The Chorder Plugin in Cubase.
Q. If you highlight a chord you have found and input the keys to the plug-in you then have a different chord on each key, are the chords on the keys every chord that could possibly fit with that original chord or not?
Always wondered about that plug in, how many people use it I wonder.....?
Using Chorder Plugin in Cubase
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- KVRAF
- 4279 posts since 14 Nov, 2008 from UK
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 4279 posts since 14 Nov, 2008 from UK
Whoosh! That went straight over my headjancivil wrote:Note what I'm going to say here well: 'every possible' anything in music is wholly dependent on context.
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- KVRAF
- 26033 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
"every possibility" for one context, let's just say a genre of music since you prob'ly know what that means, isn't going to be the same for every context/every style.
Really basic musics that have to stick to basic *consonances* to be that genre or whatever, are not the only kinds of music. A 'style' has <constraints>, in order to be a style. There are many styles, many particularities of constraint prescribed, each has 'context'. Which is to say, things it contains and doesn't contain.
For example,'Bebop chords' use certain kinds of chord structure, as a preference for getting around harmonically, that 'nursery rhymes', or 'trance' would avoid in all cases.
Take this chord: C Gb Bb Db E Ab. That in bop is a perfectly normal chord, goes strongly to 'F', or 'B'. There are 'many possibilities'. In techno or one of these more heavily constrained contexts, it's going to seem truly jarring. "Possibility" here is a different kettle of fish, so 'possibility' is wholly dependent on context.
There is no set of rules for 'music'. I have only the most general idea of what you want to do. Something really basic such as a walking bass might stick out like a sore thumb in your idea of a bassline against a type of lead line, but I can't know for sure.
You could make a general search of terms such as 'basic consonances' or 'basic concords' vs 'basic discords' and get some general basic information. But that sure isn't going to speak to 'every possibility' that 'sounds good'.
In general terms, if the tempo is faster, you're going to have less objections to some *dissonances*; these will appear to you as 'passing' tones...
But in the most basic terms, the most honest answer is "every possibility" means "nothing is impossible".
Really basic musics that have to stick to basic *consonances* to be that genre or whatever, are not the only kinds of music. A 'style' has <constraints>, in order to be a style. There are many styles, many particularities of constraint prescribed, each has 'context'. Which is to say, things it contains and doesn't contain.
For example,'Bebop chords' use certain kinds of chord structure, as a preference for getting around harmonically, that 'nursery rhymes', or 'trance' would avoid in all cases.
Take this chord: C Gb Bb Db E Ab. That in bop is a perfectly normal chord, goes strongly to 'F', or 'B'. There are 'many possibilities'. In techno or one of these more heavily constrained contexts, it's going to seem truly jarring. "Possibility" here is a different kettle of fish, so 'possibility' is wholly dependent on context.
There is no set of rules for 'music'. I have only the most general idea of what you want to do. Something really basic such as a walking bass might stick out like a sore thumb in your idea of a bassline against a type of lead line, but I can't know for sure.
You could make a general search of terms such as 'basic consonances' or 'basic concords' vs 'basic discords' and get some general basic information. But that sure isn't going to speak to 'every possibility' that 'sounds good'.
In general terms, if the tempo is faster, you're going to have less objections to some *dissonances*; these will appear to you as 'passing' tones...
But in the most basic terms, the most honest answer is "every possibility" means "nothing is impossible".
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- KVRian
- 1480 posts since 14 Jun, 2003
i use chorder in my live setup:
i use it to cover string sections and horn sections on songs, and on one gig i do on the side i actually play NI B4 from the windsynth.
my strategy is to first of course listen to the song, lets take for instance mj's "rockin robin" which i had to add for a gig last week. my job was to cover the flutes and piccolo parts.
first i talked to the singer about key because chorder doesnt have an easy transpose button , so once youve done your harmony mapping if the singer wants to change keys you have to....wait for it....start OVER.
she wanted it 2 half steps down.
i charted out the flute parts into finale and made a nice readable chart in case some day we wanna actually hire 4 flutes and a piccolo and then i take awhile to kind of scope out the chart for thing like common tones and look for notes that will work to trigger off the specific voicings and harmonies.
