Suggest chord progressions

Actually I love the humour that permeates all folks here
Totally different from the spite that I see in other fora
:ok_hand: :+1: :clap:

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I could not agree more Claudio! :wine_glass: cin-cin

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I’ve found that Scaler currently works best if you first come up with your own progression first and then use Scaler to then manipulate the chords. When you try to then lean on Scaler to come up with ideas, this is where confusion and frustration set in. Sure, you can use the wheel of fifths to find nearby keys but then you’re kind of on your own to find maybe a chorus or something that fits your current progression for the verse of your song.

It would be nice to maybe have Scaler kind of “clue” you into compatible chords by right-clicking on your current pattern and create an option called “New Part Suggestions” or something like that and it will maybe point you to some possible viable keys/chords that match well with the selected pattern. I haven’t found any software that currently does this but I think it might help when you have writers-block and you’re stuck with a good verse and are struggling to come up with something more to keep the song interesting.

Nevertheless, @Capt_Ahab, you can’t imagine how keeping an existent progression, above all in the style that is more distant from yours (for example, hip-hop for metal or Balkans), and manipulating it can produce original and interesting stuff…

Check my post called “Scaler is good at”, thinking that I never used a matching progression…
:rofl:

Data Scientist in work life, also. Dang, how many of us are also musicians? Interesting Venn diagram I bet.

Concur with @Bernd on his comment about Prediction. My experience is that getting an objectively solid predictive capability above 80% usually takes a lot of good, clean data. It’s devilishly hard to do that even though humans do it every moment without realizing it.

@xtremsounds pointer to Diatonic Chord Progressions is invaluable - thank you. :slight_smile:

@Ed1 is spot on as well re: “…if you make one good enough…” some room has to be left for inspiration.

To the, “is there anything like…”, question. There was once a product called The Jammer by SoundTrek that was freakishly good at generating drop-dead, “Whoa!”, moments from time to time. Drums, Bass, Comping Chords, and Lead lines all at once. Pick one of its “Style” settings and go. Worked with General MIDI format synths like the old Roland MT-32. I still have a copy of it, and the SoundTrek site is still visible, but no links work.

Scaler is the best I’ve seen in well over a decade.

On the data scientist front, I spent some of my early years as a financial ‘quant’ in the investment banking world so I’m familiar with a lot of forecasting and AI /ML techniques… I have to say I don’t really understand the concept of ‘prediction’ of what is likely to come next in the context of music. It’s not random, it’s whatever the musician choses to play or the composer to write - forecasting is not much use in a deterministic process. However, there are clearly ‘patterns’ in music, often driven by different genres, and some software can extract ‘style’ which encompasses aspects of progressions in that genre, and also things like timing and so on.
I digress. My point was if you have just played a C#-7 you can reasonably assess whether any specifically chosen next chord in a progression might be dissonant or not, with some structure of n bars. It’s not really prediction, in that if b-7(b5) sounds crap against it ,it will always sound crap (I’m ignoring ghost or passing notes here).
Further, the ‘what comes next’ approach points to a sort of Markovian characteristic, which makes techniques other than pattern matching hard to employ, but clearly, you can asses a reasonable set of potential resolutions to the next harmonic point.

However, the real issue in automated composition is that If I play a progression of 8 chords on my guitar, and then Steve Vai plays the same 8, they will not sound the same. Music which moves people is imbued with some undefinable aspect of ‘feel’ in a very broad sense imparted by the musician. It seems to me that amateur hackers like me, even if I get to the point where my short piece has the right notes in the right sequence, it will then take me a long, long time (and probably never) to sound like a highly talented artist.
Jazz guitarist MIck Goodrick listed 7 things a guitarists could do a pianist couldn’t. ( Vibrato / bending / hammer-on , pull-off / glissandi / harmonics / string muting / changing the position of attack relative to the bridge.) It’s being a master these sort of things that will make Vai sound better than me, even if I play the same progression / notes; so I’m not sure how you can predict the right feel, even given ‘feel’ was a quantifiable entity. .
Of course, with physical modelling or clips of Steve Vai I could sound like him - but none of us are using Scaler as a playback machine ?

BTW 'john_q_public, Jammer is still alive and well. They are revamping the web site. I have Jammer 6 Pro, and there are certain things it is pretty good at. You can now micro adjust settings, so output is not too canned.

It is very encouraging to hear that Jammer is still alive and well. I take my hat off to the original author of that codebase. Brilliant work.

Thank you @yorkeman :slight_smile:

@Ed1 and @davide, I’d love to see something like this map in Scaler, with clickable/listenable nodes. A drop down list above or to the side could allow selecting a genre, and the irrelevant nodes could be dimmed, thus highlighting common progression pathways in the genre. It would seem more functional than a flat list of canned progressions without any context, and would keep with Scaler’s goal of being an educational tool.

That said, it’s truly a wonderful time to be alive. There’s a ton of info online. Here’s just a couple of the (IMO) great references I’ve discovered. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Interesting…

Nevertheless, “chords to evoke a certain emotion” sounds scary to me
It reminds me the subliminal advertising
:thinking: :poop:

Perhaps. :slightly_smiling_face:

My interests focus on cinematic orchestral music, but no matter what genre/style of music one prefers, there are certain idioms, techniques and harmonic language associated with each.

Hi @eakwarren

Nice collection :slight_smile:

I spent a fair bit of time looking at those types of things when building the first Scaler. They still look a bit scary to me but they can be useful references.

For me what matters is the way you interact with the software while making music, the rules are everywhere, there are thousands of technical documents and amazing songs to look at for knowing what works. It’s all about the workflow and understanding what you’re doing.

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