By maintaining your preferred chords and re-writing the others, this virtual instrument allow you to play around with harmonic changes. Simply click on the controls with your mouse or use your computer keyboard (faster) to interact with it. Think of it as a playground for chord progressions; experiment with slight variations and hear what happens to overall flow of phrase.
At top left is dropdown menu where you select major key. Clicking this moves all of the chords into appropriate keys for you to work around. This can be useful if you’re working on a particular style or register. Below that are volume and tempo sliders. The volume slider determine how loud the chords play through audio engine, while the tempo adjust to play them at whatever pace you wish to set. Set these first before experimentation.
How to Use the Tool
Two lanes is displayed here on the main stage. This is the progression from the source (top), which is set by default to a basic four-bar sequence. Click a chord to highlight it. You can then see what it is in the rewrite bench on the right. From here you’re able to choose a new function for the chord with the palette of Roman numerals. This gives you the ability to change harmonic flow of every single bar.
Lock any of these chords in place using the pin button underneath each one. If you pin a bar then that bar will not change if you apply any of the global transformation strategies. If you want to protect certain chord from being changed while you play around with the rest then this is really handy. You’ll notice it visually too, the chord card will show that certain elements of your progression are locked.
For the unpinned bars it provides a set of four options for how to transform the bars. Function twin is a chord swap in the same musical family so it keeps the role while changing the color. Secondary launch converts the approach chord to a dominant seventh that pulls heavily toward the next destination. Modal shadow takes colors from the parallel minor key and darkens the sound. Seventh lift add diatonic ninths or sevenths to thicken the texture without altering the root notes.
Below that is tension runway. Here’s where you adjust thickness of every chord on its own. As you drag the slider for one bar, it’ll unfold from a basic triad to a seventh chord then to a ninth chord. Immediately, you can view the results in the variation lane and hear them as you conduct the phrase. That provide very specific control over the thickness or thinness of each moment of the sequence.
In the lower section is metrics panel that offers feedback on what you’re doing. How many common tones do you have in the variation versus the source? How much does the voice lead from one note to the next? What’s the overall tension per phrase? These stats can show you structural effect of your changes. Too much voice travel may mean you’ve created a jarring transition; too few common tones means you’ve made a sharp harmonic change. Let this feedback guide your revisions so you create a smoother (or sharply different) variation.
The central conduct button lets you listen to what you’ve done. That’s right, there’s no need to switch tabs: it plays both source and variation back-to-back so you get an instant A/B comparison. You can choose to see only the focused bar or trace just the changed lane too.
Your most recent steps is recorded in the history log from which you could of backtrack a step at a time or jump back to square one in the original source.
The workflow is simplified with keyboard shortcuts. To select a bar, use the left/right arrow keys; to apply the appropriate scale degree to that bar (number 1-7), press that key. To toggle the pin on the current bar, press L; to rotate the bass note for better voice leading, press B. To compare the entire phrase, press A; to reverse the previous step, press U. To compare two specific bars without focus on the phrase, press Enter.
Start by keeping the first and last chords pinned as an anchor point of where it all starts/ends. Next, play around with the modal shadow approach in the center bars, noting what those minor key colors does to the mood. Increase the tension to push the dominant bars more toward the tonic. If you go too far with a change, simply hit the rewind button and then reconnect with the starting point to return to the blank canvas.
It’s meant as a rapid iteration / experimentation tool. Jump around different tension levels and strategies to discover exactly the type of harmonies you desire. Don’t be afraid to mix and match extensions and functions. Begin with single bars, hearing their effect individually, and gradually develop increasingly complex variations.
It’s just a game: have fun reworking your chord progressions.