Yesterday, I got a letter from someone wishing for some songs to play with common chords they already know. If you fall into this boat, and need some songs that already work with what you’ve learned, I’ve got good news for you.

I was recently contacted by the creator of The Chord Genome Project, who recently came out with a page focused at ukulele players: The Ultimate Collection of Easy Ukulele Songs for Beginners. The page is a good resource and jumping off point for a site that I think is a great idea.

The Chord Genome Project is basically a database of half a million songs that you can search with the chords you already know. This allows you to find new songs that already fit your personal knowledge base. There are many reasons you might want to be able to do this, besides being lazy. Some examples:

• Disability, such as the arthritis mentioned in yesterday’s post, may limit the amount of chords you are able to make.
• You need a new song for this weekend, for whatever reason, and you want to be sure your sure about what you’re playing.
• You teach beginners and are looking for songs that will fit within their skill sets, or just help them to grow one chord at a time.

How the site works:

• Go to the main page at The Chord Genome Project.
• Enter the chords you wish to search for.
• Under the instrument filters you can select Guitar, Ukulele, Banjo or Mandolin.
• You can also select whether you just want to see music specifically for Guitar or Ukulele or Both (I’d suggest both if you already know these chords, because ‘chords are chords’).
• Optionally: There are also Genre, Decade and paid filters you can select.
• Hit the Search button and see your results.

The free version is quite limited on the results you’ll get back (5% for Demo and 10% for Free accounts), but the Gold membership returns results from all half million songs in the database and is only $24.99 for lifetime access (Disclosure: I am not being paid to review this and have no relationship with the site whatsoever). Paid membership also includes wildcard searches, which allow you to put in the chords you know and get results with just one more chord.

A useful tool? Yes, I think so. Worth it? I don’t think it is overpriced. Lifetime access is what I look for on these kinds of sites. I hate paying monthly for database use.

Anything missing? Yes, I do wish that there was an easy way to search for songs based on the number of chords in the song, rather than by specific chords. Also, it would be so awesome if there was a way to search chords by relationships (all songs that have I, IV, V or I, ii7, V7, etc. progressions).*** These features would make it indispensable for teachers or anyone who wasn’t afraid to transpose a song.

Do you know any other resources out there for players to find songs to chords they already know? Please post a reply or drop me a line at ryan@ukuleleplay.com

*** CORRECTION: I contacted Austin at The Chord Genome about those missing features, and while they currently don’t have a way to look up songs by the number of chords, they DO have a way to look up progressions. See this video:

Post filed under All UkulelePlay! Blog Posts.