Hi,

I have only been using BIAB for a few days now so if I missed existing functionality in BIAB that does what I describe here, then please forgive me. I was a little bit surprised to see that Chord Builder doesn't give you better options when building a progression based on the currently selected song key. While it allows you to select a large number of chords, it doesn't seem to give you any real guidance to come up with useful progressions.

In my spare time I have written a few VST plugins for my own use, and one of them is used to build chord progressions. It is a simple chord sequencer, and the idea is that you build up the sequence from a table of the most common chords, based on the current song key. It doesn't give you all possible chords, but it should cover most cases.

See the image below. Note the UI is incomplete and hence is a bit rough and unpolished, but you should get the idea:



So, how it works is as follows: Based on the currently selected key, the chord table lists the progressions at the top for the current scale (the I, ii, iii, etc). In each column, the chords are listed from most common at the top to least common at the bottom. Choosing any chord will result in a chord that has all of its notes fall within the current scale. There are a few chords at the bottom that might have one or two keys that are not in the current scale, but those chords are still sometimes used given the key.

In the image, I clicked on the B min7 chord (the screenshot doesn't show the cursor unfortunately). Left-clicking on the chord sounds it out. Right-clicking adds it into the song at the current location. It also highlights the chord, as well as highlight any other chord that have the same notes (D6 in this case). The semi-highlighted chords (G maj9 and B min9 in this case) means that all of its notes are a subset of the currently selected chord.

The orange bar at the top of each column shows the "strength" of that progression. For instance, going from the B min 7 to E min would be a "strong" progression, while going from B min7 to G would be a "weaker" (or "fragile") progression. This is important, because for a verse you want fragile progressions, while for a chorus you want strong progressions.

If the chord table looks familiar, it is probably because you saw it in JMT Orchestrator or JMT Arranger. I based this VST plugin on their chord table, so I am not claiming that this is at all original, but it is useful.

As far as BIAB is concerned, it only really needs the table itself and maybe the chord display area on the right (for recognizing chords in realtime).

Anyway, that is my wish item for BIAB, and if I missed a feature in BIAB that is already similar to this, then I would love to hear about it. If not, I think something like this could be very useful in BIAB.

Last edited by BitFlipper; 02/27/10 06:27 PM.
BB+RB 2014 (3)
Windows 8 Pro 64-Bit