Dusk Audio has released Chord Analyzer, a free MIDI chord detection and music theory analysis plugin for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
We’ve covered a few Dusk Audio releases recently, including DuskVerb and the 4K EQ, MultiComp, and Tape Machine trio.
Chord Analyzer is a different kind of tool. Instead of processing audio, it reads incoming MIDI and tells you what chord you’re playing in real time.
If you’re still learning music theory (I also have a tutorial for that) or just want a quick reference while writing, this is a neat little plugin to have sitting in your DAW.
You can route MIDI to it, play some notes, and it’ll display the chord name, its Roman numeral in your chosen key, and its harmonic function (tonic, subdominant, dominant, borrowed, or chromatic).
It recognizes 45 chord types, including triads, seventh chords, extended chords up to 13ths, altered dominants, sus chords, and power chords. It also detects inversions and shows slash notation.
That’s all pretty basic stuff, but the chord suggestion feature is where it gets more interesting for learning purposes. Based on your current chord, the plugin tries to think like a musician and suggests what might come next across three tiers.
Basic covers common progressions like I-IV-V and ii-V-I. Intermediate brings in secondary dominants, borrowed chords, and tritone substitutions. Advanced goes further with chromatic mediants, Neapolitan chords, and augmented 6th approaches.
So, if you’re trying to break out of the same four-chord loops, this is a nice push in the right direction.
There’s also a session recording feature that captures your chord progressions with timing data and lets you export them as JSON, which could be useful for further analysis or feeding into notation software.
I also like how educational tooltips are available throughout the interface, so you can hover over elements to learn about chord qualities, harmonic functions, and why certain progressions work.
To me, the interface looks like it may have been built with AI assistance (and the Dusk Audio website confirms this for their plugins in general), but for a lightweight utility like this, that’s fine. It works, and it does what it needs to do.
Chord Analyzer is completely free to download from the developer’s website with no registration required. It’s available in VST3 format for Windows 10 or later and Linux, with AU also available on macOS 10.13 or later. LV2 is supported on Linux as well.
Download: Chord Analyzer by Dusk Audio (FREE)
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Last Updated on April 2, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
