Flash and the future

product questions
62

Seventh chords lose the suffixed “7” when that note is put in the bass.

This happens to all sevenths, and only the “7”:



(Also, a minor seventh in first inversion is still called an uninverted sixth, even though those are properly possible now. Clarifying tabs where that was used is going to be a hassle…)

63

Although, it’s somewhat reasonable to not have the 7 notated. It says that the root is the 7 right there, and would be redundant to have the 7 essentially twice in the chord notation.

1 Like
64

(Horrifically late, but) I suppose. I’d prefer to have that toggleable, if that’s the route the team goes down. It’s definitely wrong to write things like “Cmaj/B”, though – that should just be C/B.

65

The “stable” button is not working properly, is it? I mean the top right button that reveals which notes make up a chord. I often have to turn it off and on again in order for it to update, or else the displayed notes don’t change even if you swap some chords for another ones.

A couple of issues that I find pretty annoying are the bug that causes the left mouse click to get stuck on its “pressed” state, and the fact that you can only click-and-drag notes up or down, and left or right, but never both in the same click-and-drag maneuver.

And this is kind of a reach, but: when exporting MIDI, it would be nice to have an option that allows you to export complex chords with more than 3 notes as a “single” chord. Right now, the normal behavior is to split the notes between the bass track and the chord track, so that when combined they sum up the original chord, but sometimes I find that I export my progressions simply to use the chords as a reference of the full “harmonic picture” of a song, and that forces me to manually combine them. Other times I simply have no use for a separate bass track, but simply deleting it and forgetting about it is not an option because of what I just mentioned.

66

@CDEFGAB, thank you for the continued bug reports.

###Stable Button

I made some performance improvements to the drawing with 2.0.0-beta.3 and may have inadvertently broke this. I will investigate

###The Left Mouse Thing

We are working on. We are able to reproduce on ForceTouch rMBPs. Still have not figured it out, but we will get it.

###LR + UD note drag in same action.

I’ll run it by the team. We made an intentional choice to do it the way it is now, but that was a while ago and a lot has changed so we will certainly consider it.

###MIDI
Definitely doable and a great suggestion.

67

Agree we need a solution for this. Added to our internal bug list.

68

Many thanks for bringing back relative transposition.

Notes across a modulation should not be retriggered at the key boundary though, otherwise some common tone tricks in the melody would not be possible. Also they maintain the same scale degrees after the boundary rather than following the transposition.

Speaking about inverted seventh chords, cmM/B is definitely wrong, and cm7(#5) now just becomes c7(#5b7) (which definitely has a redundant b7):

69

Yup this is just a bug.

Typically guitar tabs will write C/B rather than Cmaj7/B even though these are technically the same, so that’s what we did for HP1. We also write F/G for G11, since in practice the 3rd and 5th are usually omitted in real songs.

70

After beta 4, export doesn’t work even on my Hookpad+ account.

7(add6) is sometimes mistakenly labelled as 6. Also, HP2 shows the full em11(♭9) where HP1 would show dm/E.

In practice, the 3rd is omitted only if both ♮3 and ♮11 are present in the same chord (e.g. Ionian, Mixolydian). And if the 3rd is omitted, sometimes the 5th is kept, resulting in 9sus4 chords. It appears that HP2 does not reflect this practice even though the voicing is already supported since HP1. After all, the fact that slash chords with voicing equivalent to 11(no3no5) appear frequently in real songs should not be taken as the reason to support these special chord spellings in lieu of true slash chords (again, something that HP1 already partially supported), either.

Two more bugs:

  • It is possible to “copy” nothing by pressing C while nothing is selected.
  • The band settings do not load after pressing N to start a new tab.
71

I also found that none of the exports are working. There’s just a dialog saying that exports are part of Hookpad+ and I’m logged in.

I noticed that in the latest version the screen follows the playback, which is really good!

72

We just enabled the Plus gating in the beta for HP2 and there are still some issues there. Please bear with us.

@HertzDevil, thanks as always for the noting the theory issues with the current algo.

Dave

73

The auto-scrolling always assumes a zoom level of 100% and does not work horizontally when line wrap is disabled.

Minor issue: when creating a secondary chord that is augmented or diminished, a quality symbol appears after the targeted chord instead of the targeting chord, e.g. V+/V becomes V+(♯5)/V+, and V7(♭5)/vi becomes V7(♭5)/viø, as if an alteration is applied to the targeted chord.

