1. At the beginning...

First of all, it's good to explain what I do in my life. I'm 28 years old and I work as a system annalist and programmer. That's what I do for living. I also have a rock group where I'm the vocalist and play guitar and base. This bizarre combination gave me the courage needed to develop this project.

It all started when I was surfing on Internet and my phone rang. It was my band drummer asking if I had figured out U2's song "Beautiful Day" chords for our next rehearsal. The first thing that crossed my mind was if I’d have to sing it screaming just like I do with Counting Crows' "Mr. Jones" (believe me, this is a very though music to sing on stage!). By the way, the choice of the correct key is a very important issue to any singer. If not, it should be! We should not sing beyond our limits because, more than damage our vocal cords, it harms people ears! On Internet we find hundreds of chords sites, but none of them let us select the right key for our voice. So, because of that call, I decided to create a site with this functionality. At that occasion, I did not intend to implement it for the Web, but only for my use at home. "Beautiful Day" is the site's first music. Its "idMusica" is #2. After a lot of programming, I was able to see the results and I loved! I wanted to show it to my brother Christian that, at that time, was learning to play the guitar and had a Reggae and Forró (Brazilian music) exotic band (don 't ask me what it is!). When he saw it, he said:

- Man, it's awesome! But where are the drawings for the chords? – It was a great idea, but I think he didn't realize that we could modify the key also!

2. The chords

That comment got me confused. After so much effort, how come I couldn't please anyone? So I begun to wonder if it was possible to show all chords drawings of a song on a Web page. Some sites put a image (gif or jpg) of the chord, but it is a lot more laborious to have all chords of all songs, because it is necessary to have a image of each one of the thousands of chords. Even though we'd be restrict to only one chord variation of the song. After many attempts and mistakes, still on "Beautiful Day", I've got to show all the chords. But I decided to go even further. I wanted to show, not only one variation, but all chords variations of the music! That was it! At that point I could choose any chord from all 12 possible variations of the same music. Than I called my brother and showed to him:

- Now, you've got it! It's really great! Show me another song. - It would be perfect if he wouldn't say this last sentence. The only chord I had in my database was “Beautiful Day.” I got depressed. Think of it: store thousands of chords, one by one. The logical way would be inserting them as the songs where being stored. To make things worse, I started working on Djavan's (Brazilian musician) songs, which are on top of the list of the most difficult ones. His chords can tie your fingers up!

The storage of the chords works the same since the beginning, I mean, we input the song and if a chord is missing, we insert it.

Other day, going back home, I stopped by a magazine seller and bought a book of chords just to compare with the site. Surprisingly, all chords were for keyboards. So, I passed all travel from my work to home observing those keyboard chords, and I confess I didn't understand anything of it. So what? Keyboard chords are for the same keynotes that guitar chords are. So we decided to move on and include in our site keyboard chords too.

3. The site

It would be very selfish to remain with that work all for myself. So, I made up my mind and published the site on the Web. All I needed was a name. Among many suggestions, I choose "E-chords.com". It may seem like a lie but if you punch the key "xcv5rfc" on your computer keyboard, you will realize that it's registered as a Internet dominium! I designed and put it the on air with few hundreds of chords. It wasn't enough however. Than, my brother Christian took the responsibility to put the chords into the site. At the beginning, he stood up to 18 hours a day working on it. I'm not going to lie, most of the songs where already in Internet. My job resumed to correct them. Many chords were wrong as well as their format too. To imagine the work we had, there were chords impossible to perform like C6/Cº, B#, Cb, A#m7+/7/6/9/D# (how many fingers these people think we have?). But, also we worked very hard to input chords songs that we couldn't find in Internet. In some cases, when I didn't know the music, I had to download it, listen and figure out the chords. Nowadays, our official chord placer has discovered the existence of MS Messenger and reduced his time to only 3 hours a day. Also he gained an extra help: my wife, Andreza. She doesn't know anything about music but I bet you she is placing chords into the site at this very moment.

Andreza e Peter                                                                                            Christian

4. E-Chords.com.br

All innovation will not stop here! Always I have some brilliant idea or receive some spectacular suggestion I strive to implement it right away. Be sure that I'm working on something new at this moment. I appreciate all the compliments for our work and I can sincerely say: it's you all that make this project get better and better everyday. I'd never imagined that this site would be so successful.

As like in any story, there were two bad guys: Breno and Lucas. These two, since the beginning, did not agreed with this project and made all that's possible to stop it. They disturbed my wife, intentionally distracted my brother and sabotaged my computer. They are lucky to be 3 and 1 year old and to be my sons.

Peter Jordan
Webmaster