Moving chords down an octave in Hookpad

product questions
1

Hey, I’m trying to put together the chord progression for a song, and I’m finding an issue - a V7 chord and IV7 chord in Bb Major are in separate octaves - the latter an octave up compared to the former. This is just one specific example; there are many other cases this happens as well. I’d like the IV7 chord to stay in the same octave as the V7 chord - the IV7’s Eb bass note should be one note lower than the V7’s F bass note. Is there any way to do this correctly? Thank you.

2

No. The chords are coded in such a way that they have a specific octave in the scale, which includes a nonsensical octave jump in the middle of the scale when the I chords should lowest and VII chords the highest.

3

Hopefully this is fixed eventually. It’s a bit of a pain, especially when figuring out the progression of a song.

4

@jokull,

The Hookpad voicing algorithm aims to keep chord voicing within a certain range. With any voicing algorithm, there has to be an octave break somewhere within the scale. There are two ways to approach this:

  1. You can always break the octave at a specific location, say, between 7 and 1. This would make progressions like I → IV → V → I have the same octave. However progressions like I → V6 would have a break, since they are crossing this 1-7 boundary. Another issue with this approach is that since all keys would follow this same logic, a I chord in C major would be nearly an octave below a I chord in B major, and more awkwardly, a vi chord in B major would be nearly 2 octaves above a I chord in C major (C2 vs G#3).

  2. You can break octaves naturally based on the general range of the chord tones. This has the advantage that all chord progressions will be in the same general range, regardless of key. The downside is that this octave break will occur in a different position depending on the key of your song.

We decided that going with the second approach was more optimal and felt way more natural. If you are interested in moving this octave break around for a specific Hookpad session, you can adjust the “octave” setting in the mix tool.