Two things sit between your take and everything the rack can do with it: a key, and a chord progression. The rack opens with neither. That is deliberate, and it is the difference between this plugin and a scale-lock plugin, so this chapter explains what each one unlocks, how the plugin works out its suggestions, and how to overrule them.
What you'll learn
- Why the rack starts with no key at all, and what that protects you from
- How the key picker ranks what you sang, and why it never shows a confidence figure
- Which slots do nothing until a key exists
- How the Chords slot writes a progression from your melody
- Every control on the Chords strip
- Writing your own chord onto any bar, and what changes downstream
6.1 There is no key until there is a key
When the plugin opens, the key row says No key, and it means it.
A default key is not a neutral setting. It is a claim about seven pitch classes, and In Key (which is the one slot on by default) acts on it. When the picker used to open on C major, a take sung in E flat came back with three of its five notes pulled into a key nobody had chosen, before the ranker had said a word. That is exactly the harmony-blind scale-lock this product exists to argue against, and it was shipped as the first thing the plugin did to you.
So the rack starts keyless, and three slots say needs a key on their faces until one exists:
- Chords, because a progression is a set of degrees in a key.
- Harmony, because "a third above" is a number of scale steps.
- In Key, because it has nothing to pull a note toward.
Click needs a key on any of them and the key panel opens on the take bar, where the key is chosen (6.2).
Every other slot either has no opinion about the key (Feel, Chance, Register, Expression) or degrades honestly.
6.2 Picking a key
Sing something and the plugin runs Song Cage's key ranker over the take.
It offers, and it never applies. The row stays on No key and puts the best two keys beside it, one click each, lit to invite the pick. Nothing is chosen until you choose it.
That restraint is the feature, and it used to work the other way: a clear winner was written in on the ranker's own initiative. In Key is on in a fresh rack, so the moment that happened the take was corrected toward a key nobody had agreed to, and from the singer's side a take simply came back different from the one they sang, with no gesture to point at as the cause. A guess that is offered is worth more than the same guess applied, because the offer can be ignored for free.
The chevron at the end of the row opens the best three keys, each with how well it fits your notes, above a grid of all twelve roots with a major/minor switch. Rest the pointer on a key to preview it on the roll. The chevron lights when your take sounds like a different key from the one you chose. A list of three is wrong 100% of the time for the writer whose key is the fourth, and no better ranker fixes that.
Two rules the picker will not break:
- It ranks the take, never the rack's output. In Key moves notes toward whatever key it was handed, so ranking the output would score the current key against evidence the current key manufactured, and agree with itself harder the further the Strength dial went.
- A key you name is never overwritten. Not by a later take, and not on reopening the session next week. Naming no key is also a decision, and it sticks too.
Reading the key off the part you sang well
A long take is rarely sung evenly, and the bars that wandered are not neutral: they spell something you did not mean, and the ranker counts it as evidence like everything else.
So pick out the phrase that came out right and the shortlist re-ranks on those notes alone. Sweep three or more notes on the roll, or shift-click them, and the keys offered are the keys that explain what you picked. Choose one and it applies to the whole take, which is the point: the phrase you sang cleanly sets the key, and the rest of the melody is pulled into it.
The picker says when it is doing this rather than doing it quietly. The ranked keys carry a dotted underline, their tooltips read of the notes picked out, not the whole take, and the chevron lights with the full sentence behind it, which is the cue you get once a key is already chosen and the row has collapsed to it. Below three notes there is nothing to rank, so the shortlist goes back to the whole take.
Trimming the take to the good phrase does the same thing, and nothing is lost either way: the edges hide notes rather than cutting them (see Chapter 5).
The caption counts notes and never prints a confidence. It says 11 of 14 in key, which you can check against the blocks on the roll, rather than 77% fit, which invites a trust the ranker has not earned.
Each take carries its own key (see Chapter 5), so a verse in G and a chorus in B flat coexist.
6.3 What the key does once it exists
- The pitch axis on the roll lights up: the tonic strongest, the other six in plain ink, the five outside the key dim.
- In Key starts working, and its strip says which key it is reasoning in and how many notes it moved:
C maj · moved 3 of 14, orC maj · moving nothing. - Chords can build its palette.
- Harmony and Motif can transpose within the key.
6.4 The Chords slot
Switch Chords on and it works out a progression from your melody and writes it into the rack, where every slot after it reads the chord under each note.
This runs the opposite way from every other tool in the category. They pick chords and generate a part over them. This listens to the tune and works out what you were singing over.
It also sounds by default. Adding a slot called Chords and hearing silence is the wrong surprise, so switching it on plays the chord bed as well as recording it. If you want the progression without the pad, turn Play the chords off: the slot still writes the progression into the context, and Harmony, Arp and Echo still read it.
