evolving MIDI phrase builder with Mozaic

sounda

@bleep + @wim
Got a simple solution for the chord branch filter respectively chord notes splitter solely based upon StepPolyArp, which works already if your chords are always made up of the same amount of notes, always triads e.g..

Theoretically it will work up to 7 note chords, even if the amount of chord notes vary – that this does not work by now is a bug of StepPolyArp and I already contacted the developer.

But first things first – what it does

• it works if your chord notes are always played together (no strumming) at the beginning of a bar – also if notes are held across bar boundaries
  o this might even work with chord changes in an ongoing bar, if one uses e.g. 16’th note events in the StepPolyArp grid instead oh whole notes, but I did not tested it, as this is beyond my needs

• StepPolyArp does the chord detection , although it is capable of key & scale logic, you get no inversion and hence no “real root note” detection – the notes are ordered by the MIDI note numbers

• route each single note of the chord to a specific MIDI channel, ensuring that the lowest (smallest MIDI note number) is always on MIDI channel 1, the next upper on channel 2 and so forth
• …
• this can be routed in Poly 2 e.g. running as an AUv3, so that each colored track got only 1 chord note to pick its note triggers from … and this makes a lot of fun – very inspiring kind of composing melodic & harmonic phrases

How it is setup in StepPolyArp

• use StepPolyArp in “arp” mode and set the pattern length to 1 bar

• configure the lanes to have no transpose (= +0 in the lane header / 1st column of the grid) and let each lane route its output to another MIDI channel
  o tap on the lane header cell and you get a config dialog

• set note events to whole notes in each lane and set the order parameter to the chord note number accordingly, whose numbers show up in the center of the note event afterwards
  o tap the note event and you get a config dialog
  o the manual of StepPolyArp on page 34-37 is very clearly about the details, https://dev.laurentcolson.com/steppolyarp.html

That of what I think is a bug – if you had set up a 6 chord note splitter (as you see in the screenshots) and you feed in a 3 note chord, the 4’th, 5’th and 6’th note events should not trigger any notes, but they do and use the highest pitch of the chord.

I tried to catch this with a small Mozaic script (dropping double notes, which is easy in its essence), but after some test I was faced with the random appearance of MIDI notes, which would make this way more complicated and I decided to let it be and contact the developer … to fix a bug with a workaround is natural, but if further randomness comes into the game it gets more cumbersome as it should – so it should be fixed at the source / root cause, I think.