How Super Simple Chords works
Super Simple Chords is a piano playground built from real songs. Its 366 patterns were found by reading thousands of piano scores and keeping what pianists play again and again.
Patterns that fit every chord
A pattern is stored by its place in the chord, not by its keys: “the root, then the fifth, then the octave”. Played over C it is C, G and C; over A minor it is A, E and A. That is why every pad of the Playground fits every chord of every mood, in every key, and nothing sounds wrong.
From a loop to a song
“Make a song” plans an intro, a verse, a chorus, a second verse and chorus, and an ending from the choices on the Playground. The chorus moves to a livelier left hand (the one songs most often move to), sparkles mark the ends of lines, and the tune on top is made up for the chords: strong beats land on chord tones and the notes between walk the scale, in phrases of four bars that answer each other.
Inside the songs
Each song is the arrangements of it in the library put together: its key and tempo, the chord loop it repeats most, the left-hand and right-hand patterns its scores use most, and its last chords. Where a famous part of the song was found in a score, “The part you know” plays it with its real notes. Where a score had no chord symbols, the chords are worked out from the notes, and can be wrong now and then.
Three ways to read it
The player shows the music as falling notes onto the keys (with the fingers and the hands), as a bar sheet (each note a bar on the staff, with its name) or as sheet music. The finger numbers are worked out by the same rules for every pattern: they are a good start, not a teacher's fingering.
The sound
The piano is the Salamander Grand, recorded by Alexander Holm (CC BY 3.0). The sheet music is engraved by alphaTab (MPL 2.0).