Chord Factory

VST3 · AU · Standalone

A chord and progression
workbench.

Chord Factory builds chords, extensions and progressions and sends them to your DAW as MIDI. Pick a chord from sixty types, set how it is voiced and what the bass does, then break it into arpeggios, scale runs or melodic patterns over any comping figure and metre. Start from fifty built-in progressions or write your own. Everything can be changed while it plays, cycled through every key, and dragged into your project.

Read the manual What it does
C G D A E B F# C# G# D# A# F Cm Gm Dm Am Em Bm F#m C#m G#m D#m A#m Fm C° G° D° A° E° B° F#° C#° G#° D#° A#° F° C+ G+ D+ A+ E+ B+ F#+ C#+ G#+ D#+ A#+ F+
Hover a chord — the inner rings are minor, diminished and augmented.

What it does

The interface is the circle of fifths. Four rings of twelve chords — major, minor, diminished and augmented — so any chord in the key is one click away and its neighbours are the chords most likely to follow it.

Select a chord and you can set its extension, its inversion, which note is in the bass and how that bass moves, and how the chord is spelled across the voices. You can then hand the same chord to an arpeggio, a scale or pentatonic run, a fourths pattern, or a melodic line built from phrases taken out of recorded playing.

Each of the sixty chord types is mapped to the scale that belongs to it, so those patterns stay inside the harmony: a minor seventh draws on Dorian, an altered dominant on the altered scale, a half-diminished chord on Locrian ♮2. The full map is in the chord and scale reference.

Controls

Voicing and bass

How the chord is spelled

Inversion, and a bass that can be off, held, root-and-fifth or walking, with an octave-down option and a slash-bass override. Seven voice-leading modes: parallel, smooth, open, drop 2, four-part SATB, and quartal and pentatonic stacks with upper structures drawn from the chord’s scale.

Motion

How the chord moves

Block chords, gospel rolls, strums and scatter; seven arpeggio shapes; scale and pentatonic ladders in four directions; four fourths patterns; and Combo, which assembles a melodic line from phrases analysed out of recorded playing. Note Rate sets the subdivision, from quarters to thirty-seconds and triplets.

Time

Metre and comping

4/4, 3/4, 5/4, 6/8, 7/8, 9/8, 11/8 and 13/8, each with its usual grouping, plus comping figures from Charleston and bossa to samba. Swing is adjustable. Runs stay continuous across an odd bar and break with the comping figure when one is selected.

Progressions

Fifty built in, or your own

Fifty progressions common to Western music, in any key, which can be chained and combined. Custom mode takes typed chords — up to four a bar, sixty-four bars — with per-chord editing, tritone substitution, secondary dominants, cadences and negative harmony.

The Chord Factory interface: the circle of fifths above rows of controls for key, voicing, metre and pattern.
Single chord mode, Midnight theme. The wheel is the interface, not an illustration of it.

Getting it into your DAW

Preview plays the current setting, and can loop while you change controls. Dragging the pad into your project gives you a MIDI file of what you just heard — note for note, including the styles that build something different on each press.

With Follow host tempo on, the dragged file says nothing about tempo or time signature, so your DAW is never told to change either.

Auto-Transpose moves the key on each time the preview loops — round the circle, chromatically, in thirds — so an idea can be heard everywhere it might live before you commit it to one.

Read the manual

Availability

Chord Factory is in testing. Pricing, a trial and the download will appear here when it is released.

Contact: tom@chord-factory.pro