Question

Hi. Now that Studio One 5.1 has the Key Track, in conjunction with the Chord Track the software has anything to show the user the functional harmonic analysis of the piece and let the user input Chords by their roman numeral notation (ie: "I" instead of "C" if the Key is "C Major").
Especially for those who are not super experts in music theory, while having in the chord track something like “Fm D G7 Cm” is useful, having “iv V/V V(maj) i” or something like that, while composing gives a much more insightful view of what’s going on, it expresses a purpose.

With the first, current form (only the chords) I’m puzzled on what I was thinking when composing the piece, while with the roman numeral analysis, I immediately think “Oh, i see a ‘i’, so the first degree is minor and hence we are in a minor key. The progression starts from the fourth, has a little run with the secondary dominant of the fifth degree that is a borrow from the parallel major scale and back to the tonic to form a perfect cadence”.

Together with the key indicator, having this view as a parallel or alternative track to the current chord view would make the composing process so much easier and the program even better.

Thanks for the amazing software,
Gustavo

Answer 1

Thank you for the feature request. 

If anyone else agrees or disagrees, please VOTE!

The developers pay close attention to those that are voted on the most. 

You are allowed one vote. You can change your vote later if you choose.

(Here's some helpful info on how to use the voting system)

Please vote the original question / feature request. 

Please DO NOT Vote on THIS response!

Answer 2

YES please.

At the moment I use a colour-coding scheme for notating chord functions in Studio One. But it would be great if, as you said, there was a separate chord track showing the chord function.

If anyone is interested, my colour scheme works like this:

Anything in the blue/purple spectrum = tonic chord. Anything in the green/yellow spectrum is predominant. Anything in the red/orange is dominant. So

I = Blue
ii = Yellow
iii = Light blue
IV = Green
V = Red
vi = Purple
viio = Orange
Non-diatonic chords: Shocking Pink!

I was originally coming here to request functional colour-coding as a feature so I didn't have to do all that manually, but a separate track for functional chords is a much better idea, as the colour-coding doesn't allow for things like secondary dominants and can't give more detail on non-diatonic chords.