Chordinator

The trigger keyboard covers the whole MIDI range, divided into octave blocks, each block a family: triads, 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, sus chords, add chords, 6/9 and triad-4, power 5ths, quartal and quintal. Within a block the white keys are the seven degrees of your scale and the black keys are inversions of their neighbours, so moving one finger changes the voicing and not the harmony.

That is why there is no wrong note on it. Play up an octave and you are playing the same progression in a richer flavour; play the black key beside a chord and you get the same chord sitting differently. Keys you have not mapped pass through as ordinary single notes, and right-clicking a key takes it out of the pool the generators may draw from.

The algorithms are not stored progressions. Each one is a table of legal moves: one row per scale degree, listing the two or three degrees that degree is allowed to go to, best first. Chord Gen takes the rhythm already on the roll, starts somewhere, and walks that map. So two rolls of the same algorithm are two different sentences in the same language rather than the same loop twice.

There are 84, grouped by what they are for: functional (strong steps, cadence pull, circle of 5ths), colour (suspension chains, upper structures, neo-soul 9ths, quartal drift, Dorian), dub and minimal, house, trance, plus a top-line group of nine that hand their chords to a voicing pass so the bottom notes hold still and the highest note carries a melody. Five of them were measured from chroma analysis of a reference record rather than written from memory.

Hold decides where a chord change is allowed to land and Loop decides when the progression comes back round, which between them is what makes a roll a progression instead of a chord per hit. Follow Bass hands the root motion to the bassline already on the roll and leaves the algorithm to choose only which chord of that root. The tonic comes from your bass line, the harmony from the engine. And Suggest reads the same tables with no dice at all: it lights the recommended keys on the keybed so you can play the progression by hand.

The library, the visualiser and the chord editor are the way in when the keybed does not already have what you want. Search every chord type by name, drag one onto the roll and it stamps rooted on the row you dropped it on, or drop it on a trigger key to assign it. The visualiser names and shows whatever you just played, and its Edit mode lets you play in a chord the library does not have and put it on a key. Beside them sit Invert, Octave and Humanize, the voicing mode and the smoothing switch, which apply to one key or to the whole block at once.

Generators are only useful if you can keep the parts that already work. Chordinator uses the same lock system as MutationStation, the one Elektron sequencers made famous.

Click a note or a chord to pin it and the generators step around it. Rhythm Gen replaces only unlocked notes. Chord Gen keeps the timeline's rhythm and re-rolls which chord each step gets. Fit Stabs rewrites the roll against a bassline. Lock the four chords that make the progression, then roll the rhythm underneath them as many times as you like.

Auto-Lock marks the notes worth keeping for you, scored the same eight ways: structural, recurring, phrase corners, downbeats, offbeats, accents, long notes or low notes. Velocity locks are separate, so a note can keep its dynamics while its pitch stays free.

Or narrow it to a marked area. Draw a box selection over a few notes and Re-Roll re-rolls only those hits, holding every other one exactly as it is, and the status line says how many it held. That is the one thing Chord Gen cannot do, since it always rolls the whole timeline. Locks and the box work together: the dice never touch a locked note, in any generator.

The generators overwrite the roll by design, so before any of them runs, the outgoing state is parked in the History strip for you. The take you wanted is routinely two rolls back, past the point undo is comfortable, and it is still sitting there as a picture you can click.

↓ Rhythm Import takes the timing of whatever clip Ableton is showing and lands it in the roll as a mono line on the scale root: exactly the shape a Rhythm Gen pattern lands in, so Chord Gen can roll chords straight onto it. Point it at your drum loop and the progression lands on that groove instead of a grid.

It works on audio clips, not only MIDI ones. Live's scripting cannot hand an app the audio, so Chordinator reads the sample off disk, decodes it, and finds the attacks itself, by spectral flux: how much the spectrum grew from one frame to the next, which is what an attack actually is. That is why it finds a kick sitting under a held pad, where plain loudness barely moves but the spectrum does. Hit strength becomes velocity, so the accents survive the trip.

A warped clip is read through its own warp map, so the hits land on the grid you are looking at rather than where they fell in the raw file, and only the region Live actually plays is analysed. Hits snap to the roll's current grid. On a MIDI clip a chord counts as one hit, at the velocity of its loudest note, and deactivated notes are ignored.