AL9 Chordmaker
The AL9 Chordmaker is a MIDI chord generator that makes it easy to add chords to your music. I've been using chord generators a lot in my generative music, but all the free ones have some shortcoming or didn't quite do the thing I needed. Many of them don't work well for generative music...but this one is designed for that.
At its most basic, it will generate the selected chord on an incoming MIDI note, with that note as the root of the chord.
You can determine the inversion and voicing of the chord. Inversion determines which note of the chord is at the bottom. Voicing here controls the "openness" of the chord, so as the voicing value increases the span across the keyboard that the chord uses is widened.
If you can't decide which inversion or voicing to use, just dial in some random, there's a randomness control for each.
Pretty basic so far, but we have more features!
There is an "Add Octave" button that will add the bottom note an octave up. This nicely adds some top to the chord.
We also have a "Strum" control that will add a strum to the chord, either up or down, with a variable time for the strum. Strum also has a "Spray" button to randomly mix up the order of the strummed notes. Great for, you know, guitar-like sounds, but wait till you try it on some horns!
But the real breakthrough feature of this plugin is the Key Chord Map. What this does is assign a chord to each note so that instead of all the notes playing the same chord, you can determine which chord each note will play. Those of you with some knowledge of music theory will appreciate this because a scale can also be played as a series of chords, but not all the same chord, each degree of the scale has a chord that fits into the key.
This map also has a root note setting, so you can set up the note map in the key you're using or use the same map in a different key.
This feature lets your static chord generator bust out of it's confines and become way more interesting and musical.
"AL9" stands for Alchemical 9, which is my artist name, head over to my Bandcamp page if you want to hear some of my music.
Version 1.1 fixes a couple of bugs:
- chordmap not initializing
- strum scrambled with voicings 2-4
Version 1.2 fixes some bugs:
- dropped notes when using strum
- "Add Octave" and "Spray" didn't look right in automation
Version 1.3 adds another chord voice so that extended chords like 11ths can be fully voiced.
Version 1.4 makes it easier to add custom chords.
Take a look at this video, it shows you how to add custom chords: https://youtu.be/4rE8XHDV8_s