add11" would be useful for similar reasons, but rarer (and "add4" may be as good). "Add" on the others is redundant. Guitarists are not known for their love of conventional theory or notation , so I wouldn't be surprised if they were more guilty than (say) pianists.

[JonR]

What defines difficulty more properly is where any given chord changes into , which is actually the next step of the project.

Good luck with that! Any one chord can - in theory - change to any other, so the permutations must be near infinite, once you add in every possible inversion and voicing of any chord. (At least guitar only has 6 strings...)

[jorivirtanen]

Good luck with that! Any one chord can - in theory - change to any other, so the permutations must be near infinite, once you add in every possible inversion and voicing of any chord. (At least guitar only has 6 strings... )

 

Yeah, believe me, we know It's entirely possible we'll limit the choices somehow, but as I don't handle the technical side of this project, I can't say how the next phase will be approached.

But you have to start somewhere! And as the days, weeks and months roll by, the sheer volume of answers will provide loads of raw data.

And as we plan to go public with the project, the academic benefits are immense. Something like that is well worth the effort, in our opinion.

Besides, it's not like we're going to stop here! There's tons of steps to take, and these two phases are just the beginning.

 

Still, luck is needed, as is perseverance -- but most of all, we couldn't do this without help.

 

So,... Thank you. Really. You're the ones that make this happen. All we do is present some stupid looking tools