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.
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.