These all help you add some individuality to the sequence. For example, you can split a chord that extends over a whole bar, to add additional chord changes, and adjust various settings for the Inversion, Octave, Flavor and Complexity of an individual chord within your sequence. There are some individual chord adjustments available, though. The Rhythms and (as shown here) Timing presets make it easy to customise your basic chord sequence.
Do note, however, that all these settings apply across the whole song section, not just the currently selected chord within the sequence. Strum and Swing can also add some nice performance details. The Timing, Rhythm and Note Length options, all of which also feature a good collection of presets, then help you liven up the performance of the sequence from the ‘one sustained chord per bar’ default. Other controls within the leftmost panel include access to an extensive collection of pop‑friendly, four‑chord preset progressions to explore. Captain Chords can also do chord recognition from your MIDI keyboard as a means of adding chords to the sequence. To build a chord sequence, you simply select the chord you require and then hit the ‘+’ symbol in the piano‑roll section of the display. The collection of chord options appropriate for the current key/scale combination is displayed as seven basic triad chords in the top row, plus a selection of harmonic variations in the bottom row. The last four of these allow you to create four different chord sequences (which can be in different keys if you like) the controls running down the left edge of the user interface can all be configured individually for each of the four song section tabs, and apply to the whole sequence within the selected tab. Under the plug‑in’s title strip are six tabs: MIDI In, Play, Verse, Pre‑Chorus, Chorus and Drop. Both versions support drag and drop of the MIDI data for the created chord sequences. These provide very similar functionality, but the former gives you access to the Captain’s internal instrument sounds, while the latter is placed as a MIDI effects plug‑in on an existing virtual instrument track. In Logic Pro, Captain Chords comes both as a virtual instrument and as an AU‑based MIDI effects plug‑in. You can then use various tools to develop chord sequences for the different sections of your song.Ĭaptain Chords includes an extensive collection of four‑chord sequences to get you started. In essence, it lets you select a key/scale combination, and then offers you a palette of chords that fit the chosen key/scale.
Industry Of CaptainsĬaptain Chords is the heart of the system. The VST versions may work with other hosts, but such combinations are not currently official.
Second, Mixed In Key make it very clear that, at present, only Logic Pro (which is where I did my own testing), FL Studio and Ableton Live are officially supported. First, in order to use the various plug‑ins to create new chord sequences and so on, your host computer has to be online, as processing is done in the cloud.
Purchase, installation and authorisation are all painless, but potential users should be aware of two technical elements of the current specification. All purchasers will also get two further plug‑ins currently in development called Captain Hook and Captain Beat as further free additions when they’re available. Captain Play provides an additional tool for triggering a palette of key/scale‑specific chords with a single finger using either a MIDI keyboard or just your computer keyboard, and might be particularly useful to those working on a very compact (perhaps laptop‑only?) system.Īt the time of writing, the Windows version includes only Captains Chords, Deep and Play, but Melody will follow as a free update when it’s ready. As the names suggest, Captain Chords will assist you with developing chord sequences for your song, while Deep adds a bass line and Melody, well, adds a suitable melody. It’s a collection of plug‑ins that can work together to help you develop musical ideas in electronic, dance and pop genres.įor this review, I worked with the Mac OS version 2.0, which currently comprises four plug‑ins: Captain Chords, Captain Deep, Captain Melody and Captain Play. Whether for good or for evil, software‑based compositional aids are becoming an established fact of life, and Mixed In Key’s Captain Plug‑ins suite is attracting a lot of attention. A new suite of plug‑ins aims to take the compositional donkey work out of pop and EDM songwriting.