MPC Chord Progression Generator

Support and discussion for all of Akai’s modern standalone MPCs including the MPC X / X SE, MPC Live 1, 2 & 3, MPC One / One+, MPC Key 37/61.
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MPC Chord Progression Generator

By Jean-Marc Liotier Wed Aug 27, 2025 11:51 am
Discover my mind-blowing free MIDI chord packs !

Just kidding: MIDI chord packs suck... Let's kill this market on the MPC !

Remember the MPC Chord Progression Finder ? Well, I turned it inside out !

Instead of trawling through thousands of inane progressions, generate musically intelligent custom chord progressions in 4×4 pad layouts for your specific needs, delivered as .progression files for Akai MPC Pad Perform.

The full application, freely available in your browser.

The documentation.

And the obligatory screenshot:
Image
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Re: MPC Chord Progression Generator

By Jean-Marc Liotier Mon Nov 17, 2025 10:21 am
So, it turns out this thing has users... And some go as far as expressing their liking of it, which makes me happy. I guess musicians feel the same when they have an audience !

As a software person, I love users - so, here is a new version:

https://liotier.github.io/AkaiMPC/AkaiMPCChordProgressionGenerator/

It was just about MPC Pads chord progressions - now it also produces keyboard diagrams and guitar chord diagrams of the same chords that you loaded to Pad Perform: print them, distribute them to your friends and jam together !

Plenty of quality of life improvements and polish, bug fixes galore, shareable permalinks, persistence across sessions, left-handed guitar diagrams, cleaner everything for both users and future developers... Makes the previous version look like a prototype.
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Re: MPC Chord Progression Generator

By Mike Boogie Mon Nov 17, 2025 5:54 pm
Jean-Marc Liotier wrote:So, it turns out this thing has users... And some go as far as expressing their liking of it, which makes me happy. I guess musicians feel the same when they have an audience !

As a software person, I love users - so, here is a new version:

https://liotier.github.io/AkaiMPC/AkaiMPCChordProgressionGenerator/

It was just about MPC Pads chord progressions - now it also produces keyboard diagrams and guitar chord diagrams of the same chords that you loaded to Pad Perform: print them, distribute them to your friends and jam together !

Plenty of quality of life improvements and polish, bug fixes galore, shareable permalinks, persistence across sessions, left-handed guitar diagrams, cleaner everything for both users and future developers... Makes the previous version look like a prototype.



Hi Jean-Marc, I think there might be a bug in the update. I tried to flip to the Minor progression setting and it gave me a Major chord for the I, not sure if that is by design or not.
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Re: MPC Chord Progression Generator

By Jean-Marc Liotier Mon Nov 17, 2025 8:59 pm
Mike Boogie wrote:Hi Jean-Marc, I think there might be a bug in the update. I tried to flip to the Minor progression setting and it gave me a Major chord for the I, not sure if that is by design or not.
Good catch, it is indeed a major (lol) bug... Working on it.

Releasing merely means the developer couldn't find more bugs and passed the debugging to the users...
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Re: MPC Chord Progression Generator

By Jean-Marc Liotier Mon Nov 17, 2025 9:34 pm
Jean-Marc Liotier wrote:
Mike Boogie wrote:Hi Jean-Marc, I think there might be a bug in the update. I tried to flip to the Minor progression setting and it gave me a Major chord for the I, not sure if that is by design or not.
Good catch, it is indeed a major (lol) bug... Working on it.
Should be fixed now.
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Re: MPC Chord Progression Generator

By Mike Boogie Tue Nov 18, 2025 3:26 pm
Jean-Marc Liotier wrote:
Jean-Marc Liotier wrote:Good catch, it is indeed a major (lol) bug... Working on it.
Should be fixed now.

It's a GREAT concept but it is still quite buggy. The features are great, but the core data needs some more work.
Original bug is still there but now you can't adjust the key without switching modes.
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Re: MPC Chord Progression Generator

By Jean-Marc Liotier Tue Nov 18, 2025 7:13 pm
Mike Boogie wrote:It's a GREAT concept but it is still quite buggy. The features are great, but the core data needs some more work.
Indeed, I submitted it to r/MusicTheory and got thoroughly roasted, as I expected to be... That helped me a lot though - catching not just small bugs, but also going into some fundamental re-framing.

As usual, facing users is the only real quality test.

By the way, it is on Github and the license is The Unlicense, in case anyone fancies tweaking it

Mike Boogie wrote:Original bug is still there but now you can't adjust the key without switching modes.
Please give more details about what you expected and what you saw instead.
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Re: MPC Chord Progression Generator

By Mike Boogie Fri Nov 21, 2025 2:57 pm
It's getting better, you are rolling out updates FAST! This is going to be a bad ass app with a little more polish
In progression template mode the minor I is still starting with a major chord.
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Re: MPC Chord Progression Generator

By Jean-Marc Liotier Fri Nov 21, 2025 5:24 pm
Mike Boogie wrote:It's getting better, you are rolling out updates FAST!
Anthropic gave away $250 of Claude Code credit for its subscribers to try the Claude Code research preview... That let me push the progression generator, build the missing 80% of Inundator (Ever dreamed of simulating an hydroelectric dam lake fill anywhere ? I got you covered with a new toy: Inundator. Draw a dam on a map and simulate the resulting reservoir using digital elevation model data, all in your browser !) and turn a major version of Isosmfar (interactive web application for exploring heatmap based on Openstreetmap data).

It is the first time I use a LLM that way and the iteration speed is staggering. It lets me deliver rather fast when I know what I'm doing (Isosmfar) or, when I don't know what I'm doing, hit my head against every wall and learn as I go (Inundator and the progression generator). It is fun.

Mike Boogie wrote:In progression template mode the minor I is still starting with a major chord.
I'll draft my classical piano expert elder daughter to explain the problem to me and laugh at my musical incompetence...

But I think I found the problem: the mode selector, even when greyed out was still impacting templated generation. Now it doesn't. Try and tell me !
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