One of the most accessible and audibly recognizable sequencing tools is an arpeggiator. An arpeggiator is a real-time sequencer built to take a chord and create an arpeggio. Musicians first used arpeggiators in the early days of hardware synthesizers. Since then, they have preferred it because of its simplicity and immediate results. We at SoundBridge created a very intuitive arpeggiator called reChord, which I will guide you through in the following tutorial.
I prepared a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW containing most full-mix elements as usual. First, we’ll learn how you can load and connect reChord to a midi channel.
How to Connect reChord to any MIDI Track
Recently, we released SoundBridge 2.2.2 BETA: DAW. One of the main new features of this version is that you can directly add VST plugins with MIDI outputs (such as reChord) to the insert rack of MIDI channels as MIDI FX. This will be very useful because we will add reChord as a MIDI FX to the Vital synth MIDI channel.
Once we are done with that, we can move to the reChord interface. Part 1 of this tutorial will look at the essential functions.
Basic Functions and Features
The upper section of the interface contains some functions. When you press the “Hold” button, the incoming notes hold indefinitely. Next is the “Style” combo box, which provides a wide range of arpeggiated sequence styles, from classic ones like Up, Down, Up & Down to more complex ones like Converge and Random Unique. Moving on, the “Key” combo box transposes each input note to the closest note on the scale you selected. That is if any incoming notes are not in your selected scale. On the interface, we can also see the “Velocity” button. When you activate this button, reChord generates a linear progression in the velocity of the output notes. Finally, the “Retrigger” button applies the “Velocity” feature’s instantaneous retrigger settings.
We can see the “Rate” parameters below the functions I just described, which control the speed of the arpeggiator’s playback in milliseconds or musical time values. Following that is the “Gate” parameter, which controls the length of the notes as a percentage of the current “Rate” setting, which we will discuss more in the second part of this tutorial. Finally, we have the “Repetitions” parameter control, which controls the number of times reChord repeats itself before shutting down.
Using Our Arpeggiator
After covering the more basic features of reChord, let us hear it in action. I have made a sequence that we will listen to solo and then in the context of the whole mix.
~reChord Arp Sequence – Solo
~Full Mix – With the reChord Arp Sequence
If you liked this article about music composition, here is some more on the same subject:
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The World of Scales, Intervals, The Circle of Fifths, and Diatonic Chords
- Arpeggiator 101: Arp Basics and How to Use Them
