For me the Trends feature is probably the most valuable aspect of the TheoryTab database. After all, what’s the point in having a database of 57 thousand songs, if there is no way to filter all of that data in any useful manner?
Unfortunately though, the feature is currently so limited that I all too often find myself not being able to find what I’m looking for. There is so much unique and inspiring music on this database and yet most of it remains hidden from our sight, because we don’t have any way to actively search for it, especially now that TheoryTabs don’t get a Complexity Level assigned anymore.
I think first and foremost the thresholds on the Trends feature are just much too high. 0.2% might not seem like a lot, but if I click on any of the major key 0.2% options, I still get between 300 and 500 results. That’s much more than I would want to go through in one sitting.
I get that the “Other” chart is already maxed out on chords, but what’s the point in cramming all of the options into one chart anyway? Why not just add another layer and let the user choose the desired bass note first before showing all of the possible chords for that bass note?
That way there would be more than enough space for all of the less common options as well. To illustrate what I’m talking about, here’s a quick mockup of what the “Other” chart could look like for major keys:
And here’s an example of what it might look like when you click on “1”. This is obviously not an exhaustive list of chords, it’s only meant to illustrate the concept:
Also since it’s possible to transcribe songs in Harmonic Minor and Phrygian Dominant, these should be available in the Trends feature as well.
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Bumping because I love the idea, and because I think that this feature needs more chords to search with. I like the concept of searching by Roman numerals as well as chords.
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It would also be really awesome if the Trends feature gave you the option to toggle off modes, meaning that what mode a chord progression is in would be disregarded entirely, and instead all songs containing the same chord progression would be shown regardless of what mode they’re in. For example, if you’d search for songs with a certain chord progression in Dorian (i-III-VII-iv or i-III-VII-IV, for example), it would also show songs in minor mode containing this chord progression (and vice versa), instead of strictly songs with Dorian as their assigned mode.
Especially considering how common modal ambiguity and modal mixture (for example, a chord progression like i-III-IV-VI in minor/Dorian that contains both the major IV chord from Dorian and the flattened VI major chord from minor mode simultaneously) are in many Pop, Rock, Jazz, EDM, etc. songs, such a feature would be very useful, to find songs of which it isn’t really clear-cut in which mode they are, due to said modal mixture and borrowed chords, which are currently near-impossible to find in the database due to the current unnecessarily strict separation of modes which can’t be disabled.
In addtion to this, it would also be very nice if users could be given the option to even toggle off major/minor chord sensitivity, enabling them to search for songs purely by the progression of the root/bass notes alone, meaning all songs that use the same bassline regardless of mode or chords would pop up. For example, if you’d search for a chord progression like i-v-VII-iv/i-v-VII-IV/I-v-VII-IV, all songs containing either the minor, Dorian or Mixolydian version of this progression respectively would pop up regardless of which of the three versions of the progression you searched for.
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Thank you all for your ideas! I’ve added it to our list.
Regards!
Dennis
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It would also be amazing if there was some kind of way to filter the database by keychanges. So for example being able to request a list of Tabs where the chorus is one sharp away from the verse section (e.g. verse in C major, chorus in E minor).
I don’t know whether it would make sense to try and integrate something like this into the Trends feature or whether this would need to be its own separate feature, but since this is still about different ways to search the database I thought I’d drop this in here as well.
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I honestly think it would be more useful if you could simply add multiple modes in your search query, possibly with the ability to choose between searching for songs that contain every single mode in your query (and your searched chord progression at least somewhere in each song) or getting all songs that contain any of the modes in your query in combination with the searched chord progression being at least somewhere in each song. Maybe also an idea if your could search for any songs with a specific combination of different modes, without necessarily specifying a chord progression: For example, if you wanted to search for songs that contain Phrygian and Mixolydian, it’d only show all songs that contain both Phrygian and Mixolydian (whether within the same section or accross different sections in the TheoryTabs).
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