The progression is worth switching on even when you do not want to hear it: Harmony lands on its chord tones, Echo keeps its repeats in it, and Arp runs it. In Key does not read it. In Key runs ahead of Chords and answers to the key alone, so the chords are fitted to your line after it has been corrected, and a note you missed cannot pull a chord the wrong way.
How it chooses
Each window of bars is scored against the notes you actually sang in it, weighted by how much each note carries (length, and where it falls in the bar). Two refinements matter in practice:
- It looks ahead. Each chord is chosen once to find out what comes next, then chosen again with that in view, so the progression goes somewhere rather than being a row of locally good guesses.
- It stays out of the melody's way. A voicing is charged for reaching above the melody's lowest note, and charged heavily for a minor second or minor ninth against a sung note, which are the two intervals that actually clash.
The controls
Chords opens on one knob, Lush, which turns Rate, Colour, Spacing, Strike and Level together: from plain chords held for two bars, through opened-out, coloured chords struck every bar, to reharmonised chords spread wide and changing twice a bar. It leaves Play the chords, Answer, Let them invert, Bottom note and any chord you locked alone. Every control below is in the strip's drawer.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Play the chords | Sound the bed, or only write the progression into the rack. On by default. It stands under Lush as play. |
| Rate | How long a chord lasts, from half a bar to four bars. One bar by default. A chord you locked keeps its own length. |
| Answer | Best fit by default. Turn it, or click another under Lush, for the next-best whole progressions, each a different reading of your take. The same answer on the same take is always the same chords, and chords you locked stay put. Locks can leave fewer answers, and the dial stops at the last one. |
| Colour | Support it makes each sung note a root, third or fifth. Colour it lets it be a seventh, ninth or sixth. Reharmonise favours chords from outside the key, which is where the surprising chords come from. |
| Spacing | Close together, opened out, or spread wide. |
| Let them invert | On, a chord inverts so it moves less from the one before it. Off is root position throughout, which is what a bass part or a deliberately plain pad wants. |
| Bottom note | A hard floor for the voicing, C2 to C4. |
| Level | Velocity of the bed. |
| Strike | Hold it for the chord's whole span, or re-strike every bar, half bar or beat. |
Spacing, inversions, bottom note, level and strike all shape a bed that is not sounding until Play the chords is on, so they are hidden while it is off. Rate, Answer and Colour stay, because they change the progression Harmony, Arp and Echo read either way.
6.5 Disagreeing with the progression
A fit score is an opinion about a hummed bar, and the runner-up is frequently the chord you had in mind.
Click a chord name on the roll and the ones that fitted are there with their roman numerals. Pick one and it is locked; pick the one marked best fit to unlock it and hand the decision back to the scorer.
Every chord has a padlock at its right end. Click it to lock the chord as it is, and Answer, Colour and Rate then change everything around it and leave it alone. Shut and solid is locked, open and hollow is not. A chord too narrow on screen for its padlock offers lock in its menu instead, and the menu also has lock all and unlock all, so "everything but bar three" is lock all, unlock bar three, and turn the dials. A locked chord keeps its length and its bass note, and the Chords strip counts the locks: 8 chords · 2 locked. Locking moves Answer to the answer that still sounds the same; when none does, the bars that changed are framed on the roll for a moment.
Every bar in the chord row is a place to write a chord. Click a chord, or the dim + on a bar with nothing on it, and a field opens with the possible chords listed under it:
- Typing nothing shows the scorer's shortlist for that bar.
Dis every D chord, with the key's own first, so in C major it opens on Dm.m7is every minor seventh, in-key roots first.Cm7, orcmin7, puts Cm7 at the top with its neighbours under it.
The first row is always what Enter writes, so if you know the chord you can type it and press Enter without looking. Arrows move the highlight, a click takes a row, Esc closes.
Two things a typed chord can do that a picked one cannot: a rest under a typed chord becomes a bar of that chord, and a chord typed past the last note extends the progression.
A chord you chose or locked says locked on hover, and one written onto an empty bar carries a remove option, because the scorer had nothing there to hand the decision back to.
A pick changes what follows. It acts as the preceding chord for everything after it, so changing one chord re-chooses the ones after it rather than leaving a seam. A locked chord keeps its own start and length, so it holds at every Rate. (A chord picked in a session from before 0.5.20 has no length saved, and a Rate with no window under it still drops it rather than landing it on the wrong bar.)
The chord field needs a take on the roll and a key, for the same reasons the slot does.
Chapter 7 is the other half of this: how In Key corrects the line before Chords hears it.