MIDI and MPE
What your DAW receives
Chords sends everything it plays on the MIDIpad Chords port, always on, from the moment the app runs. Point a DAW track at it and the instrument is in your session - MIDIpad's own sound is optional and never in the way.
The six-string convention
With a licence, MIDIpad Chords speaks MPE: a master channel for the instrument, and one channel per string behind it. Set the receiving track to MPE mode and each string arrives as its own voice - a strummed chord is six voices with six independent lives, not one block.
Everything the instrument expresses rides those channels, per string:
- Energy - how hard each string is playing right now - arrives as channel pressure. A string swells as you feed it and dies as it fades, and a synth patched to pressure breathes with it.
- Agitation - how bright each string's voice is - arrives as CC74, the brightness most MPE synths already listen for. Where you strike and where your finger rests colours it.
Both are set before every note lands, so even the first instant of a pluck carries its loudness and its colour.
Making it yours
Those targets are defaults, not fixed wiring. The Expression group in Settings → Audio & MIDI opens them up:
| Row | What it chooses |
|---|---|
| Energy output | Channel pressure, a CC of your choosing, or both |
| Energy floor / ceiling | The range the energy travels between |
| Agitation at rest | Centred at 64 (ROLI, Logic) or rising from zero (Osmose) |
| Agitation ceiling | How far the brightness reaches |
| Agitation CC | 74, 1, 11 or 2 |
The rows are licensed, and they exist because MPE hardware disagrees about dialects - match them to what your synth expects and MIDIpad speaks it natively.
One channel, when you want it
Chord channels in the same settings pane collapses the output to a single channel: plain notes and velocity on channel 1, for instruments and setups that don't speak MPE. The per-string expression is a many-channel story, so on single-channel output it stays home - notes and velocity carry the performance.
Single-channel is also what Demo Mode sends. The demo plays the whole instrument and the internal voice sounds every bit of its expression - what a licence buys is the wire: the six channels, the expression streams, and the rows above.
For port names, virtual-port setup and DAW walkthroughs, see the MIDI reference.