Acoustica
Cherry Audio

Chord Play: Live Chord Performance

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CHORD PLAY: LIVE CHORD PERFORMANCE

Chord Play turns any MIDI keyboard into a chord instrument. Press one key and Mixcraft plays a full chord in the current key — as a strum, an arpeggio, a pad, or a full rhythmic pattern — using the style you've chosen. It's a fantastic sketching and performing tool, whether or not you play keys.

Enable Chord Play with the trefoil-triad button on any virtual instrument track header. The button shows an orange border while the Chord Play dialog is open.

THE CHORD PLAY DIALOG

Clicking the Chord Play button opens a per-track popover:

  • Palette and Style dropdowns on the left select which chords your keys trigger and how they play back. See The Chord Browser Panel for details on palettes and styles.

  • Live Input, Snap to Beat, and Snap to Scale toggles on the right.

  • Now-playing keyboard — a live two-octave keyboard lights up the chord tones as you play, with the spelled-out chord name above it, including slash-bass inversions ("C Major / G"). Note names are drawn on the lit keys, and the display is voice-leading aware, showing the actual voiced inversion. You can also click any key on the popover keyboard to audition that key's chord and style.

  • Octave control — an octave label and spinner shift the performance range.

The dialog is modeless, so you can leave it open while you work. Its title follows the track if you rename or reorder it, and it closes automatically if the track is deleted.

PERFORMANCE MODES

  • Palette mode: each white key on your MIDI controller triggers a chord from the selected palette, spelled correctly for the project key at the play position.

  • Live Input mode: play real chords — multiple notes at once — and Mixcraft identifies what you played, displays its name, and drives the style engine with your actual voicing.

SNAP TO BEAT AND SNAP TO SCALE

  • Snap to Beat aligns cyclical styles to the style's own rhythmic subdivision (for example, 1/8 note), so pattern playback locks to the grid no matter when you press the key. One-shot styles ignore Snap to Beat and fire instantly.

  • Snap to Scale maps every incoming MIDI note to the current scale. The same pressed letter always produces the same harmonic pitch class in every octave — even on scales with fewer than seven notes, like pentatonic, blues, and whole-tone. Black keys fold down to the adjacent scale tone.

VOICE LEADING

With Voice Leading on, Mixcraft smooths the transition between consecutive chords by choosing inversions and octaves that minimize hand movement, and remembers the previous chord's voicing while you stay in a key. Turn it off for strict root-position playback.

RECORDING CHORD PLAY

Record while Chord Play is enabled and your performance is captured as chord blobs on the chord lane — recording exactly what you played and heard, with full undo. Chords played during the count-in are not recorded, the first chord is always captured cleanly, and with Snap to Beat enabled the recorded chords are quantized to the beat after recording (your live playing stays responsive). Auto-quantize settings apply to chord-play recordings, too. Slash chords are recognized — play C with an E in the bass and the chord lane shows "C/E".