Can't seem to change the length of chords

I want a chord to play for different lengths of time like I can adjust so with notes in the melody section, however shrinking or extending the chord itself still makes the instrument play by divisions, for example in 4/4 it will abide by 4 beats, when I want that chord to play using whole notes within the measure for example.

I don’t see this functionality anywhere, and it’s sort of a fundamental concept

Hey guthriec,

if you want to change the rhythm of your harmony or bass instruments, open the band browser and select another patch. For a simple Piano which plays only the length of the chords you write you can select for example the “Piano Full Chords” patch which you can find in the “keys” folder.

Please let me know if this helped.

Dennis

That’s ok for rough analysis but there are some patches which are the only sound of that type available, and lots of music also has tied harmony parts that are held into other measures. As it is now, it’s impossible to articulate that accurately if you’re forced into divisions. It would be more intuitive to specify the note length of harmony within measures than it is to have different harmony patches with hard-set beat divisions linked to them. It would make the ‘band’ menu more intuitive to use and less cluttered, without duplicates of patches of the same instrument that just have different divisions.

I understand you concept as this is what you would do in a DAW. Write every note you want to be played into a piano-roll for every instrument you want to arrange. That offers you complete freedom but also needs lots of time and skills.

Hookpad is more of a songwriting sketch pad. The idea is to quickly write a melody and some chords and then use a couple of band instruments to let that music sound in the desired genre and as good as possible. Of course with this there are lots of limitations and the workflow might be a bit unexpected but you can also export the midi and add more details in a DAW of your choice.

It’s got nothing to do with using DAWS. It’s about the accuracy of the length of chords when they’re played. Sure a sketchpad can be simple, but it can’t lack fundamentals. I’m not talking about changing each note length in the harmony blocks, but how long the chord block is played in note length. We should be able to select how long the chords are held in a measure, whether it’s for a whole note, half note, played in eighth notes, sixteenths, or is tied into the next measure, etc. It’s an omission of fundamental composition with rhythm, not a limitation to exclude that. Chord lengths in a measure aren’t trivial, even in a rough sketch. That’s like saying the length of the notes in a melody don’t matter.

I’m not sure I exactly understand where the problem lies. Perhaps you can give me some more detailed examples.

We have instruments which play nothing more than long notes. All Bass instruments have a “sustain” patch. The only harmony instruments which do not play long notes are the Rhythm Keys and Rhythm Pads. And all those patches have a corresponding long note sound. The Guitars have Break patches which play long notes instead of rhythms.
If you select those long note patches there will be no “devisions” and you can write any chord rhythms as you like with rests, quarter notes, chords that exceed a bar etc. Isn’t that what you want or am I misunderstanding something here?