Chords and harmony

How to play in key without knowing any music theory — and what the theory is, once you want it.

You now have: drums, bass and a lead.

Firmware note. The Harmony feature described here is on a development branch and has not reached a stable firmware build yet. Everything about PolyPad applies today.

This lesson is being written. The outline below is what it will cover.

Planned outline

PolyPad — chords without harmony theory

Track 15 is Chords, running PolyPad, whose page 1 is:

Knob What it does
Chord Which chord shape is played from one note
Inv Inversion — the same chord with a different note at the bottom
Nnotes How many notes of the chord actually sound
Detune Spread between the voices — small amounts thicken, large amounts wobble

Play one button, get a chord. Page 4 (Spread, Tilt, Motion, Phase) puts it in stereo.

Harmony — the whole device in key

The planned Harmony exercise has three small ideas:

  • SETUP — MODE (OFF / QUANT / AUTO / FIXED), KEY (C–B), SCALE (Major, Natural Minor, Harmonic Minor, Dorian, Mixolydian), KEYS (PIANO or SCALE).
  • CHORD — QUALITY (Maj / Min / Sus4 / Dim / Aug) and VOICE (inversion, −2 to +2).
  • PLAY — for machines that have to play a chord one note at a time: RATE, ORDER (up / down / up-down) and STYLE (arp or strum).

The two ideas that matter:

  1. QUANT mode means you cannot play a wrong note. Every note is pulled to the nearest note in the key. With scale keys, the 16 buttons become scale degrees, so the whole grid is in key.
  2. The engine adapts to the machine. PolyPad plays a real chord; the Wavetable Osc and TBDaits manage two voices, so you get a dyad; the Rompler retriggers pitches in sequence. The overlay’s headline tells you which is happening.

Also planned: why minor sounds sad and Dorian doesn’t quite; picking a key that suits your bassline; and the RNot2 / RNot3 fields in the Step Editor as a way to get chords out of a mono track.

Next: 12 · Samples · Previous: 10 · Lead sounds

Reference: PolyPad · TBDaits · Step editing