Karyne Levy/Business Insider
I tried teaching myself some chords on the guitar, but it turns out that you need big, strong hands to press down on the strings hard enough to make music.
My hands are neither big, nor are they strong.
So instead I picked up the ukulele, and, using YouTube, taught myself how to play.
The problem is, I've run out of songs to play that are remedial enough for me to learn. That's where Riffstation Play comes in.
The online app gives you the guitar, ukulele, and even piano chords and notes to pretty much any song you can find online. It even includes a search engine.
The chord diagrams are on the right, while a bar displaying the chords scrolls below. It syncs to the video.
Riffstation Play
With a library of 10 million songs and still growing, it looks like I'll never run out of things to play for my friends.
"Not only are we able to provide chords for any version of any song in the world, we also get to collect the data on what songs are most popular within the guitar player community," Dan Barry, cofounder of Riffstation, told TechCrunch. "Furthermore, the fact that our chord recognition is automatic, means that the size of our catalog is limitless. Our index already has over 10 million songs listed."
Riffstation Play
Riffstation uses an automatic chord recognition algorithm that "detects major, minor and 7th triads with about 85% accuracy in typical rock/pop music," according to the website.
It's still in beta, but at least one thing it's working on is allowing users to fill in a proper chord if the algorithm messes up.