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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.