I follow a bit of music theory when working on new tracks and I found it useful to know the chords available within the Syntakt. This website is a tiny tool that helps you remember the notes within the chords available in the Chord Machine.
I just pulled up the Syntakt manual (I don’t own one) and inversions don’t appear to be supported. Major deal-breaker, IMO.
I’ve played a lot of scales in my life. There is a certain elegance to correctly spelled scales. Including enharmonic equivalents in a sequencer would probably create unnecessary complications, though it could be implemented with a set-key function or some contextual guessing function.
Some of the beauties of scales are: They follow the musical alphabet; they don’t repeat letter-names; Intervals can be derived by calculating the range between two notes. For example, a Db major scale:
Db-Eb-F-Gb-Ab-Bb-C-Db
Now, look at this scale on an Elektron sequencer:
C#-D#-F-F#-G#-A#-C-C#
Makes very little sense…
My suggestion to everybody on the forum: If you want to improve your music theory understanding, learn to play and spell scales. So much of the rest of music theory derives from this kernel of knowledge.
Yep, just like the M:C, the chord machine does a plain chord, 1st and 2nd inversions as well as chords with individual notes 1 octave up (don’t know if there’s a word for that ) and plenty of interpolations between those.
@rtrigoso awesome simple tool. Could see it coming in handy for many situations. Thanks a thousand!
Re harmony, I’ve come to really enjoy the chord machine as a chord progression helper, and have started to make chord quality sample chains for Digitakt that mimic this technique on Syntakt SY Chord:
Play in the basic chord melody, where the simple top line will go, as 5ths (CG)
Then change it to chord 17, M6, in the third inversion (ACEG), and parameter lock any that sound out of key to chord 25, mb6 (Ab C Eb G). Rare outliers might sound best as m6, m7 or Maj7, dim, a handful of others.
Add the bass line, which makes these all rootless voicings. Over F, chord 17 in C is a Fmaj9, 25 is Fmin9, and each has a range of good-sounding other root notes and chord characters (maj7#11, sus13, 6, maj7 m7).
Then add additional chord inversion changes to embellish.
Figure out what key or keys it’s in by playing melody notes.
I find this a refreshing way to come up with new chord progressions, and forgetting about the key entirely for the beginning, letting the bass line add harmonic interest helps me to come up with unusual progressions that are still musical. Learned it from buying a sample pack where the chords were all Am7 + Abmaj7…
I was looking for something like this yesterday. Even just a simple chart in the key of C with all the notes in each chord would have done… but this tool is Perfect!
Thanks