Accidental handling (preference etc)

MoPa

Hi Peter,

Firstly, Stage Traxx 4 is awesome!!!!! Best in class…… I’ve been using it 8 hours a day for the last 6 weeks and have had several rehearsals and gigs with it now that I have 45 multitracks loaded in. Most of the issues I’ve had are related to my gear except for the odd crash and lyrics out of sync occasionally which I am sure you are working on when you can get repeatable data.

Anyway, my experience with chord chart apps is vast and (to the best of my knowledge) nobody has really cracked the way accidentals are handled. In saying that Stage Traxx may be right at the bottom of the list in this area as the ‘Accidental Preferences’ setting is a very blunt tool. I think there is an opportunity improve the way accidentals are handled which would make a huge difference to how the app feels to musicians. Any musician that ‘reads’ music regularly gets confused quickly when accidentals are wrong, and there is a most definite right and wrong in music theory 99% of the time. I’ve got three points to make regarding the use of accidentals:

Firstly, it is rare that whether a note is a flat or a sharp is a ‘preference’, rather, the decision whether notation uses sharps or flats is a function of the key the song is in, nothing else, see attached chart of The Circle of Fifths. The only time a preference should ever enter into things is the four keys that have dual names: C#/Db, or F#/Gb. Even this is not really a preference, if the key of a song is listed as C#, all accidentals will be sharps and if the Key is listed as Db all accidentals will be flats. The only preference really is whether you call the key C# or Db….. All of this is established music theory and hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. This should be relatively straightforward to code, if a song is set in one of the flat keys all accidentals are flats, if the song is set in a sharp key all accidentals are sharps. It’s that simple.

Secondly, The only use for a preference is in the key of C (or it’s relative minor Am) which technically has no sharps or flats in the key signature, therefore if a note falls outside of the key then an accidental needs to be used and at this point it is user preference whether to use sharps or flats. However, even in this instance once set if sharps are used, all accidentals should be sharps and vice versa.

Lastly, where things can get interesting is that the key of a song isn’t necessarily static. The key can ‘modulate’ (change) within the song, often the key changes multiple times within a song or occasionally between vs/chorus and back again etc. The Key is not set in the meta-data of a song to never change, rather it is a dynamic thing that can change multiple times within the song, so much so that the Chordpro syntax has the directive ‘Newkey’ for exactly this purpose. There are two places where these changes need to be represented: both in the Lyrics section, and in the Song Details section. The Song Details should list the range of keys that the song is in, if a song modulates from Eb - E as in the case of Kenny Roger’s ‘The Gambler’ this should be shown in the key listing in the Song Details section and the Queue etc (I realise the Queue is short of real-estate for more info). This is important for singers who know what keys they like to sing songs in etc. It should be straightforward to extract this data from the Chorpro directives in the Lyrics section to populate these fields. How the lyrics section handles these modulations is a little more complicated. Back to our example of the Gambler for an overly simplistic look at this, the song starts in the key of Eb, any accidentals should be flats. However, half way through, the song modulates to the key of E. Any accidentals after this point will be sharps. None of this is rocket science, it just needs careful forethought in the way it is implemented in an app.

Anyway, to sum things up, the way accidentals are handled in most charting apps (including Stage Traxx) is extremely primitive and technically incorrect. Additionally because music theory in this matter follows very logical rules there is no reason a really simple easy to use solution couldn’t be coded into the app. I would love to discuss this further with you if it needs further explanation. Also, I am in Germany regularly and would be happy to work through the details with you.

MoPa

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who finds the handling of sharps/flats when transposing and capoing etc to be a bit clunky. Vote this idea up if you think it could be improved……

AnthonyB

My reason for not voting, or commenting (until now) is that this feature/functionality has no impact on how I use ST.

I don't use the transpose feature because if I have to do a song in a different key, I'd make the changes in my DAW where I create/produce all the content. Theoretically, I think the only time I might use the transpose feature is if I'm in a rehearsal and we decide the current key is noy working and we do the "can we just quickly try it down a semitone?" type thing.

Even then, I don't put chords into my lyric sheets in ChordPro notation (i.e. square brackets) where they could be transposed by ST. In my band, after trying a number of styles, we just agreed that it added more blank space to the page and stretched lyric page lengths vertically so we changed to using 'embedded' chords in the lyric lines and just using text colouring to differentiate. On the odd occasion we need to change a key of a song, then there is 10 mins of lyric sheet editing and it's done.

So, this functionality isn't one that affects me or the way I use ST, thus I really don't have a vested interest.

