Reijo Hiltunen from Finland doesn’t promise that you will learn everything there is to know about chords within one hour. But he does promise that after one hour, you will throw all chord charts and all chord generators you have known so far into the fireplace. After starting the app, which runs on iPhone and Apple tablets, the user is forced to work through a small tutorial and cannot access the regular user interface before completing it. This tutorial shows clearly and unmistakably how the app is working and is therefore a good help.
The app doesn’t break down the fretboard into tone names but into interval relations of a selected key tone. The user can build a chord himself, all common options can be integrated and therefore every possible chord can be created. Whether it’s a G power chord, a jazz-style G13b9, an open G9sus, diminished, minor, 9#11 – everything is possible. There is no worldwide common standard for chord notation, the notation used in this app was chosen wisely. After selecting the desired chord symbol, the fretboard displays the chord’s interval structure and the app is giving advice where the individual notes are located, whether a note is still missing, if a mistake was made when building the chord or if one is about to create a finger-twister. This is simply ingenious. Everything can be listened to as well, even as strumming over the fretboard. It is possible to place a capo and even to change the tuning. The latter opens up new ways to learn about, for example, DADGAD.
Pure chord charts without harmonic context can be hardly used in a profitable way, except you take Ted Greene’s chord collection, where even the advanced guitar player can find some surprises. The promise to help finding and building meaningful chords yourself on the guitar in a fast way is kept by this app. Along the way you will learn about the fretboard schema and chord construction. With its low price of less than 5 Euro, OneHour belongs on every guitar player’s mobile Apple device. Hiltunen already announced a German translation. The app is currently only available for iOS and can be purchased from iTunes / Apple App-Store.”
