The new Chord Search feature is a huge upgrade to the Database and I’m very happy that you guys decided to implement this.
Unfortunately though, after only a few minutes of trying out the new feature, I’ve already encountered some major limitations:
Augmented and half diminished chords are not searchable. Although the + and ø characters are displayed in the search results, they are not recognized as part of a search string. Using #5 and 7b5 doesn’t work either.
Applied chords are not searchable. Applied notation isn’t recognized and using the borrowed spelling exclusively returns results where the chord in question is transcribed using the borrowed spelling.
Applied chords are displayed as regular diatonic chords. So IV/x is displayed as IV, V/x is displayed as V and viio/x is displayed as viio. This also means that searching for ii, IV, V and viio will return all of the instances where these are used as applied chords. For example the first 2 results when searching for viio in a major key are White Christmas by Bing Crosby and Say Yes by Elliot Smith, neither of which actually contain a regular viio chord. White Christmas has a viio/V and Say Yes has a viio/vi:
Thank you for fixing this! Augmented and half diminished characters, as well as applied notation are now recognized.
The only issue is that chord alterations are still included in the chord labels. For example most people don’t transcribe augmented chords by borrowing them from supermodes, but instead they just raise the 5th of a diatonic chord. So searching for I+ only yields 1 single result, whereas I+(#5) provides 200.
Another example of this would be non-diatonic diminished chords. Some people borrow these from parallel modes, but others just flatten the 5th of a diatonic chord. Searching for iio in a major key yields one set of results, whereas searching for iio(b5) provides a different set of results.
I honestly think it would be worth considering whether to generally exclude chord alterations from the chord label when the chord label itself already communicates in which way the chord has been altered. I personally find these extremely redundant and misleading. I+(#5) implies that the 5th has been sharpened twice, because the + already communicates that it’s an augmented chord. Same thing with diminished chords.
By the way - it would be amazing if there was an option to disregard chord extensions and inversions, so that for example searching for iv would also yield results with iv6, iv7, iv64, iv65, iv43, iv42, etc. That would make this feature much more useful.
agree this would be very useful. Easiest thing would be to also ignore all chord modifiers e.g. sus, add, etc, although this is probably also desirable.
Yeah agree with this. This wasn’t really on purpose, it is just an artifact associated with the way that Hookpad displays chords which is sort of a different use case, and makes for several redundant cases where the same chord is spelled differently.
That would be totally fine by me! I think ideally there would be a separate checkbox for each category (Extensions, Inversions, Suspensions, Added Notes and Alterations), but just a single checkbox to disregard all of them would already be incredibly useful!
Yes! I had been considering writing a post with a similar suggestion. I would also suggest a category for Spelling.
I think allowing more flexibility in matching is particularly vital because, despite everyone’s best efforts, the transcriptions here are never perfectly accurate. People make mistakes, both in recognizing chords and in notating them, and sometimes transcribing is just really hard.
I’m so delighted with this tool and its potential. I already liked the Chord Probabilities at Songs With The Same Chords (I think that’s how I first found this site) but Chord Search is much more powerful and usable. I love being able to see the matching chord sequences in context immediately from the search results, and I’m impressed with how quickly the search runs.
I fully agree with what you said, but also want to add that even in a flawless transcription there can be chords with multiple viable spellings.
One obvious example would be augmented chords. Due to their symmetrical structure there are at least 3 possible spellings for every inversion of an augmented triad. For example if we take a descending line chliché in A minor, you could spell the second chord as A♭+, G#+, E+/G#, or C+/G#, none of which would be technically incorrect.
Another example would be sixth chords, which can either be spelled as a root position chord with an added sixth, or a seventh chord in first inversion. In most cases there’s no good reason why one would be more correct than the other.
There are other examples of this, but the point is that being able to include multiple spellings into a search string would be very useful - not only to account for transcription errors, but also because sometimes there’s more than one right way to label a chord.
