Hi – I am fascinated by the database that matches songs to popular chord progressions, but all the songs that claim to go with that progression just don’t seem to. Am I missing something?
For example, under the Pachelbel progression (I, V, vi, iii), it lists Katy Perry’s Fireworks, but no where in Fireworks do I find anything like that progression.
(Aside, the Pachelbel progression really needs 8 chords (I, V, vi, iii, IV, I, IV (or ii), V), not just the four.)
Another example, under the “Most Popular Progression” (I, V, vi, IV) we get Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams as an example of this “Most Popular Progression”, yet no where in that song do I find anything close to this progression (doesn’t even have I V).
Am I missing something?
I really think this capability is totally cool, but if the list isn’t accurate, it’s hard to get on board.
@DaleMcMillen, thanks for reporting this, this does appear to be a bug, I’ll take a look into why this is broken and hopefully have it fixed shortly.
EDIT: The problem here is that the database query is looking at an outdated copy of the Firework analysis, where someone did (mistakingly) ascribe this progression to the chorus. Unfortunately, because the Theorytab database is publicly maintained, issues like these can arise. The obvious solution here would be to make sure that the page always queries the most recent analysis version.
This page runs on the same engine that powers the trends page. We are in the process of swapping this engine over to the Hookpad Magic Chord engine, which incorporates scale information directly (as opposed to doing relative transpositions). Since this engine is crawled and updated more frequently, it will allow pages like the popular chord progression page to be more reliably current.