Chords
To anyone else in the studio, you appear to be shaking a PS4 pad at a laptop in a threatening manner.
Twenty years ago, some clever bugger game up with the very lucrative idea of taking the feeling of playing music and condensing it in to a video game controller.
And thus, the Guitar Hero series was born.
It’s quite elegant in its simplification, in that it added lightness to a heavy thing, and made a feeling accessible to anyone.
Twenty years since, a considerably less clever bugger looked at a gamepad and thought “what happens if we try it the other way around? If we make the doing accessible to anyone?”
And thus, MIDIpad.
(Which is highly unlikely to be as lucrative an idea.)
Chords puts a chord wheel on the left stick and six strings on the touchpad and right stick. Pick a chord from your key with one thumb and strum it with the other. A shoulder button brings in the borrowed chords and dominants that give a progression depth and complexity. Strum harder and the notes come out harder. Shake the controller and the chord rings back up. With an MPE synth, each string's energy goes out as pressure and where you plucked it goes out as timbre, so pads and strings swell and move without any automation drawn in.
At a glance
Chords sends on the MIDIpad Chords port, MPE by default. See How it works for what each string sends and why.
Point at a chord to arm it. Strum to play it.
Strum it, hold it, brighten it
Swipe along the strings to strum, or tap to pluck. Move a finger across them to hold the ringing chord and set its timbre.
Push the stick to its edge to strike a group of strings. Each direction strikes a different group, on every controller.
Hold it with the stick at the edge and roll the stick round to pluck the strings one by one.
Plays the armed chord all at once. Out of the box that's all six strings, the low half, the high half, and the bottom and top strings, and you can pick the strings for each button.
Hold for the chord that leads into each wedge: the dominant seventh, or whichever kind you've picked.
Hold for the chords on the same wedges from another mode with the same root. Out of the box that's the parallel key.
Hold both for the ii chord of each wedge, the first step of a ii-V-I.
Hold to turn the wheel's chords into suspended chords, or whatever you've picked for that wheel.
Recolour the wheel mid-song: swap sus for sevenths, major for minor, or change what the shoulder buttons bring up.
A light pull holds the chord, a deeper one softens it, and a full pull stops it.
Voices the next strum higher. A shallow pull opens the chord out and a deep pull sends the top up.
Keep it ringing, play harder, or send a CC
Shake the pad to put energy back into the ringing strings. Tilt it to the right to strike harder and to the left to strike softer. Turn the tilt CCs on to send a CC as you tilt.
Turns the Arp on and off. The Arp plays the chord you strike as a repeating pattern, in place of the strings.
Switch instrument
Chords or Drums.