Better chord machine explanation?

Sorry if there is already a similar post that’s been answered, but I’m wondering if anyone has written up a better explanation of the Syntakt Chord machine TYPE and BAL on the SYN page.

For TYPE, there is some ambiguity for me in what m7, M7, and Maj7 are. Is the first a minor 7th, second a dominant 7th, and third a major 7th? I think most of the rest are pretty clearly although if dim7 is a fully diminished 7th I’m wondering if there’s a half diminished 7th as well that I’m missing.

And there’s effectively no real documentation for BAL and what the little icons mean.

Thanks in advance for any light you can shed.

I think you’re right on the first part with the chord types, balance basically just inverts the chords smoothly

Yeah, this is it, I think actually the way it works is the chord machine plays four FM operators in parallel (using them as separate voices, each playing one note of the chord), and the balance control changes smoothly changes the volume of each operator (i.e. note) to allow you to blend between different inversions (then I guess once the note at one end has faded out completely, changes the notes so you get a new inversion)

I think you’re both correct. It’s not FM though, it’s a wavetable created using additive synthesis. See also @Ess ’s post on the Mode:Cycles’s Chord machine. There are multiple threads in the M:S topic where he explains more about the Chord machine, which I think you can extrapolate 1:1 for Syntakt.

Edit:
More info from @Ess on the Chord machine

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Yes, the M7 is a dominant 7, and the others are right (not sure where this notation standard is coming from). Half-diminished is the m7b5.

From what I can understand by the (slightly maddening!) selection of chords, there are no rootless voicings (like a keyboardist would play), but the hollow ghosts [in BAL display] are below the root note, so a couple of inversions are possible (if you turn the encoder slowly it says Inv 1 etc).

The other curveball is that for the unison types, the inversion [BAL] controls detune instead.

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