my windsynth, the yamaha wx5, has 4 octave keys, add middle and you have a lot of octaves to do stuff with so i usully assign harmony trigger notes in the outside octaves and leave the middle to play in the range for unison parts.
i programmed the upper octave f and g and a keys to trigger off the intro flute chords and then had the even higher c f and d keys just play the piccolo, thats repeated 3x so thats easy and then i map the even higher f to play the last intro hit chords with piccolo added on top.
so there i have the intro which is also the ending and still plenty of keys left to cover all the other stuff so then i just map the rest and its done, and finally i do a chart with only the notes i need to play to trigger off the chords so i dont have t remember all that. eventually i get it memorized if we play the tune often enough but i dont think this one will come up that much.
for when i play the windsynth hammond on that other gig i had to force another strategy because its kind of a jam so a lot of unplanned tunes come up so i map the middle octave scale as minor chords and the octave down as minor 7th chords, one octave up is major chords, 2 octaves up is dominant 7th chords and the top is maj 7th chords.
obviously thats only simply cover simple tunes but thats the fodder of jams, more elaborate tunes with fancier chords would probably be planned in advance more and id do a seperate harmony map for the tune.
and thats me and chorder. i have like 30 of em inserted in my setup loadout they dont take any cpu and very little ram and dont add any latency really, stable and reliable thru hundreds of gigs anyways...
wish it would save its maps to some kinda file which it doesnt, and the key change thing, thats what i wish theyd add, or i wish someone else would do a MIDI plugin that does the same thing only better. i found a vst plugin that does this but i need midi plugin to work in my rig. id have to start over in my setup config to try and use the other i dont even know if itd work as well.
so i always ask the singer for the key they want, some tunes i make multiple maps for different singers.
i use it to cover string sections and horn sections on songs, and on one gig i do on the side i actually play NI B4 from the windsynth.
my strategy is to first of course listen to the song, lets take for instance mj's "rockin robin" which i had to add for a gig last week. my job was to cover the flutes and piccolo parts.
first i talked to the singer about key because chorder doesnt have an easy transpose button , so once youve done your harmony mapping if the singer wants to change keys you have to....wait for it....start OVER.
she wanted it 2 half steps down.
i charted out the flute parts into finale and made a nice readable chart in case some day we wanna actually hire 4 flutes and a piccolo and then i take awhile to kind of scope out the chart for thing like common tones and look for notes that will work to trigger off the specific voicings and harmonies.
my windsynth, the yamaha wx5, has 4 octave keys, add middle and you have a lot of octaves to do stuff with so i usully assign harmony trigger notes in the outside octaves and leave the middle to play in the range for unison parts.
i programmed the upper octave f and g and a keys to trigger off the intro flute chords and then had the even higher c f and d keys just play the piccolo, thats repeated 3x so thats easy and then i map the even higher f to play the last intro hit chords with piccolo added on top.
so there i have the intro which is also the ending and still plenty of keys left to cover all the other stuff so then i just map the rest and its done, and finally i do a chart with only the notes i need to play to trigger off the chords so i dont have t remember all that. eventually i get it memorized if we play the tune often enough but i dont think this one will come up that much.
for when i play the windsynth hammond on that other gig i had to force another strategy because its kind of a jam so a lot of unplanned tunes come up so i map the middle octave scale as minor chords and the octave down as minor 7th chords, one octave up is major chords, 2 octaves up is dominant 7th chords and the top is maj 7th chords.
obviously thats only simply cover simple tunes but thats the fodder of jams, more elaborate tunes with fancier chords would probably be planned in advance more and id do a seperate harmony map for the tune.
and thats me and chorder. i have like 30 of em inserted in my setup loadout they dont take any cpu and very little ram and dont add any latency really, stable and reliable thru hundreds of gigs anyways...
wish it would save its maps to some kinda file which it doesnt, and the key change thing, thats what i wish theyd add, or i wish someone else would do a MIDI plugin that does the same thing only better. i found a vst plugin that does this but i need midi plugin to work in my rig. id have to start over in my setup config to try and use the other i dont even know if itd work as well.
so i always ask the singer for the key they want, some tunes i make multiple maps for different singers.