2023-05-11

Chord Memory/Trigger

Friends, I've been very quiet on this page. You know how it is. But hey, let's change that, I heard the indie web is back! Mastodon in particular is really making me optimistic. So, I made a chord trigger thing. I have switched to using Bitwig a while ago and I have not found a plugin that does what I want from something like this. I also wasn't able to make it in the grid. So I dusted off my old browser based step sequencer and rewrote it to do this.

https://gerotakke.de/chord-trigger

Quick introduction how it works:
You'll need a MIDI loopback device. For macOS, that'll be the IAC Driver in Audio-MIDI-Setup. For Linux I had to use virmidi. For Windows, I hear loopmidi is the thing you need.

Then you'll need to set up your DAW track to listen to the loopback port, not the actual instrument you're playing.
On the chord trigger page, select your instrument's port as input and the loopback as output. Then you're ready to go.

There's a lower split with the chord triggers and a higher split with the notes. You can change the split point by using the split button and then entering a note or clicking on one with the mouse.
To set a chord for a trigger, hold the trigger note and toggle the chord notes by pressing them. The chord will be held while you hold the trigger.
For playing back the chords, the velocity of the trigger is passed along.
You can clear whole triggers by using the clear button and once again entering the note or clicking it with the mouse.
Input and output ports as well as the view option for keyboard/linnstrument is saved in the browser's localStorage.
You can also download the whole thing as a zip here and run it locally: https://gerotakke.de/chord-trigger/chord-trigger.zip

I'm not happy with how it looks and I plan to record a small video explaining how it works. But I wanted to publish it anyway so it's out there; ship it!

Hope it's useful!