Bravo & Brave – Songwriting Tool – Complete Overview – (2023 edition)

Bravo & Brave is one of the few music theory databases currently available and suitable for players of all levels. Software like Ableton and Beats’ catalogs like Splice help music producers with everything else related to producing music; why not give musicians help at the actual songwriting stage? If Mozart wrote music moved by God’s voice and deep knowledge of music theory, and Erik Prydz writes electronic music today using the great potential of music technology, perhaps the correct combination of talent and familiarity with the basics of music theory can allow many new artists like you (and me) to write unforgettable pieces. In the end, isn’t leaving a mark on the world the goal of every artist?

 

Let’s examine how Bravo & Brave does in terms of reliability, features, and performance and see if it is able to help expand our inner creativity.

 

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Bravo & Brave – Product Overview

Bravo & Brave, an Italy-based technology company that creates and categorizes data for musicians, offers music producers and songwriters collections of HARMONY progressions that can be used in modern compositions and also allows them to improve their proficiency with music theory.

 

The music catalog is the product’s core functionality; easy to use and very intuitive, it includes a large number of harmonic progressions and categorizes them by genre, country of origin, musical style, emotional impact, novelty, and much more. For experienced songwriters, it can expedite workflow, and for novices, it offers the opportunity to try their hand at composing music. It’s then easy to export the MIDI file from the catalog to any track and import it into your DAW.

Pros: A vast quantity of data
Cons: With so many progressions available, choosing what to export can take time

 

Is Bravo & Brave catalog any good?

For those looking to write new and original songs and for those who want to improve their musical knowledge, the catalog is certainly useful.

 

 

Track Structure

Each track is divided into the 7 basic musical sections that make up every modern song: the Intro, Verse, Pre-Chorus, Chorus, Post-Chorus, Bridge, and Outro. In some tracks, one of the aforementioned sections can be replaced with an instrumental one, which allows the Bravo & Brave music tech team to write some of the progressions without following the typical structure of a pop-rock song.

Pros: Flexibility is definitely there; you can choose to export only a single part of the track.
Cons: None

 

Is Bravo & Brave’s catalog musically correct?

The catalog uses all the rules of modern tonal harmony, and the tech team is made up of Berklee musicians and developers passionate about music. The co-founder, Lorenzo Brizzo told us that he and his tech team have spent more than two years researching and studying every aspect of tonal harmony; and so the backend has a database of basic chords, inversions, secondary dominants, sus 2 and 4, and much more available in each musical key.

 

 

Product Interface

Bravo & Brave conveniently organizes its GUI into 5 sections. The top bar contains the control panel for using the catalog, editing the artist
profile, and monitoring/collecting the exports. In the top bar, you can also find the musical instruments, loops buttons, and the search bar. The tags selection bar is also on the top. The bottom bar allows you to adjust the volume, play tracks in a loop, and turn on/off the different sections of a track. The left sidebar is dedicated to the musical categories and the right bar collects the track’s metadata and the export functionality. The main dashboard is for the harmony catalog and is designed to be very intuitive. The brand identity is vintage and designed to fit music tech standards.

 

Pros: Clarity and good UI/UX
Cons: Too much information on the lateral settings bar.

 

Is Bravo & Brave easy to use?

Scroll – listen – Export are the most important features of the catalog and are very intuitive to use. I would have added some separate images for each group of 25 tracks to make the experience more “advertisement friendly”, but I understand the choice to focus on data only.

Bravo & Brave – Tech Features

Designed to provide musical artists with a simple and effective way to discover new harmony progressions, Bravo & Brave‘s music harmony catalog offers musicians and songwriters thousands of chord progressions and musical harmony patterns. For ease of browsing and discovery, it is divided into searchable categories and genres. The flow is very simple: scroll – listen – export.

 

Explore New Music

The use of the categories and tags bar allows the user to identify musical tracks suitable for his/her own musical genre. Pop, rock, hip-hop, and chord progressions in minor and major keys, are all possible options that can be explored. It is possible to search for tracks that have a specific BPM or in the particular key of the musical project one is working on.

 

Customize Your Chord Progressions

Creating the perfect song is the result of both high-quality harmonization and an intuitive creative taste. The songwriting tool allows you to work on each section of your track and try out different keys until you find the perfect match. Bravo & Brave allows you to change the musical key of an entire track or a single section. This is a unique feature found only in our software, which is especially useful when switching from a major to a minor key or vice versa. Once you’ve found your chord progression, in the key you like, navigate to the top bar to tweak its sound, its metronome, as well as its playback timings on the bottom bar. Bravo & Brave does not compete with DAW stations and VST plugins; those tools help musicians with sound engineering tasks, whereas Bravo & Brave Technologies’ focus is on music data only

 

 

Importing to DAW

You can either import an entire track or individual parts of it to your DAW and continue to work on the final project. Seeking to improve the quality of music in the world, Bravo & Brave’s method of organizing music theory data is both new and accessible to everybody. It is compatible with the use of DAW and VST plugins like Scaler 2 and Splice’s catalog for beat creation.

Pros: The key change function is pretty cool – GUI flat design
Cons: Users can’t add or delete chords (on the current 2023 edition).

Is Bravo & Brave a Marketplace like Splice?

From the team: “At first we thought of making Bravo & Brave a marketplace where artists could upload music data and sell it to other musicians; it would have been easier for us. However, this would have led to problems in managing the quality of the musical data in the catalog. We have chosen the traditional approach where a dedicated team of musicians from different countries and backgrounds imports and checks each progression. Without this process, we could not have called it ‘The First Music Theory Search Engine.’ ”

 

Bravo & Brave Alternatives

Scaler 2
This plug-in allows you to load preset progressions, detect chords from audio and MIDI files, and build and edit your own chord sets.

Mixed In Key
This plug-in suite offers some clever connectivity for writing chord progressions, melodies and basslines, and comes with an excellent library of built-in sounds.

Conclusion: How much does Bravo & Brave cost?

If you find yourself stuck on the same old chords in the same old keys, tools like Bravo & Brave can completely change how you write music. Users are supplied with a vast number of harmony progressions that fit together in the track’s musical structure in different keys and with a variety of types of instruments. This process can lead to the creation of beautiful songs (or, as we call them, perfect songs). Progressions can then be dragged into DAWs and developed into a larger project.

 

Is Bravo & Brave Subscription-Based?

Despite being designed mainly for high-end professional music producers, Bravo & Brave charges only $3.37 per hour for unlimited access to its catalog; that’s a sweet deal!

Don’t forget to follow @bravoandbrave on Instagram to keep an eye on the latest developments on the platform. For any questions contact: [email protected]

 

Next article: Top 10 Must-Have Plugins for Music Production in 2023

Image credits: Bravo & Brave