Lyrics editor chord recognition issue

musicadi

ST4 1937

Hi Peter,

A few issues with chord recognition in the lyrics editor.

Words like had, cab, bad etc. are recognized as valid chords

The issue with this is that if you transpose the chords, the first letter of these words will also be changed, so "had" will be changed to "cad", if you transpose up one semitone 🙂

Numbers are recognized as chords, unless they contain 8 or 0 🙂 Write a long enough number and then add an 8 or a 0 and the app hangs

3 (related to 2). The editor seems to be checking whether what you types is a chord, no matter how long the string is. The more characters you type, the slower the evaluation, and eventually the app will hang or crash.

Suggestion 1: limit the number of characters that can be recognized as a chord to, say, 10. I doubt anyone using the app would ever type in a chord like C#maj7#9#11, but just in case... 🙂

Suggestion 2: use a predefined list of character sets that are recognized as chords. Maybe the list could be editable by the user

Suggestion (actually a feature request): As already suggested in another thread, I think using tables in the editor, with separate columns for timecode, chords and lyrics would be a huge plus and would make the lyrics a lot more easier to manipulate.

MarkGuitar

This is a really cool idea and would enhance the chord layout a lot. Option 2 especially.

One particular thing I would love to have is the use of Forward Slash as a rhythm slash, particularly in chord only sections of the chart. Intros, solos etc. Forward slash is commonly used in a number of other chart creation tools as a rhythm indicator. It would be great to indicate that chord x is 2 beats, chord y is 2 beats etc
Something like this

| C / G / |

Etc

Be so helpful when shipping in sub players as we often do, particularly bass players. (What is it about bass players!)

Thank you.

peter

Chord recognition in the editor uses a very simple algorithm optimized for speed. I could use the much more sophisticated algorithm used for chord highlighting (and transposing) in the viewer but that would slow down the editor even more which I want to avoid at all costs.

This is an area that behaves identical in ST3 and ST4 so I see no need to change this behavior in the beta. I will move this issue to feature requests so that I can schedule it into a future version if the upvotes justify it.

Numbers are recognized as chords because of the Nashville chord system which is based on numbers.

musicadi

peter Ok, thank you! Then this could be improved later when/if you decide to change the editor altogether 🙂

AnthonyB

Just for reference for this conversation, the current ST3/ST4 chord detection rule logic is documented here - https://stagetraxx.com/user-guide/lyrics/#adding-chords

musicadi

AnthonyB Thank you! Honestly, I would remove the chord recognition altogether for text which is not in brackets. It would lead to less confusion, stop actual lyrics from being recognized as chords, and would probably also take the load off the editor/viewer

So, why not make the algorithm only treat text within brackets as chords, same like with timecode? This way, it wouldn’t be called unless an open bracket is recognized. I am pretty sure the editor would be faster if the chord recognition algorithm wouldn’t be fired with every single character you type in 🙂

So, this could be the formula:
Format: [12:34.56] - timecode
Format [Xaz19]- chord, where X is the tonic (A-H) and az19 is any combination of letters, numbers and special characters like # and / (maybe the whole string limited to 10 characters)

@peter is this a viable option?

peter

No, because the lyrics viewer does layout first which removes the brackets. Chord highlighting and transposition is done after the layout phase.

musicadi

peter I see… Sounds like another reason to switch to an improved editor sometime in the future 🙂