midilifestyle

Maybe you can help me:

I am hoping to someday make a max device that mimics the functionality of an omnichord, but instead of strumming something to play the individual notes, you would actually play them on keys or midi pads. The idea is that there would be a way to select the chord with one set of controls, and then your keys or midi pads would only play notes in that chord.

I was inspired by playing the polychord app on ipad but wishing for physical keys to press instead of the ipad screen.

I have gone through all possible ways of trying to make this using existing max for live devices or the built in midi filters in ableton, but everything focuses on allowing you to play entire chords at the touch of a single button, or arpeggiating chords with a clock. I want to do neither. I want to hit a button and now every key on my keyboard only plays notes that are in a dsus9 chord, and I don't want repeated notes on the keyboard, so for a triad, c1 would play the first note of the chord, c#1 would play the second note of the chord, d1 would play the third note, then d#1 would play the first note of the chord but an octave above the note the c1 plays.

I keep trying to set aside time in max to try and hack something like this. It seems that the coll object is going to be my friend here, and each chord would essentially be it's own row in coll, remapping the keys.

Is there a chance you might be able to implement the note-per-key feature? I feel like I will have a steep learning curve trying to learn how to do it...

This is awesome. Thank you so much!

My only suggestions would be to make new chords not default to playing such a low octave, and to implement a copy+paste functionality. But those are just santa claus requests, it's great as-is :)