Heat
Pick a chord and every other pad re-heats to show how well it follows, scored on diatonic function, circle-of-fifths root motion, shared tones and common cadences.
- White-hot — the obvious next move
- Forge — likely, still inside the grammar
- Ember — a stretch, worth trying
- Cold — a left turn out of the key
Workflow
- Set a key, forge a set, click pads to audition
- Drop chords onto steps, set gate, velocity and ties
- Play it, tune the swing and BPM
- Export WAV for rendered audio — upload it, sample it, drop it on a timeline
- Export MIDI to open in a DAW
Steps
- Gate — how much of the step the chord sounds for
- Tie — hold through the rests that follow, so a chord can span several steps
- Velocity — per-step loudness, written into the MIDI too
- Each step stores the voicing it was placed with, so you can mix inversions across one progression
Suggest
The heat engine already scores every chord move in every key. Suggest progression walks that graph: strong moves win most of the time but never always, and the last chord is chosen for how well it leads back home — a loop that doesn't come home isn't a loop.
Forge a new set first for a different vocabulary to walk.
Chord rhythm
A chord's rhythm, separate from its harmony. Held leaves chords sustaining. Anything else subdivides each chord and gates it — 16ths for trance, offbeat 8ths for house, tresillo for latin and afrobeat, Charleston for funk.
Not a genre mode: they're swappable across genres, and that's the point. The per-step gate goes inert while a rhythm is on — the pattern owns the timing.
Sound
Nine instruments, all synthesised from oscillators — no samples, nothing downloaded. Presets pick one that suits the genre; change it whenever.
- Supersaw — seven detuned saws, the trance chord
- Analog Pad — slow filter swell, breakdowns
- Hoover — resonant and pitch-bent, rave
- Plucked String — a real Karplus-Strong model, the closest thing to a guitar without samples
Export notes
- MIDI is a format 0 file at 480 ticks per quarter, with tempo and 4/4 baked in
- WAV is 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo, rendered offline from the same synth you hear
- WAV is uncompressed: about 176 KB per second. Watch the duration readout if something downstream has a length or size limit
- Filenames carry the preset, key, tempo and instrument, so a folder of exports stays legible