Hookpad key change within a section

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In Hookpad, is there any way to show a key change in a single section, without having to begin a separate section in the new key?

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At the moment, no. However, we have thought a lot about this.

Basically we haven’t come up with a clean way to do it both from a UI perspective (visual representation). In addition, it is going to be a ton of extra work under the hood. We are spending our time on other features since the breaking into multiple sections is a reasonable work around right now.

Hey Chris, I’m new to Hookpad, and I was wondering how do I separate a song into multiple “sections”? I need to be able to incorporate key changes, and I can’t seem to get it to work (though I may just not understand your workaround, i.e. what a “section” is).

@phorwitz, By breaking into sections, I mean creating separate Hookpad projects for each section. For example, say you want a verse in the key of C and a chorus in the key of D. You could call one project “My Song - Verse” and have it in the key of C and have it contain all of the chords/melody of the verse. Then create another project called “My Song - Chorus” and have it in the key of D and have it contain all of the chords/melody of the chorus.

Unfortunately, there is no way to play both sections continuously in Hookpad, but at least you can write out the song.

Oh, I see what you’re saying. Well I like the tool but this is kind of a deal breaker for me. It’s like: here’s this really nice car! It’s has all the features you want: power windows, A/C, leather seats. Oh, but it can’t turn left…

Key changes are hardly uncommon. Thanks for the reply though!

Any sufficiently elaborated tonicization can bring about modulation that cannot be separated from the original key into logical sections.

I think the interface could allow each individual row to have its own key; then, when a modulation occurs, a tinted copy of the last measure in the original key would appear before the next row, in the new key, to show the connection between the two adjacent keys. For even finer control, marker objects on measure boundaries could be used.

Changing the key of each bar would be straightforward as the melody and the chords can be simply transposed to the new key (the way it behaves now), but it would require a separate key menu where the top of the “circle of fifths” selector is a relative mode of the base key instead of C major. One should be able to change both the key and the mode using this separate key menu; if done properly, more inline modulation Theorytabs could be submitted without losing their complexity tags. The greatest difficulty would be incorporating the new modulated Theorytabs into the Trends API seamlessly (unless the database becomes tonic-independent).

I just want to start with E and go E A G, but there is no way to do this!

I really hope that this is something being worked on ASAP though it is a really limitation of such a great product. I use it in the classroom and in it makes a lot of music like jazz where the key centers move often out of the question. And as I see it this would be a great tool to teach about this specifically if you guys are able to make it happen.

Roughly a year since this was last posted in. Hopefully you guys have this on the line for Hookpad 2.0.

This will be supported in Hookpad 2

please guys work on it, it is very important to be able to change key or scale in the middle of the song, as well please allow more time signatures:)