My bunch of suggestions

Hi everyone! I wrote some post´s last week. And i got always quick and helpful responses. Thank you so much! As i don´t want to flood the community with posts i decided to sum up my suggestions, requests for hookpad here. I priorized the suggestions loosely by my personal most wanted first.

  1. The possiiblity to convert midifiles into “styles” / band content. Pleaser refer to post: Importing midifiles to styles

  2. Input Chordparser. The option to input more than one chord at the time in the Search dialog box seperated by comma. Typing C/G,dm,E7,am would insert those 4 chords at once.

It should also be possible to export selected chords as a textstring in the same format. There could be an entry like “Export selected chords as text to clipboard” in the file menu.

This way you could easily create progression snippets, build up your own favorite progs database and also share them with the community. How awesome would that be!

Even better would be the possibiltiy to optionally include the chord duration. A resolution of 1/16 notes would be sufficient. If durations are not included all chords should be inserted with the duration choosen in the upper left corner of hookpad.

The multiples of a 1/16 note length could be added behind the chord seperated by ; for example.

C/G;16,dm;16,E7;8,am;8

In this example the first two chords would be one bar and the third and fourth would be half a bar long. It would be great if the resulting progression would be previewed as usual right from the box.

  1. Displaying the time passed since a definable Song Begin Bar. The time could be displayed right of the bar number. So for Bar 64 it could look like this: 64 (1:23). This way no extra ruler would be necessary. You may agree that time is critical for writing songs, scores. Every DAW provides a timeruler for that reason.

  2. I love to use the dark theme. But the bar numbers as well as the Band and Sectionsnames are coloured dark grey on darker grey and are hardly visible. Could you brighten those text to make it more visible, please? Like the colour of the two cicular arrows of the loop indicator.

  3. Adding the option to pan, to stereoposition the indivudual tracks of the band. That would clearly bring the audio experience to the next level.

  4. A reverb, chorus send there would also be great. :wink:

  5. One or more recordable audiotracks would be awesome. The corresponding .wav - file could be stored locally on the pc. Some simple editing functions like cutting and positioning horizontally would be sufficient.

  6. A simple notepad where you can write and store notes with a hookpad file would really be nice and handy.

I am curious, what you think of those eight suggestions. By the way, is there a beta test program to apply to?

Thanks
Alex

Thank you for all the great suggestions! Let me try to answer to a few of them.

  1. I’ve already answered in your initial post.
  2. Scripting your own chord progressions into Hookpad and saving them into local data files doesn’t sound like the best user experience for me. But I agree that it would be nice to have an easy way to save custom chord progressions and reuse them. Right now you could always save your chord progressions as Hookpad Projects, name them accordingly and copy them in from a second Hookpad Window if you like. This is a bit of a hack but it would give you what you need
  3. I agree: We need a way to display the time of a song
  4. Yes, they could be a bit more visible
  5. (and 6.) Yes, at some time we’ll need to overhaul the band browser / mixer and get in a few new options which will be a really huge task
  6. see above
  7. There’s some of that functionality already in our dev version early stages. I’ll ask what it would take to bring this into our production version
  8. You can already do this in the Lyrics section. Just write something like 1000 at the start. This will skip the lyrics of the first 1000 notes and you can write your notes without having the text displayed in your music.

Thank you a gain for giving us great things to think about!

Dennis

Thank you Dennis for your quick response and your openness for suggestions.

To 2. I thought it would really speed up the composition process and also the exchange of progressions and the collaboration of musicians. As it makes it easy to share progressions in a mail or in a post like this. Especially if it is not possible to attach files. I am thinking of posts like “I don´t know how to continue this progression. Has anybody an idea?” One advantage of the text format is also that you see beforehand what to expect and you can sort your progressions/text lines by firs chord or key etc. Saving each progression as an entire Hookpad project i find a bit cumbersome. As like i said i can´t see whats in the file. The chordparser would also speed up the input of chords in the Search box.

Another way would be to introduce a second file type with whom you can save selected chords right out of hookpad. Ideally such file would automatically have the chordnames in the filename. It would only store chords with their length. What do you think of that? This way it would stay in hookpad. But i still would prefer the chordparser idea as it provides more flexibility.

Thanks for the tip how to add notes in the lyrics window. I did not think of that. It´s a workaround. But if you have already lyrics there it also gets a bit cumbersome. So for me personally a tiny notepad function i would keep on my wishlist. I do a bit of coding myself and assume it would be an easy thing to implement but that of course is totally up to you. I could also store there some progression snippets as text if the chordparser ever would make it. :wink: Do you offer betatesting?

Thank you!
Alex

Dennis, is it possible that you overlooked my suggestions number 7? :wink:

For the band please make it so that we can listen to one instrument at a time like how we can for the mixer.

No, the editor didn’t know what to do with the information “5-6” and miscorrected number 7 and 8 to 5 and 6. :slight_smile:

Actually i overlooked your answer. Sorry!