Hi! I love strum machine and I use it every day.
Is there a way through existing features to ‘hide’ chords for practice purposes? When I’m working on repertoire, I’d like to be able to play with a track without seeing the chord charts to ensure that I have them in my ear and memorized.
There is not. I’ve had this suggested before, but I’m not sure it’s worth adding another button to the interface… couldn’t you just look away from the screen? Maybe I’m not understanding the issue quite right though. I will be expanding the options for chord display at some point in the future so nothing’s off the table…
Thanks for the consideration. That’s what I do now, but I find it difficult to choose a song and get it playing without at least seeing the chords in my peripheral vision and confirming my memory of them. I’ve taken to practicing the progression without strum machine to make sure I have it in my ear and made the concession that playing it in SM means that I’ll get a visual reminder of the chords.
I would love an ability to assemble a list of tunes to play with set tempos, and kick them off without seeing the chords. Some kind of ‘jam mode’.
All that said, my full time employment is in software and I get the constraints you are working under.
This is unfortunate - I also need to play without seeing the chords - my purpose is to hear the chords, not see them. This will make use a different method than Strum Machine.
The chords show up on screen before you play. Maybe there’s a way not to see them, but I haven’t found it.
Mike
I have some new ideas related to this request, inspired by a Chrome extension that a Strum Machine user shared with me recently:
It replaces the chord chart with a view of the guitar player’s chord hand. It was made by Strum Machine user (and music teacher) Chris Roszell, who writes more about it here and has a demo video here.
Having this kind of feature in Strum Machine would both prevent you from seeing the chords ahead of time and also help train your ability to read chords from someone else’s guitar playing (if needed) which is a very valuable jam skill. I have some fun ideas for how to integrate it into Strum Machine (on all platforms) and make it even better/more realistic, but for now you might like to try using this ChordCam extension in Chrome because it sounds like it may do just the trick for you!
Wow! This would be so helpful for players that don’t quite agree with SM. I tried to “connect” it to my app, but although it shows in the toolbar and it is on, I cannot see the toggle like in the demo video. What am I doing wrong?
This extension only works if you’re accessing Strum Machine through your Chrome or Chrome-based (Edge, Brave, etc) browser. It’s working for me right now. Beyond that, I can’t really offer support because this extension is not affiliated with Strum Machine.