The Chord Finder

A fantastic tool for GCSE and A Level students who are exploring creating harmonic progressions.

This spreadsheet allows you to select your tonal centre, then it gives you the key, chords I-vii as well as secondary dominants and common modal interchange chords. Complete with instructions on how to use them within a sequence. These pages will also give you the key signatures and notes in the scale.

There are tabs for Major, Minor and Modes, as well as the Chord Finder. the Chord Finder allow you to select the root note, then it gives you 40 chord types (ranging from major triad through to all the crazy extensions/alterations). It will give you the notes in the chord, as well as guidance on how to use them.

This resource comes with 2 versions of the spreadsheet. One which uses images of the key signatures and scales, which I find most useful, but only works on Macs/PCs/Laptops. The other version is 100% text based, which will work on phones/tablets.

This is a powerful tool, which can be useful for students to get to grips with the fundamentals of harmony, as well as explore the more advanced aspects of the harmonic language.

The spreadsheet is locked for editing so you can’t accidentally overwrite the formulas. But the password is on the “Backstage” tab if you really want to adapt the resource.