Playback of Chord Symbols
In the early phase of song writing I use a simple score with "voice" to write the vocal melody and maybe some preliminary lyrics. I use chord symbols to write the chord progression (as maybe many others do as well). It would be very helpful to actually hear the chords together with the melody.
What I currently do, is to add a piano line and insert the chords with a very basic rhythm, sometimes just whole of half notes. When I'm in the process of writing / rewriting melody and chord progression, it would be much faster if I only had to rewrite the chords and leave writing the piano arrangement to to the phase when the basic composition is done.
I would propose the following:
- At minimum Piano sound only, the luxury variant would be free choice on the sound
- default duration whole note (Luxury variant: some configurable value)
- repeated until the next chord symbol
- if the next chord symbol follows shorter than the default duration, than this should be use as the duration instead. See also attached file.
Links:
https://musescore.org/en/node/275304
https://musescore.org/en/node/281558
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Playback_of_chord_symbols (1).mscz | 5.78 KB |
Comments
It's being discussed since years, really strange to not finding that in the issue tracker
In reply to It's being discussed since… by Jojo-Schmitz
I guess that a lot of people - including me - thought it is sufficient to post a feature request in sub-forum "Feature Requests". It is not so straight forward to enter it as an "issue". But it finally found it's way here :-)
Requested even before we had a website :)
http://dev-list.musescore.org/MuseScore-the-perfect-lead-sheet-editor-t…
Today however, I would mark this feature request as closed as this is not the core business of MuseScore. There are apps doing a terrific job playing chord names like iReal Pro, Band in a Box, and more.
In reply to Requested even before we had… by Thomas
Well, the need is still there ;-)
Feel free to close it, but maybe consider the value for a composer of a smooth and seamless transition from early stage composing to writing out voicings and further on to full blown arrangements - without having to switch tools.
I personally am happy to see this left open. I don't see us trying to compete with iReaol Pro etc, but some basic facility seems useful. There are lots and lots of issues in deciding how to do it, though, and just agreeing on what is actually wanted (what rhythm? piano voicings? guitar voicings? what about bass? notes displayed on staves or just happening magically?) is probably the biggest roadblock.
Could make a good GSoC project...
In reply to I personally am happy to see… by Marc Sabatella
I second this - even an extremely non-sophisticated chord playback would be helpful - not even on the staves, just happening magically would be fine for me - I just want an audio way to error check my chord notation on a lead sheet.
[EDIT: Just realized the extent of pre-existing discussion. Will repost in an existing forum thread; feel free to delete here.]
Big +1 for this feature, especially for lead sheets, and for speeding up transcription & composition.
To give a demo for the simplest implementation I have in mind, have this mockup of @Marc Sabatella's "Unclaimed Gift". Chords played once for each symbol & held. All root position. Octave chosen to best fit notes into a tenor clef [EDIT: arbitrary choice] (unnatural jumps in some progressions, but easily automated). I'd be thrilled to see magical playback as basic as this (even without every single fancy extended chord ;) ).
Thanks for doing this! I'd go a step further, and say, instead of basic root position we could use the strategy from https://musescore.com/marcsabatella/scores/5236325 and get significantly better results. There are a couple of people interested in doing something along these lines for GSoC, so maybe this will finally happen.
Great! This is now going in right direction.
Happy to see Peter Hieu Vu implementing it for GSoC. Awesome! <3
Seer https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/5129
In reply to Requested even before we had… by Thomas
I use iRealPro a lot, but that's not what's being discussed here. iRealPro is for form/chord charts only, so it does no good when you are composing, trying to hear how a certain set of pitches would sound under a new melody but can't input the melody to hear with the chords. It's a very valid request that would offer a workaround for the unnecessary hassle of creating a new piano part and manually inputting chords note by note. It's especially relevant considering, as you say, how common this technology already is with apps like iRealPro.
Yes, and that's what the pull request above does. As in, it's already implemented and awaiting further review. Hopefully it will be merged for MuseScore 3.5!
In reply to Yes, and that's what the… by Marc Sabatella
v3.5 would be really good. The longer the pull request remains unmerged the more it will diverge from master. At some point in time the author will get tired of fixing again and again the conflicts naturally arising by other development on master. It would be really a pitty to loose that ready developed feature.
The PR was merged some time ago.
I made a Musescore 3.0 plugin that expands chord symbols into notes. It can handle most chords including complex jazz chords. The results are almost identical to Mark Sabatella's suggested voicings. Try it and let me know what you think. The plugin is here... https://musescore.org/en/project/expand-chord-symbols-notes
In reply to I made a Musescore 3.0… by markshepherd
This is aready part of the standard functionality of "playback of chord symbols" feature in Musescore coming with v3.5. It is already merged to master and available in the nightlies.
Hi drowo, thanks for the heads up. I learned about the upcoming 3.5 feature only after I started writing the plugin :( But it was fun to write and I learned a lot, so it wasn't really a waste of time. Also, I thought that until 3.5 comes out there might be people who want to use the feature but don't want to do work using a pre-release build.
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.