Play your laptop, like a real instrument.
CHORDAL is a desktop app for writing and performing chord progressions. Every chord in your key sits on a coloured pad: press one and it plays, voice-led smoothly from the last. Four performance pads split each chord into bass, low, mid and high, so you can strum, arpeggiate and riff it live from your computer keyboard, a MIDI controller or your trackpad.
perpetual license
3 computer activations
works offline (after activation)
14-day money-back guarantee
Two rows of 12 pads hold the chords of your key, with a second bank of 24 one key away. Function keys add sevenths, extensions, altered fifths and inversions on the fly. Pads are coloured by harmonic function (tonic, pre-dominant, dominant, secondary dominants) and named as letters, Roman numerals, jazz or classical symbols.
Each new chord moves the fewest notes it can from the last, so progressions sound smooth with no music theory required. SPREAD sets how wide the voicing is, and notes the two chords share keep ringing across the change.
Bass, low, mid and high: play the chord's parts separately or together. Strum, arpeggiate with AutoStrum patterns, add humanised timing, or let guitars strum real fret shapes with capo positions.
Play four white keys and CHORDAL places the chord across the four pads in the shape your hand made: wide keys give a wide voicing, close keys a close one. Black keys play chords or melody. Works on 25, 49, 61 and 88-key controllers.
Turn a row of pads into a bassline or a melody row that only offers notes that fit the current chord, with chord-scale colouring and optional jazz tensions.
Load a whole song of any length. Its chords step along the pads as you play, mid-song key changes included, with the lyrics shown beside them.
Factory chord presets across genres, plus a visual editor: drag chords between pads, recolour them, set their extensions and save your own sets.
Around 40 sampled instruments: pianos, electric pianos, organs, guitars, mallets, orchestral strings and horns, synth keys and pads, plus basses and swing-quantised drum grooves. A built-in polyphonic analogue-style synth gives each part its own patch.
A full effects chain: filter, compression, overdrive, amp and cabinet modelling, chorus, tape delay, reverb, EQ, multiband dynamics, saturation and a limiter, with a mixer for drums, bass, chords and melody.
Drive CHORDAL from any MIDI keyboard or pad controller, send its chords to your DAW over MIDI, and record your performance as MIDI (drums included) or audio. A sheet-music view shows what you play.
No controller? The whole app plays from your computer keyboard, with a trackpad mode for expressive strumming.
| Mac | macOS Monterey 12.6 or later, Intel or Apple Silicon |
|---|---|
| Windows | Windows 10 22H2 (64-bit) or Windows 11 or later. |
| Linux | Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (64-bit) or later |
| Internet | Needed only for sign in/activation, and checking-for/downloading updates. |
| Controllers | Optional. Any MIDI keyboard or pad controller; LED support for the devices listed above. |
There is currently no demo version or demo-period for the full CHORDAL app. A CHORDAL-lite free version is in development to release asap, which will give users the most basic features and let them experience the core-usability at zero cost. We also offer a full 14 day refund guarantee if you purchase the app but realise it's not for you.
We do not currently offer this or have any plans to do so. CHORDAL is a one-off purchase perpetual license. There are no renewals or recurring charges. The purchase price includes all incremental updates for the v1 app. A later v2+ app may be offered at an upgrade price.
Yes: ask within 14 days for a full refund, no reason needed. See the Refund Policy for more details.
Our online reseller Paddle.com is the Merchant of Record for all our orders. Paddle takes the payment, handles VAT and sales tax, and sends your invoice. We never see your card details.
You'll get an email from us with the download link. Open CHORDAL, sign in with your purchase email and the 6-digit code we send you, then activate the computer. No passwords needed.
Each licence includes 3 computer activations. We currently add 1 more on each anniversary of your purchase (if you have below 3 activations available) as a goodwill extra, for convenience when you may buy new computers etc. This is not guaranteed and we may revoke this plan at any time, but will never remove unused activations from a paid account. Activated computers work offline. See the Terms for details.
Of course! Note that all the built-in sample libraries are licensed for use in your own music, but not for redistribution as samples / sample packs (except where individual license files may have even more permissive licenses such as CC0). See credits tab in the app for more details on each factory-installed sample pack's own license.
No, there is zero AI use within any feature of the app and in creating any of the factory sample libraries / content. All 'smart' behaviour is coded to follow the rules of music theory like a real musician would. These algorithms have been developed by manual trial and error and according to our own, 100% human, musical tastes.
Every feature, every line and every letter in the app is designed and lovingly tweaked to perfection by a human hand. The app has been developed over 3000+ man hours using standard professional software engineering methods and practices as of 2025-26. This includes agentic coding assistance to speed up development and optimisation, ensuring a comprehensive automated test suite backs all the features, ensuring stability as much as can be expected of any complex app from a serious indie developer.
The sample libraries supplied as factory content are a mixture of samples we recorded ourselves, and a curation of the best-available free packs that the internet has to offer. The factory content contains a mix of CC0 (public domain) and CC-BY (royalty-free) packs, in many cases which we spent hundreds of hours reworking with further editing and polish. The credits tab in the app lists all authors for all factory content, to whom we're eternally grateful.
CHORDAL is great fun to play whether you're a music theory expert or a total beginner. It's even good fun for young children, especially when paired with a supported coloured-LED MIDI controller like eg Launchpad. It was designed to be useful to musicians of all levels. It can help you learn theory if you want to, without requiring that you do.
Write it. Play it. Perform it.
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CHORDAL is patent pending (UK patent application filed 5 November 2026).
Launchpad, Push, Akai, APC, Fire, ROLI, LUMI and Lightpad are trademarks of their respective owners. CHORDAL is not affiliated with them.