pianochords

Generator for an Anki deck to learn Jazz piano chord layouts

Overview

This might be handy if you learn Jazz piano and want to memorize chords in order to be able to read lead sheets.

You can use this program to generate an Anki deck containing basic question/answer pairs as follows:

The question is the chord symbol, the answer is the layout of the chord on the piano keyboard.

Imagine sitting at the piano with the mobile version of Anki on an iPad or similar, practicing chords, or practicing mentally while on the road.

Various chord types (e.g. maj7, dominant, half-diminished, etc.) are supported as are different inversions (first, second, ...). In the example above, the circled number represents the chord interval that appears highest in the chord.

Usage

For the impatient

There's a pre-generated deck available. Just download pianochords_ankideck.tgz and import it in Anki. Make sure you follow the advise in Anki's section on Importing Media. Alternatively, use the shared deck provided at Ankiweb.

If you want to learn just certain chords, for example while practicing a particular piece, analyse the lead sheet at the piano and find the chord inversions you are going to use. Then tag the corresponding chords in the deck, e.g. with song:all_the_things_you_are. Now use the tag to create a filtered deck, and practice exactly the chords you need.

Using the generator

For a start, try

bin/pianochords generate -r c

This creates a file ankichords.txt containing question/answer pairs for the four inversions of Cmaj7, and a directory png containing the four corresponding PNG files.

Run

bin/pianochords

or better

bin/pianochords help generate

for an overview of options.

Prerequisites

You need LaTeX with piano.sty and standalone.cls. And Ruby, of course. I used Ruby 1.9.3 and Ruby 2.0 during development.

Development

Start reading bin/pianochords, or skip directly to lib/anki_generator.rb and descend from there.

Run the tests with rake test

Remarks and open issues

• The code internally uses a mixture of English and German musical terminology, and the file names of the generated PNGs reflect that, too.
• I recommend to patch piano.sty and modify the picture dimensions from \begin{picture}(14,4.5) to \begin{picture}(13.9,4.05) in order to get rid of unwanted borders (and therefore incorrect centering).