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Forum: Wishes and new features

Topic: Chords Detector
sarebbe molto comodo avere una finestra che visualizza gli accordi
 
Posted Sun 10 Apr 22 @ 6:54 pm
It displays on deck, next to the bpm .
 
That's the key, not the chord.
 
ci sono molte app che riconoscono gli accordi dei file audio mi domando perché questa funzione non viene implementata anche su Virtual DJ sarebbe molto comodo soprattutto per i musicisti
 
You need to post in English here, or use the Italian forum area.

bigolingianpaolo68 wrote :
There are many apps that recognize the chords


Could you give an example?
 
To add to what @groovindj has said...those apps that can (potentially) do this are called Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) and VirtualDJ is not a DAW (at least not in the conventional sense).

If you can list any prominent DJ software that does this we'd be glad to try it out, but realistically, of what use would that be to a DJ/Karaoke set in your view?
 
There are many VSTs to detect Chords from a Track .
 
I honestly can't understand why someone doesn't see the benefit of chords detection for a DJ set.

2 tracks can have the same key, but different chord progressions. Mixing them won't sound really good. Unless you identify parts of the songs with the same chords and loop one of them.

There are many plugins, but many have a large margin of error, which makes them useless.

I believe if VDJ had this feature, it would be highly useful.

Maybe I'm wrong or I don't understand something. I'd be glad to know what exactly.
 
Станислав Ушанов wrote :
many have a large margin of error


Exactly, so how would you expect VDJ to perform any better?

I was watching a video recently, showing one such plugin in action. The part detecting the chords was jumping around all over the place, and the key detection wasn't much better.

 
So, you're looking for something that identifies each and every chord in a song? As someone who loves harmonic mixing, I'd think that would be tedious and laborious and for software that already has trouble identifying song keys, I'd think it would be fraught with errors. Knowing the song key should suffice, and if there's a key change in the song, that should be on the user to identify and prepare for.
 
Perhaps if OP could explain what the goal of this feature request is wrt DJing then it may help us to understand.
 
The goal is ability to set several cue points named their chords. Or to save a short sample (4 beats or shorter) and analyze its chord. I believe it would really help to mix perfectly.

I think VST plugins make a lot of mistakes because they work on the fly. Programs and services that load an audio file and then analyze it for a while work much better. There is no need to analyze the entire audio file. This is required only for short sections of the song that are planned to be mixed.

At least it would be nice if VDJ had a tool to analyze the key of a song from a set cue point where I hear that the key of the song changes in its middle. There is no such feature in VDJ either, right? I couldn't find it.
 
So I (personally) think capturing a correct key could cover/be a superset of recording a chord progression wrt to mixing two songs - given a "normal" progression in a key, you can mix many other "normal" progressions in the same key and in other keys related via the circle of fifths. There may be example of where this may not work completely well (especially if the progression is weird), but in most common cases of music it seems to work ok for mixing.

I definitely agree with tracking key changes throughout the song though. There aren't many songs in my collection that have a transitional peace, but the ones that do are normally vocal-heavy and powerful songs (e.g. Michael Jackson - Heal The World, Whitney Houston - I Have Nothing), and it would definitely be useful to at least have some representation of those key changes.

Remember though that:

  • A DJ normally wants to make quick decisions based on a summary of info about the track - the more info you have presented may mean a longer time to make a decision
  • More info stored per track = more database storage space + processing
    Most likely doesn't mean much but if the Key summary captures enough info for like the majority of mixing cases, it's actually a tough sell to add more things (e.g. Chord Progressions)


This also doesn't take it adds in complications analysis (errors in detection + enharmonics, more time/processing resources to handle this case).
 
It's still a shortcoming of DJ software, that song analysis typically allows only one tempo, one key and one time signature (4/4) for all music. In all cases it just shows us an average, or the most prominent.

It really should have been a thing from the start (of digital analysis), as the further back you go, the more likely a song will have a varying tempo, key changes and time signature changes.

The UK entry to Eurovision got a lot of stick because it changes tempo - yet the winning song does too!