I think DAWs benefit from displaying the chord progression of songs .
That’s why I think it would be great if Bitwig offered a chord track, like Cubase.
The idea isn’t necessarily to synchronize this chord track with other tracks (Bitwig already has scale quantization functions for that), but rather, at a minimum:
to display the chord progression in the timeline
to allow the generation of MIDI clips based on this chord track (basic arpeggios, chord progressions in different voicings, etc.).
It wouldn’t necessarily be about covering all the functions of Scaler and other similar plugins, but at least the essential, useful ones, without necessarily including all the rules of harmony.
This would eliminate the need for third-party plugins that are often poorly designed and overly complex.
In my opinion, chord tracks are going to become a standard in modern DAWs, and one of the four will have to adopt them…
I know I’ve already made a post about this, but it was probably too ambitious and a bit vague.
I’m trying to be more realistic in this new request.
Adding a vote here, but with a nuance that I think matters for how this gets built. The two things you listed are quite different in cost: a track lane that just displays chord symbols along the timeline is mostly a notation and metadata problem, while generating MIDI clips from that lane means committing to voicing rules, inversions and voice leading, which is where most implementations get opinionated and start annoying people.
If the display half shipped first I would already get most of the value. Right now I fake it with an empty instrument track holding named clips, one per chord, arranged along the arranger. It survives project reload and it is readable at a glance, but clip names are tiny at normal zoom and it does not follow when I move sections around, so it drifts out of sync the moment I rearrange.
Two things I would ask for if this is being specced:
make the chord lane’s data readable by modulators and the Grid, not just by a generator. If a chord event can expose root and scale degrees as values, people can build their own arpeggiators and harmonisers with what is already in Bitwig, which is a much better fit for how this DAW works than one fixed chord engine.
keep the generation strictly opt-in and non-destructive, writing into a normal MIDI clip you can then edit freely. The moment generated notes are locked to the chord lane, it becomes a plugin instead of a workflow.
For anyone who wants something usable today: notes in a track set to a scale, plus the existing scale quantisation, gets you a surprising distance for progression sketching, though it has nothing to do with actually seeing the chord names on the timeline, which I agree is the real gap.