Hey guys sorry for the lack of updates. I know we said we would be releasing this feature earlier, and I’m sorry for the delay.
Long story short, we’ve been working on making the midi-import experience workable for the new version of Hookpad. When it works, it works great, but when things don’t line up properly, it can be frustrating. The issue is that midi files have very few restrictions on the timing of key, tempo, and meter changes, as well as note durations and placement.
As you know, Hookpad is constrained in the following ways:
Melody voices are monophonic (it doesn’t allow you to stack overlapping notes)
Key, meter, and tempo changes must occur at measure changes, (not in the middle of measures).
There are only four melody voices.
Notes (as of now) can only have start and end times that fall on a quarter-beat (16th note) grid.
Ultimately, since we’ve promised this feature to you guys, the plan is to release it shortly, and get your feedback as to how you are using it and how we can optimize the experience. The current development handles the above constraints in the following ways:
Only melody import is supported at this time (no chord input)
Overlapping notes will be ignored. Hookpad will include the first note in the midi track that occupies a given time interval, and any other note found in this interval will either be cropped or removed so that the imported track has remains monophonic.
Hookpad will only import the first 4 midi tracks in your midi file, the rest are ignored. Each track will be placed onto a melody voice in Hookpad, starting with the active voice and cycling around.
Note start and end times that do not fall on the Hookpad grid will be rounded to the nearest valid position.
Key, tempo, and meter changes will be rounded to the nearest valid location, which is between measures.
Thanks again for all of your patience and you will hear from us soon.
I just joined Hookpad mainly to have some assistance writing melody and harmony lines to existing instrumentals. Now I read through the basic instruction but can’t find a feature to import simple chord progressions from my DAW. Is Hookpad only importing the upper notes of full chords when using the “Import Midi” feature? Any workaround so that I can import the whole chords?
Sorry, I understand your use case but unfortunately Hookpad is not able to parse midi files and interpret chords. However, this is something that we’re interested in implementing in the future.
If your chord progression is simple, it’s pretty straightforward to enter it in manually. I know this is not ideal, but it can be pretty quick using Chord Lookup. We’re also working on a new midi chord input feature to allow users to import chords quickly using a midi controller. We could try to adapt this to midi files as well, although it may be challenging to get this working effectively without making some assumptions about the format of the chords.
Hi, Could you give me some instructions as where to look for this feature on the dashboard?
I always have problems finding where to look on the console for something that’s being discussed. Every system is different, after all. So could you please be as specific as possible? i.e. “Go to the top left. Look for this or that. Click on this or that. It’s halfway down on the drop down menu” etc? That would be a big help. Thank you so much for all you do!
