J. Anthony Allen shows how to use a chord MIDI effect to generate chords from single notes. The effect adds intervals like +4 and +7 to create major triads, but it ignores your song's key and can create clashing chords. Adding octaves (+12 or +24 semitones) always works and thickens a melody without risk.
Okay, the next one is a chord. MIDI effect. Now, this is going to generate chords from a single note. So we would want to put this on this clip because it's already chords. So let's get rid of stuff here. Let's actually just see if we can find. This one's actually kind of tricky to use in a case like this, but we're gonna try. So let's see. Just trying to look for a little melody in here. Let's do that. Okay, so here's my little melody. Not much. So with this chord thing, what you can do, I'm gonna put it on here and see, what we have is we're just gonna add notes to the single note that it has. So it's got a note. So we're going to say add how many semitones above it? So let's add four. Actually, I think we start with one. No, zero. So that's our original note. We'll leave that there. And four will be a major third, and seven will be a fifth. So now we'll hear a major chord for every note in this one. Let's just solo it. Right, so there's our chord. What was a single note is now a chord. Okay, that's cool. However, this can be really dangerous because, remember, we're dealing with notes here, and it doesn't know or care what key we're in. So it's building a major chord off this note, which is a C. And that's not actually the chord that's playing here. This one, I think that was a C chord. Yeah. The second one is a C chord. So that's gonna sound right. This. It's gonna make an A sharp chord or a B flat chord, which is right. But this one is an F chord. So it's building a C chord on an F chord. Anyway, I don't want to get too much into music theory, but doing this is actually, like, kind of dangerous. Let's hear it. Anyway, you're gonna hear some kind of dissonant, not too dissonant things on this first and last chord, but this is what it sounds like. Turn everything else down just a little bit. Yeah, See, there's some weird stuff in there. One thing that the chord thing is actually really good for, and it works all the time. If you have a melody, go in here, leave your original note, go to this one, add 12. Just add an octave. That's always going to sound good. So good for that. You want to get fancy with it. Add another octave by adding 24. Now it's gonna be really screaming. Let's just play that. So we've got three octaves of notes happening now. So that's a good way to use chord is just adding octaves. But otherwise, just remember that if you add notes to it, those are chromatic, they don't know what key you're in. So it can be easy to create some really dissonant stuff on accident.
