What chord can these notes form?

Answer

Understand

The same handful of notes is often musically ambiguous. Three notes a minor third and a tritone apart, for example, form a diminished triad, but leave out any one note from a four-note chord and you can be looking at a genuine subset of several different sevenths. This tool never silently picks a winner in a true tie: when more than one candidate scores equally well, it shows co-primary alternatives instead of a false unique answer, and when no candidate can explain every selected note without leftover tones, it says so rather than forcing an approximate match.

A stated bass note only changes bass-sensitive evidence, such as whether the bass is a chord member (an inversion) or an added note outside the chord (a slash bass). It never changes which root and quality the note set itself supports.

Worked example

Selecting C, E, and G produces an exact match against the major triad template rooted on C: every selected pitch class is accounted for, and no template tone is missing. The evidence shows the intervals from the root (a major third and a perfect fifth above C) and states plainly that this is one possible reading of that pitch-class set, not a claim about the notes' original musical context.

Selecting C, E-flat, and G-flat instead produces an exact match against the diminished triad template rooted on C (a minor third and a diminished fifth above C). Selecting C, F-sharp, and G, on the other hand, does not exactly match any template from any of the three notes taken as a root, so the tool reports that this set does not support a single confident chord name rather than inventing one.

Method and limitations

For every selected note taken as a candidate root, the tool computes the interval of every other selected note above that root and compares the resulting set against a fixed vocabulary of chord templates (major, minor, diminished, augmented, sus2, sus4, and common seventh qualities). A candidate is accepted only when every selected tone is explained by the template; a template tone the selection is missing is recorded as an omission and ranked below an exact match, never silently assumed present. This tool cannot infer a missing third as definitely major or minor, cannot establish functional harmony (a Roman numeral or key relationship) without separate key context, and is not aware of your instrument's voicing or octave doubling, since it works from pitch classes.

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