Posted
Greetings,
I jut purchased the andvance version of Harmony Navigator 2 and here are my frist impressions.
1) The Chord Pallete is Awesome - Created a verse, prechorus and chorus fairly quickly using this, and created a full sketch for a song off of the midi export. Now I am going back and trying to update the small changes I made to my chords in my DAW to reflect in Harmony Navigator so I have the entire sketch within HN2.
2) Hooked my Reaper DAW up to it so I could hear my soft synth sounds - this took me an entire evening to get to work and I still don't totally understand what I did which will probably have me fiddling with it a great deal down the road
3) Now I have one inversion of a chord that plays on the Palette that I want to have played in my progression - this is where I headed down a hole for two days
I watched the support videos at least three times, read the manual and I am still struggling to get the right inversion to play in my progressions. I know this tool wants to think for me however it should be an easy overide but I am finding this is more difficult than I assumed it would be. When using the number keys to get the other inversions to play, it selects a bass note in the chord that I do not want to hear and does not match the chord that is being played in the Palette :(
4) So I decided to take a different route to accomplishing this, plug my midi keyboard in and have HN2 identify the chords I am playing to try and overide the chord it is choosing for me. 4 hours later...no success It displays the keys I am playing but now since I had it hooked up to my DAW, getting sounds back to being played in HN2 I can tell is going to take me another few hours.
This program has so much potential but it's design and the documentation force the user to make logical leaps that the developers assume you will make and when it does not happen, you are left at a dead end.
Simple things like turning off/on or chaging one note in a chord or altering an inversion is a monumental task for a new user or are not even possible.
I would imagine simply being able to click on the chord in my progression, then right clicking on a note on the keyboard dispalyed at the bottom and muting or adding a note would be awesome! I understand this could change the entire chord displayed however if the note is "outside" just leave highlighted in neon pink and allow it to play and let me do my thing - writing music
Once a tool like this fights me in the process of writing the music I want, I tend to avoid continuing to use it. I will probably wrestle around with it for a few more days and see if I have breakthroughs.
If you have any pointers for me, feel free to post!
I have included two images showing what I cannot get to match as HN2 wants me to use a different inversion of this chord in my progression and none of the inversions offered by the numbers keys match what the Palette is giving me.
Cheers. :)
Fri, 2016-02-26 - 22:13 Permalink
Welcome to the user forum!
You are absolutely right that seemingly simple tasks are not obvious and this needs to be addressed with a future update. This is mostly due to the fact that with HN2, users have different goals than Synfire users. While in Synfire progressions are used by many, many instruments, users don't care that much about inversions in the progression, because this is handled per each instrument. With HN2 however, the focus is mainly on the "chords" only. The issue being that these are abstract harmonic functions rather than physical notes. Only the instrument turns these into notes. That said, the key to controlling inversions an voicings is the instrument's playing ranges.
I'm currently in a hurry, so please forgive me. Here's two articles on the topic that might help you until I'm back:
(http://users.cognitone.com/tutorial/managing-chord-inversions)
(http://users.cognitone.com/tutorial/common-misconceptions-progressions)
Hope these will help for a start. I'll get back to it.
Sat, 2016-02-27 - 21:57 Permalink
Reading your post again, I think the fastest way for you to control inversion in your progression is
1) Change the playing range of the instrument so the chords come closest to the sound you want
2) Press 1, 2, 3, 4 on the computer keyboard to select an inversion
2) Press SHIFT+Up/Down Arrow to add hints for HN2 to transpose/invert further (not 100% sure, please check the Transform menu for the correct keys)
As said, I acknowledge that for the simple task of hacking chords by hand (which is actually what you do with a DAW), the intelligence built into HN2 for doing things automatically can get in your way. This is on the agenda for future updates.