Triplets in Hookpad

I just want to have triplets in Hookpad.

Look at these tabs: http://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/view/wan-wan/surpass-the-gate-of-the-silver-key

The original source is in swing (8th-8th = 2 triplet 8th-1 triplet 8th), and the Intro and Chorus are the most affected by it.

So, my suggestion is to have a check box next to the note lengths that changes the currently selected note length into triplets, maybe with the shortcut “T”.

Examples:

  • Selecting H T will give 16th triplets
  • J T = 8th triplets
  • K T = quarter triplets
  • L T = half triplets
  • ; T = whole triplets (although I don’t know why anyone would use these)

Also, maybe have a drop down box next to the triplet selector to change the -let type (3, 5, 7, etc.)

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Happy New Year to all!

Following up on this very important update since it has been read by 49 people with no response. We are missing out with this feature because of the amount of songs that use triplets and a triplet feel

Musically yours,
Stephen J. Souza

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Sorry for not responding to this sooner. We’ve thought a lot about triplets and are definitely going to include them in the next major release of Hookpad (the one that will be completely Flash free). One issue with simply adding quick and dirty basic support for them is that if you allow arbitrary triplet notes in arbitrary places and start mixing in “normal” notes, it’s very easy to get very strange situations with melody notes starting on (irrational) fractions of a beat that don’t line up well and don’t play nicely with snapping. The result is an usable mess. This is more or less a solved problem in the music composition software world, but this is why we haven’t done it earlier.

-Dave

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It’s 2019. How do I do create a triplet? I can’t easily figure it out, and I’m assuming in the past 3 years something was done.

Flash Hookpad (version 1.8 and TheoryTab) still don’t have this, but with Hookpad 2 you can do this using arbitrary meter changes.

Change the measure to have 3, 6, 9, or 12 beats per measure with a beat unit of 3. Depending on your base time, you will pick one of these. For 4/4, use 12/8.

In 4/4:
For 16th-note triplets, use length 1/2 notes.
For eighth-note triplets, use length 1 notes.
For quarter-note triplets, use length 2 notes.
For half-note triplets, use length 4 notes.

There’s a tab link showcasing this.

Changing the meter to a compound one is merely a tempo hack. It forces the accompaniment tracks to play differently, and you still won’t get triplets in exported scores.

If you write your own MIDI importer, Hookpad 2 also supports arbitrary note / chord lengths, including triplets, and will play them properly:

image

Because there isn’t really editor support for them, if you copy a triplet note and paste it everywhere like in this screenshot, these would all last for 1.33333333333333 beats causing the last note to be 10-14 beat earlier than the measure mark, or if the last note aligns, a rest of the same duration would have to appear somewhere between those notes.

MIDI-based DAWs sidestep around this issue by allowing projects to define the PPQN (pulses per quarter note) value and use different grid resolutions that evenly divide the PPQN. In Hookpad this is 4, or 8 (not 12) if the beat unit is 3. All time points are rounded to the nearest multiple of the shortest duration governed by this PPQN, which Hookpad 2’s own MIDI importer already does. Since the editor now has horizontal-only zooming, it would make sense for Hookpad to support finer time resolutions and support real triplets along the way.

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Are real triplets still not available in HookPad? I see a button labeled Triplets but can’t figure out how to use it.

The triplets are a bit limited in their use. They can only be used if and only if:

  • The note is beat-aligned (e.g. the note starts on the beat)
  • The note is less than 1 measure long
  • The note is length 1 or 2 beats long

As a result, it’s pretty limiting.

So, 7 years after the begining of this topic, are real triplets available in HookPad ? Couldn’t find it, did I miss it ?

If not, how do you guys deal with it ? Do you use hookpad for the chord progressions only and switch to either a daw or or a notation software to work/adjust the melody, that process sounds quite unefficient.

If real triplet aren’t available is it something the team is working on ? (half note triplets are everything, please make it happen)

Hi and thank you for your question. Yes, it’s been a while since we implemented triplets into Hookpad. If you select a quarter or a half note, you can then click on the “make triplet” button which will split the note into three triplets.

Please let me know if you need anything else!

Dennis

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It would be very useful if Hookpad and the TheoryTab editor had the ability to make triplets from eighth or sixteenth notes, not just quarter notes.

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It’s been a while since I last posted, but triplets being limited to the melody is fairly limiting. I have a song that I need to transcribe with triplets in the chords, but I can’t do that since triplets are limited to the melody.

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you can make sixteenth note triplets but it requires a lot of time and overall and extreme pain to make.

If the song is completely based on a triplet feeling, you could select a meter of 6 or 12 with a beat unit of three. Then you can write triplets in the chords, too.

Screenshot 2024-08-13 at 08.07.48

Please let me know if this helped
Dennis

The song has 2-bar phrases in 4/4: dotted 8th-dotted 8th-8th dotted 8th-dotted 8th-8th dotted 8th-dotted 8th-8th 8th triplet-8th triplet, notated as such:

image

Your suggestion would have me need to change time signatures every other measure for 2 beats, which would be incredibly messy and unwieldy. It is possible to do this in 12 with beat unit 3, but that doesn’t reflect the correct time signature of 4/4 and is really annoying to have to use 2.25- and 1.5-duration notes for dotted-8ths.

Ah, I understand. Yes, this is not possible in Hookpad right now.
The thing is, that in Hookpad you usually notate the chord changes and let the rhythms be handled by the patterns the harmony, bass and drum instruments play. So to achieve this, we would rather need band instruments which play dotted/triplet rhythms. I think right now even if you would be able to write triplets in the chord section, the instrument wouldn’t know how to play them.

when i need to explicitly have a piano, guitar, bass play something in the chord section, i set them to full chord, sustain, or break so they sound each time, and then create chords to emulate the desired rhythm. i’ll also add a pair (or three) notes in the melody section to space the overall “chord” so i can use other instruments in my DAW to perform against them. i typically don’t try to set the drums to break on each chord as i usually want to drums to flow.
so if i need triplets, it’s currently a bunch of manual steps to get what i need, but i also have copy and paste, so many times i only need to get one measure just right…