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.
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.