Chords engine

The Chords engine is designed for creating inspiring chordal textures. It features a suite of MIDI processors to help you build compelling chord progressions. It has two main sound layers and an optional noise texture layer, each with independent controls to shape the sound. The Global tab at the bottom of the interface lets you define the key and scale of the chord generation, and other configuration options.

The three main animated controls; Dispersion, Inversion, and Repetition, allow for expressive variation in how chords are played back. Dispersion introduces humanized timing or strummed playback with adjustable order and tempo-syncing; Inversion randomizes voicings and octave spreads; and Repetition enables looping or arpeggiation with quantized timing and optional overdubbing for held-chord layers. The settings for Dispersion and Repetition can be found in their respective tabs at the bottom of the interface.

Macro controls at the top handle per voice Pitch Warble, the Layer Blend, and the Filter Frequency, all of which can be MIDI-mapped for performance.

In the Advanced Settings, the Layers tab provides detailed per-layer control over envelopes, tuning, panning, timing offset, and FX sends, along with customization for the Noise layer’s envelope and routing:

The Chords tab defines the harmonic structure with chord shapes for each scale step, inversions, spread, and octave doubling:

The FX tab gives access to processors such as delay, reverb, distortion, and compression. Together, these tools make CHORDS both an accessible songwriting engine and a flexible sound design environment for creating expressive, layered harmonic textures: