Blue Notes (including idea how to implement them)

feature requests
1

Hi there,
the representation of chord degrees and scale degrees is helpful and works pretty well.
However, limiting the scale degrees to just the 12 “straight” pitches and leaving out the blue notes (mainly the “blue third” (note between b3 and 3) and the “blue seventh” (note between b7 and 7) makes it impossible to create a very large part of “western” music, like nearly all Blues and many bluesy Rock and bluesy Funk melodies.

Implementation could be relatively easy (unlike the gliding from note to note discussed elsewhere):
As HookTheory works with samples, you just need to create a few more samples: The 12 in-between notes. They could be used as blue thirds and blue sevenths.

As blue notes are not simple pitches but “pitches in motion” (in the key of c starting at or slightly below eb and moving higher at the end of the note to around the mid-point between eb and e) and this upward motion is dependent on the note length I spontaneously can come up with to solutions (depending on how HookTheory handles note lengths):
To fit different tempos the new blue notes could be time-stretched or to get different lengths the beginning of the notes (the part that is not bent up) could be cut for shorter notes (instead of the end as it’s probably done with the other pitches).

I you want to discuss this further and need a well-known (at least in Germany :wink: Blues expert that is also experienced with sampling and music software beta testing: I am happy to help!
Andi

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Servus Andi,

I think from a technical perspective our audio engine should be capable to bend the notes and pitch them down and ramp the pitch up towards the end of the note. We even wouldn’t need to record new samples for this. The biggest problem would a UI which allow you to enter those notes.
Now as another German, I’m not that much into Blues. Are you using those blue notes all the time or do you sometimes need a straight third in the melody and sometimes a blue note? I think one easier thing would be to create blues scale which uses blue notes for the 3rd and the 7th scale degree. All the time.

I’ll have to think about it, but your expertise is always welcome.
Dennis

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3

I deleted this answer accidentially because I overwrote it instead of creating a new reply. :woman_facepalming:

4

Thank you very much for your clarification!

As we need minor, major and blue note thirds I think the only option would be to create a pitch bends.

I could imagine to have a note property field on the right side, just like the chord properties field. There you could have access to fine-tune each note by up to 100cents in each direction. There you could also create pitch ramps with a defined start and end value and perhaps do something like a straight or logarithmic value.

But this is lots of work so we have to find a good timing to get this done and honestly I’m not sure when or if we’ll find the time to do this. I’m not even sure if this would sound great as pitch bending a sample also moves the overtones, we all know the terrible sound of bent notes from Guitar Pro. It’s more of a suggestion for the musician to bend a note, which is of course not bad to have.

So right now I would suggest using the first approach you described for pianos which is totally doable in Hookpad right now. Then when performing the song you can do the real thing. It’s the same with all the other instruments, especially vocals. You can always just sketch them out, but never capture all the details you would have in a real performance.

5

Servus Dennis!

Well, not really. As I tried to explain: The bluesy color with the blue notes is a third tonality next to major and minor (which as I explained in my second post is neglected by classical music theory).
It’s like saying “we don’t have minor thirds yet so use the major thirds and imagine it sounds like minor”. :wink:

You are overcomplicating things with too many unnecessary options. :slight_smile:
There is no need for many variations and user-implemented bendings.
My suggestion:
To enter the blue thirds and blue seventh there simply needs to be a little check box for each (“make minor third blue”), or maybe even better: Add extra scale degrees with a “Blue Notes” switch just like the “Chromatic Notes” switch.
So just like the Chromatic notes the Blue Notes are only visible / selectable when needed.
And for the samples: One fixed pitch bend curve is fine (basically GuitarPro quarter tone bend with the target pitch pulled completely to the right). The only thing that could cause difficulties is that the speed of the gradual bend changes with the length of the note. Can samples be played at different speeds in HookPad?

I am willing to hop on a quick Zoom call to discuss this more efficiently.

6

Hi and thank you for your answer!

Well, not really. As I tried to explain: The bluesy color with the blue notes is a third tonality next to major and minor (which as I explained in my second post is neglected by classical music theory).
It’s like saying “we don’t have minor thirds yet so use the major thirds and imagine it sounds like minor”.

I was referring to your keyboard solution where you would play the minor note first and then the major note.

You are overcomplicating things with too many unnecessary options. :slight_smile:
There is no need for many variations and user-implemented bending.

The thing is, to implement those Blue Notes, behind the scenes we need to implement bending anyway as this is something Hookpad can’t do right now. I know you’re looking only for one specific bend, but there are countless other genres who would benefit from bending notes, or micro-tonality in general. So if we implement it, we should also account for the other use-cases.

To enter the blue thirds and blue seventh there simply needs to be a little check box for each (“make minor third blue”), or maybe even better: Add extra scale degrees with a “Blue Notes” switch just like the “Chromatic Notes” switch.

That’s a good idea and would make writing blues melodies easier but this is something we can only implement on top of a working pitch bending functionality. Notes with pitch bends have to be marked in the melody editor and the score exports and the MIDI exports have to account for them as well. Only if this is all set up, we can create special “Blue Note” button in the scale view which would take a major third note and add the Blue Note pitch bend. A note property interface where we can access and fine tune the pitch for each note is only a very small part of the puzzle.

And for the samples: One fixed pitch bend curve is fine (basically GuitarPro quarter tone bend with the target pitch pulled completely to the right). The only thing that could cause difficulties is that the speed of the gradual bend changes with the length of the note. Can samples be played at different speeds in HookPad?

To make this work we have to use only the existing samples, we can’t create extra pitch-bend samples. They would take up much resources and to create them I would use a midi pitch-bend inside my DAW anyway as we can’t rerecord all our instruments. So it’s far easier to implement the same pitch-bend into Hookpad. I think there could be one pre-defined Blue Note pitch-bend curve which just uses the note’s start and end point as reference but this might work only for certain average tempos but not for slower or faster notes. This would be another reason to have an interface to adjust the bending.

I hope I could make the work behind something which seems as simple as adding two special notes to a scale a bit clearer.

Regards!
Dennis