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EZ Theory Mode

I'm not married to the name.

A mode you toggle on/off in the menu.

When active, only common chord progressions, or, common chords that would follow the currently selected chord type and note, are lit. Uncommon chord progressions could be lit at a different brightness, or different color altogether.

This would allow a user with no music theory knowledge to play common chord progressions and more easily write songs, in addition to experimenting with uncommon chord changes.

The problem this solves, in addition to the one listed above, would be eliminating the use of third party software like music theory apps. I've mentioned using NextChord in another thread, that is my personal use case for this feature request.

Note: maybe another toggleable feature: allow the user to select an unlit chord/note when EZ Theory mode is active, and ARP then highlights the common/rare chords for the newly selected note. Won't sound great live, but good for quick sketching and ideation workflows.

5 comments

Comments (5)

House de Kris

Sep 01, 2023

I've been monitoring this thought since it was first posted. I'm very interested. Being a musical neophyte, I could use all the help I can get. I'm such a newb, that I don't think I fully grasp the concept, but I think I like it.

But questions come to my mind about how this would work. If, for example, you are currently playing an F Maj chord, it would seem to me that the particular key and mode you are playing in would dictate, or limit, the possible chords to consider for common chords. Just knowing the current chord doesn't seem like enough information to suggest what to play next. Then again, perhaps I'm limiting myself by rigidly adhering to modes.

Also, it would seem that appropriate chords to suggest would also be influenced by the overall theme targeted. A "happy and bouncy" song would probably have different suggested chords than a "dark and ominous" one. But, I don't know.

Still, I'm somehow intrigued by this idea. This has also prompted me to check out phone apps to suggest chords. Thanks for that idea!

Chris Brown

Sep 02, 2023

Replying to

I think you've highlighted the difficulty that this topic presents.

I've struggled with this since learning to play guitar in my teens. Spending hours just testing out different chords to end a sequence and often giving up and just repeating my three good chords for the entire song. :)

Knowing the right chord is dependent on a myriad of factors, only a small handful of these are: -

-Current chord

-Relative position in the music

-Last x chords played

-Genre

-Overall theme of the music

-Mood of last chord

-Mood of future chord

After years of thinking about this, I don't believe there is a practical mathematical model for "what chord should I play next?".

A human's ability to do this comes down to knowledge, experience, practice and often a natural spark. Think, Hans Zimmer.

Apps like Next Chord are the best solution so far. They use an artificial brain to gain and store all that knowledge and experience very quickly. They are trained on tens of thousands of song and they build patterns from the data. You then enter your chords (or let it work it out from the audio) and it finds patterns the closely match the input data to give you the next chord.

AI is an amazing achievement, for humankind, and hugely beneficial as a tool. However, it is only capable of pattern matching and as such can only suggest something it has seen before.

(Side note. A true creative spark I've yet to see from AI but then our brains are just neural networks too! Watch this space).

ARP doesn't have the storage space or processing power to run a neural network. However, it could utilise a data model that was pre trained on a large AI. So, this is currently the avenue we are exploring.

Chreeb

Aug 29, 2023

Awesome, thanks for the detailed response.

I looked into NextChord a bit deeper and it appears to be powered by machine learning based on over 10k songs. Built on top of chordAI https://chordai.net

So, not sure what the data looks like, how big it is, or if it could be implemented into something like ARP, but it exists.

I appreciate you looking into this or thinking about this.

Using this next space just to brainstorm:

In using NextChord, the list of available chords refreshes based on what you last selected. I don't know if it's considering all chords in the progression up to that point, or just the most recently selected chord.

Maybe on ARP you simply select your first chord shape and note via the buttons, then only the chord and note buttons that could lead to a chord progression (based on a list here, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chord_progressions?wprov=sfti1 ) will remain lit, and will continue adjusting as you change chords.

Thinking this might work best within the chord sequencer, but why limit the user :)

(Side note can you save chord sequences to the patterns?)

The way NextChord works, is you select a chord, then commit it to the sequence, basically, which then refreshes the list of chords based on existing chord progressions. That leads me to think this might work best in the chord sequencer so that ARP has some frame of reference for what the full chord progression is. I feel like ARP needs a way to keep track of whether or not it's a 3 chord progression vs 5 chord progression, etc. or maybe the user selects a chord progression from a predetermined list and can then improvise with buttons that are lit for that progression.

Regarding the "dimness of LEDs based on chord rarity" feature i mentioned in my original post, that seems like a metric ton of manual labor to assign rarity values to all chords based on where they are in a given chord progression, unless using AI. So I'm not actively suggesting or requesting that.

Maybe this starts out much smaller.

Activate the chord sequencer >> use a button to cycle through chord progression types >> when cycling through chord progression types, you see the lit buttons on ARP change in real time to correspond with the selected key and chord progression type. The root note button is indicated by a different color. >> for key changes, select the root note, then suggested key changes would be lit >> once key changes, process repeats

Please shoot down any of my ideas that are not possible or are misinformed. Love to hone in on this by process of elimination.

Chris Brown

Aug 29, 2023

Replying to

Thanks for the info. Great stuff. We were only talking this morning about AI scraping songs being a possible way forward, but ARP having a small processor, the capabilities are fairly limited in this respect. Worth exploring though.

Chris Brown

Aug 29, 2023

Thanks for posting the suggestion. I've been thinking about this since it came up on the post. I know a few people have been looking for this kind of feature. There's a couple of areas to work out... what chords to suggest, how to suggest them in a meaningful way, etc. I will continue to think about this over the next few weeks to see if there's anything that we can do for the next firmware update. I'd like to at least have something that you might be able to test out. If you have, or indeed anyone has, any more thoughts on this topic, please feel free to share here. We are actively thinking about solutions and any assistance is greatly appreciated. :) I'll post again when I have news.