Chord of the Day, Taken Apart

One chord, shared across the whole network each day, read here as theory rather than as a fingering — formula, parent scales, keys, and where its root stands on the circle.

Once a day the whole Warrior Network draws the same chord. The seed is a single hash of the calendar date over a curated pool, so there is no server deciding anything and no feed to subscribe to: every sister site, on every device, arrives at the same answer independently. What differs between them is what each one does with it.

Why this site's answer is different

Every other site in the network answers the daily pick with an instrument. One gives you a grip, one gives you a shape system, one gives you a roll pattern, one tells you how many of its notes survive a synth's voice budget. All of those answers are true and none of them travels: a fingering is a fact about one instrument, and it stops being useful the moment you pick up another.

This site has no instrument, which is exactly why it can give the reading that holds on all of them at once. A chord is a set of distances from a root, a member of some number of parent scales, a resident of some number of keys, and — taken as a key of its own — a station on the circle of fifths. Those four facts are the same on a piano, a fiddle and a five-string banjo.

The four readings

The formula. The interval stack the chord's name commits to, spelled tertian-correctly from the root, so a seventh reads as a seventh and the letters never repeat. This is the definition; everything else follows from it.

The parent scales. Every scale type on this site whose intervals contain all of the chord's, measured from the same root. A triad usually has a dozen parents and a ninth chord has very few — which is a decent working definition of how much a chord commits you to.

The keys. Every major key (with its relative minor) whose seven notes contain the whole chord. Few keys means a chord that announces where you are; many keys means a chord that could go anywhere next.

The circle station. Taking the chord's root as a key signature: how many fifths from C it sits, how many accidentals that costs, and which ones. It is the fastest way to see how far today's chord is from home.

Today's chord appears below

The pick itself is computed in your browser, from your own calendar date, and never on the server: rendered pages here are cached at the edge for hours at a time, so a date baked into the HTML would cheerfully hand you yesterday's chord a minute after midnight. Once the page knows what day it is where you are, the four readings appear below, each one linking into the reference section that explains it.

While you wait — or if scripting is off — the same material is browsable by hand: chord construction for the formulas, the scale reference for the parents, keys for what belongs where, and the circle for the stations.