AirwindowsChordOrgan.zip(82k)

This is the most, maddest, scientist crap yet. So, hear me out. Read to the end: trust me.

This is an alternate firmware for the Music Thing Modular Radio Music. It’s a variant on the existing, ‘Chord Organ’ firmware. You have to know how to reflash the Radio Music module to use this, and you have to have a modular synth and the module (not included!). You can get it as a DIY kit, and I really liked the build instructions and built four (as you see) with no trouble. DIY kits are great for getting into hardware synth making, and I encourage this a lot. The firmware file is called ‘AirwindowsChordOrgan.hex’ and I used it on the synths in the video. It’s also on GitHub so you can see the code if you want.

It does two minor bugfixes to the existing Chord Organ firmware (more on that at the end of the post) and introduces three things: it lets you select a triangle-wave if you want (instead of the raspy pulsewave it has), it fully unlocks the Chord Organ’s ability to play a whole range of chords off its SD card (not just variations on a C chord), and it lets you change the root note modulating it around the Circle of Fifths, not chromatically like the default Chord Organ does.

I include seven different settings files for the Chord Organ (a fundamental part of what I’ve made here): low and high chords, low and high ‘ambient’ (chords where the voicings all cluster around the same notes rather than power-chording up and down as they go), two basses (one and two octaves down) and a high lead note (one octave up), the latter three monophonic. If you set up multiple Chord Organs and feed ’em the same voltages as I have done, you get a ‘band’ that you can feed through different envelopes and VCAs to do whatever with, and the whole ‘band’ will follow the same chord sequences, generated using random sequencers of the right sort (like the Music Thing Modular Turing Machine, which you can play with in VCV Rack and buy DIY kits to make)

The video is over an hour and was completely tough to make: my setup is just not able to record in this way. It’s not computer, not Reaper, not Logic: it’s me trying to pipe a mic through the same speakers I had to monitor with. I had no headphone extension cables to help. It is what it is. I do an awful lot of explaining, talked myself hoarse, but mostly you can’t hear me at all. Sometimes you can. I’ll answer any questions on Monday, or get in touch with me and I’ll repeat what I was trying to say. Most of the time you can’t hear a word of it.

It doesn’t matter.

PICK UP A GUITAR AND START JAMMING LEADS ALONG WITH THE VIDEO AND YOU WILL UNDERSTAND WHAT I HAVE DONE.

Or a keyboard, anything: if you can improvise, ignore me trying to talk for an hour, and pick up an instrument and start playing along and you’ll get it. I’ve been working on this for over a year. It is a huge jump in the direction of making computer music with ‘random’ chords that still make musical sense, and it’s all there. If you just listen it sounds basically nice, right? If you begin playing and try to follow the synthesizer’s lead it will take you on a JOURNEY and, musically, it will speak to you. That is the invention. It is a framework for letting synths jam along with humans and be talking musical SENSE, not ‘randomness’ which can’t be followed.

It’s yours (if you’re a modular synth person who has Radio Musics or Chord Organs or would like to get/build some). I may or may not be able to do another plugin right away, but this epic journey is at a destination: I may or may not be up for jamming on Tuesday right away, but when I do, it will be my musical brain collaborating with this mad scientist invention. This was the ‘self-playing synthesizer patch’ grail, and now we can all have it if we like.

(addendum: VCV Rack can’t currently do this as its Radio Music doesn’t run Teensy/Arduino firmware. But, if anyone is able to implement a Chord Organ in VCV Rack (likely with better oscillators and converters!) that reads Chord Organ SD card files (“CHORDORGAN.TXT”) it’s pretty trivial to include the Airwindows circle-of-fifths code, and I’ll happily help anyone willing to try it.)

(addendum addendum: the first bugfix was this: me and my brother Dan fixed a problem where Chord Organ always makes the first note of the chord be 0 (middle C). It was because Chord Organ (current firmware) tries to read that first note, but passes ‘toInt()’ not a number, but “[23” (or whatever the number is). It includes the square bracket, and when toInt() gets that, it doesn’t understand and always returns a zero. The other bugfix was this: when you crank the Chord knob up all the way it would play a C major chord, even if all your 16 chord shapes were unison or something else. It was because the values produced needed to ‘map’ to chordCount-1 (originally just ‘chordCount’) to reach all 16 chords. Originally it would try to reach a 17th chord. That went right past the array we used for our custom stuff, and what sat immediately beyond that? The array for ‘default chords’, with the first one being a major chord! Welcome to C programming and arrays without automatic bounds checking. That one I found, and was well pleased to find it, too)

(addendum addendum addendum: goodnight. Once this huge video uploads, I’m going to bed. And again: if it bugs you that you can’t hear me talking over the music, pick up a guitar and start playing along and you’ll understand why this has taken me a year to complete. Anyone really wanting explanations, talk to ya Monday :) )

Patreon pays for the mad science, for all to share. There will be more.