74

Chord issues:

  • Inverted suspended chords on dim cause sheet music export to fail. Non-inverted ones might proceed but generate incorrect chord symbols.
  • First inversions of suspended chords have incorrect basses for “Piano Full Chords”. Trying to export sheet music with them crashes the exporter with a message like Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'slice' of undefined.
  • 11sus2 is unnecessary, because 9 is already a chord tone.
  • ♭9 / ♯9 should not disable add13.
  • 6(♯5) chords are displayed as just 6. This applies only to chords having add6 and ♯5, not inverted instances of mM7. 6/9(♯5) chords are still correct and display as +6/9.
  • ♭9 / ♯9 / ♯11 / ♭13 should resolve to their actual scale degrees when they appear in the chord symbols, but they don’t unless the respective degree already appears in the chord. For example in a Major key, IV7(add4) is maj7(add♯4), but IV9(♯11) is maj9(♯11), and IV11(♯11) is maj9(x11), even though these two chords are the same: they both contain x11 instead of ♯11 since the alteration acts on a Lydian chord.
  • The second and third inversions of sus2sus4 are rooted on 4 and 5 respectively. Either inversions on sus2sus4 should be disabled altogether (all possible voicings can still be achieved with inversions of 7sus4 and 7(add4)), or these two inversions should be rooted on 5 and 7, disabling only the first inversion (which cannot be uniquely defined without a slash chord feature).
  • The second inversion of (add11) is rooted on 1 instead of 5. The second inversion of 7(add11) is rooted on 7 instead of 5.
  • In beta 9, when using “Piano Full Chords”, add11 implies (no5).
  • When using certain instruments such as “Metal Guitar Single”, notes are split across multiple staves in exported sheet music as if each channel of a polyphonic track is exported separately.

GUI issues:

  • Multiple modulations on the same line do not line up in beta 10:
  • Changing the global key does not preserve the relative octaves across modulations, as if the key for each region is individually changed.
  • Often clicking a chord while another chord is being selected will move the selected chords to the cursor, but this is not registered as a separate undo action (it is merged into whatever next action is done).
  • Pressing “N” to create a new file causes all band templates to vanish until a page refresh.
  • Pressing “B” does not change the note duration at 12/4 time.
  • When saving a tab with a YouTube URL that contains extra query string parameters other than v (e.g. t for playback position, list for playlist info), Hookpad 2 appears to include the URL verbatim, instead of extracting the video ID which Hookpad 1 did, since loading these tabs later crashes the editor with the message Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected end of JSON input. This does not happen to youtu.be shortened links.
  • Test sync always repositions the cursor before play as if it is inside a sync region that starts 1 beat before the start of the tab, and ends 31 beats after the start of the tab, ignoring beat unit. The actual cursor usually synchronizes with the video.
  • YouTube synchronization ignores beat units and relative tempo changes (the percentages that appear at tempo changes should be used for playback and BPM matching).
  • When importing a Hookpad 1 Theorytab that contains a YouTube video, the editor pads empty measures at the end before adding the end sync marker, therefore desyncing all of them automatically.
  • no3 does not disable sus2 and sus4 visually, which implies they can be used together. (Either sus2 or sus4 will disable no3.)

Also some suggestions:

  • The editor needs some indication whether a chromatic note is sharpened or flattened, because they have different meanings in exported sheets.
  • If tie is enabled through either the duration palette or the “T” toggle above (holding “T” would be less intuitive), and the newly input note / chord is identical to the previous one, the editor should tie them automatically.
  • Minor modes should export minor keys to MIDI files, since the second byte of the MIDI key signature meta event does exactly this, and currently Hookpad 2 always puts 0 there.
  • Display dates in the local timezone rather than using the UTC time.
75

The sync markers are really counterintuitive for people used to HP1, and I suspect for others too. Can we get an option to turn those off? Same for the automatic melody extension as soon as you dare to touch the edge.

76

Sync markers will prove useful if Hookpad 2 places one per tempo change so that music containing these changes can be synchronized more easily, however such cases probably do not arise very often. What I personally find more counter-intuitive is that the loop region and the sync region are separate entities.

One more minor issue with the new page rather than Hookpad 2 itself: when logging in (I realized I need to log out then log in again to get the export features working) with LastPass, it fills the username in the open dialog’s search field, instead of the username field.

77

A couple of urgent, important issues: for a while now, the Hookpad 2 demo is saying my Hookpad+ subscription is not active, and it is active. I can’t export my songs to continue working with them anywhere else, as it’s a Hookpad+ feature. Also, and this one’s the worst: when using the Magic Chord button on a song, the chord will not work and the whole thing will get stuck as if you were choosing a magic chord, but without the menu, effectively blocking the whole site and rendering you unable to interact with anything, including the “save” dialog, and thus forcing you to lose all your work.

Please check it out as soon as you can. I can provide more info if needed. Thank you.

78

You need to sign out of your account, then sign back in, as this poster discovered.

1 Like
79

Thanks! I appreciate it.

80

yeah we’re looking into getting this fixed so that isn’t necessary. It works a little differently from Hookpad I as we are preparing the platform to work as a potential standalone app. If you have any thoughts one how you can get this to happen repeatably let us know as we are still debugging.

As for the magic chord issue, I will look into it. Does this always happen to you or just in certain scenarios?

Dave

81

Is there any chance we’ll see the melodic minor scale added someday?

1 Like