Happy New Year everybody. Today we pushed several new features to Hookpad that we hope you like: time signatures, modes, and looping.

We’re really happy with the amount of use that the editor (and the site in general) is getting for being so new. Recently the 10,000th song was created in the editor, and the site is now getting over 100k hits per month and growing.

Time signatures

“Common time” (4 beats per measure) is great, but it’s obviously not sufficient. Today we’re adding support for 3 and 6 beats for measure. You’ll find this option in the upper right of the editor when you load a new project.

Modes

The Major mode is really useful but it’s definitely not the only mode that is used in music. Now the editor lets you write and analyze songs that aren’t written in the Major mode. This means you can write and analyze songs in the Minor, Dorian, Mixolydian modes, etc.

In addition to being able to choose the mode for songs you write and analyze, you can also “borrow” chords from any mode. We hope to post an article about modes shortly since I know they can be a source of great confusion for new musicians.

Looping

This was quietly updated a while back. You can now loop playback so you can hear an analysis (or your original composition) multiple times.

Most requested songs for the song wiki

Our Wiki of user contributed harmonic analyses of popular music is really starting to take off. If you’re looking for a song to contribute, we now have a way to compute which songs the database is most in need of:

Most Requested Songs

At the moment, the database seems to want Eminem and Kanye West songs. The list is updated dynamically as songs are added.

Smaller changes:

  • The vii˚ chord is now supported in the GUI.
  • The tempo of a song can now be changed with higher specificity.
  • Improved the interface for synchronizing YouTubes to analyses.
  • Various bug fixes.

Let us know if you have other comments/questions/feature requests. We want to make the Music Editor as useful to the community as possible.

If you haven’t already, try out The Music Editor now.

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