Suggestion: Staff Notation Option

Are there any plans to add conventional music notation (on staves) for analyzing songs in the future? The HookTheory tools make harmonic analysis nice and accessible but personally I feel it would be easier to have an option for reading and analyzing in traditional notation for the melody. One of the advantages to this is that reading duration is easier with regular notation than by judging the length of a line colored line.
I imagine it wouldn’t be hard to do since you can export theorytabs as sheet music so why not make an option for music to scroll along with a YouTube video?

Hi @Violan,

When Hookpad exports theoryTabs to sheet music, we use a computer program called LilyPond to engrave the sheet music, which generates a format that is not readily compatible with the Hookpad app.

We’ve discussed this issue before, and have actually developed a conventional staff from scratch that shows up as a third line above the melody in HookPad with the idea that this hybrid music editor could be suitable for use in a classroom setting.

The problem with allowing this option on all TheoryTabs, is that it places difficult constraints on spacing and size. In conventional sheet music notation, measures can have variable width. This is convenient to create more space for measures that contain a lot of notes, and have reduced space for measures that contain a small number of notes. Even then, when considering measures with many sixteenth notes, you can only really fit 3 or 4 measures to a line before the notes start getting crowded.

In Hookpad, we don’t want to vary the physical size of our measures because that would mean that note durations (which are encoded for us by length of the notes) would be different depending on the measure they are in. That forces us to make all measures the size of the largest measure. We also would like for the notes in both Hookpad notation and conventional sheet music notation to line up vertically. This places additional constraints on the size of measures, especially when note accidentals are involved. Given that most TheoryTabs are 8 measures long, this would be a significant change in the way that they are viewed (if we required them to be 3 measures long instead). A 2-line TheoryTab for instance may end up being more like 6 lines.

Ultimately this option is still on the table, but we need to think harder about how to hash out all the details.

I searched and found this. I really hope it can be made possible somehow, as having the staff notation available to view would be the perfect tool for going over theory with my students in class. How about a 2nd screen option like some DAWs have?