Now, from a more theoretical purity perspective, i.e. what seems the 'right' way of doing it, what you are saying sounds spot on to me. However, I am mindful/respectful of putting my voice (assuming it carries any weight ;-) ) on either side of an discussion where I have no vested interest in the outcome.

Riff

I understand what you're saying, but I guess I just don't see the point of adding the unnecessary complexity. Should ST use the selected key in details, or the chords that are in the lyrics to base the accidentals on? What if they're different?

As a guitar player, there's definitely a preference to see certain accidentals over others. I love F#, hate Gb. Like Bb, hate A#. If I'm writing out the chords to a song in the key of F# and there's a II chord, I'm putting Bb, not A#. That's just how my guitar brain works. And don't get me started on E# or Fb (or B# or Cb!) 🙂

I guess perhaps if you're changing keys on the fly at every gig, and everyone is a proper trained musician that is sight reading, then I can see where this could be necessary. But then also, any drastic change to the key is going to mess up the tracks by introducing artifacts.

Or is it that there's the situation where you're deciding where you want your capo? Like the song's in Bb, but you want to capo III and play it in G, or capo I and play it in A?

Help me understand, what is ST doing (or not doing) that is causing you issues? Can you give us an example of what it should do?

Like Anthony said, I think we're better off preparing for the gig by editing our tracks/lyrics in the desired key and not worry too much about transposing on the fly.

Riff

Riff F# and there's a II chord, I'm putting Bb, not A#

I meant III chord 🙂 Or more probably a iii.

Still, if someone like me were to not keep to a specific key when writing the chords, what should ST do?

Or even if the chords are correct, and I transpose it down a half step say from G to F#, what key is it, right? I could be F# or Gb. Seems like just having the current accidental preference would usually be sufficient?

Ok, I'll stop for now until i understand better what the goal is.

AnthonyB

One of Riff's comments that is also relevant for me is the accidental preference, whether it is 'correct' or not. One that I ran into the other day was G# vs Ab. Don't know why, just is. Once in a blue moon my guitarist and I will be working on a song and have different preferences for the accidental. Luckily, neither of us care which is technically correct, as long as we can follow the chords in the lyric sheet!

Put it down to a lack of formal music education and the habits (bad or otherwise) that you form over a lifetime.

jaytrax

AnthonyB

Almost no real songs are properly in G♯ major

G♯ major has 8 accidentals
G♯ – A♯ – B♯ – C♯ – D♯ – E♯ – F𝄪

That includes:
B♯ (C)
E♯ (F)
F double-sharp (G)

Because of that, composers and publishers do not use G♯ major in practice.
They respell it as A♭ major every time

rowe2000

I can hold on to the idea of making things technically correct, including how accidentals are handled.
Once you start looking into it, you realize it’s quite more complex than it first appears.

But since we now have the ‘Key of Song’ field, I think it will be easier to make this technically correct.

Maybe someone with deeper knowledge of the topic could describe the rules in a simple, pedagogical way so that we self‑taught musicians can actually grasp them because I like to learn it.

I'm not sure it would really improve or simplify my musical performance but I will give it a try! 🙂

MoPa

rowe2000 for people who don’t read music, the current system is adequate. But for anybody who is accustomed to reading, having sharps and flats in the same chart is virtually unheard of. It can really throw you off and makes the chart look very unprofessional.

MoPa

Riff As a general rule, all sharps and flats within a chart should be shown as either sharps or flats, you shouldn’t have both. I hope this makes sense. This gets especially tricky when a song changes key. If you have a song that starts in the key of E (which has four sharps) and modulates to the key of F (a flat key), ST cannot deal with this appropriately because the ST system forces an entire chart to one or the other.

peter

MoPa Actually it is quite common, when you have songs with key changes. That's another use case I doubt can be handled with an automatism.

MoPa

peter I agree, it’s the key changes that make this challenging. The Chorpro app has introduced the ‘Transpose’ directive which is a very messy way to handle it (Also a bad name for the directive as it really means something different). The original ‘NewKey’ directive should have worked perfectly but I’m not aware of any developers that used it….

MoPa

MoPa Also, speaking of bad names, the way ST uses the term ‘accidentals’ is also technically incorrect (although I think everybody understands what it means). Accidentals technically only applies to the sharps and flats that fall outside of the key signature… All of the sharps/flats that fall within the key signature are commonly referred to as ‘black notes’ but I’m pretty sure there is no collective noun for them other than Key Signature….