Lesson 4
What follows the chord
A progression that nothing listens to is a diagram. This is the lesson where it reaches the sound, and there turn out to be three quite different ways that happens.
How anything hears it at all
More than ninety modules read the harmonic context. They do not go looking for it. A module that wants the chord declares somewhere to keep it, and when the project is wired up Phonon walks the entire tree and hands the engine to everything with such a place.
Which makes following opt-in and invisible at the same time: there is no cable to draw and no setting to find, and a module either has a slot for the harmony or it does not.
1. Generators write from it
The largest group. These modules produce notes rather than replay them, and the chord is the material they work with. Put one on an empty track and it already has something to play.
The clearest example is the Harmonic Follower, which does nothing but turn the current chord into a part. Eighteen modes cover arpeggios up, down and around; held chords and stabs; five kinds of bassline including a walking one; two-note patterns; bare fifths and octaves; and a drawn mode where you write the pattern yourself.
The drawn mode's vertical axis is chord degrees rather than pitches, so a pattern you draw once reflows through the whole progression instead of fighting it.
2. Regions follow it
This one is for material you have already written. Select a MIDI region, and in the inspector under MIDI TRANSFORMS switch on 🎼 Follow Harmonic Engine. The region's border turns structure-gold and it gains a small 🎼 in its label, so a following region is identifiable at a glance in the arrangement.
From then on, its notes are re-voiced as they fire against whatever chord is current at that instant.
Two things follow from re-voicing at playback rather than at edit time, and both are worth having.
- Moving the region is free. Drag it two bars later, stretch it, loop it - it fits the new place without recomputing anything, because the chord it consults is simply the one underneath it now.
- The line keeps its shape. This is a degree translation, not a snap to the nearest allowed note. A melody moved onto a distant chord comes out as the same melody, which is the thing a quantiser cannot do for you.
Melodies you insert have it switched on already. Regions you record or draw yourself do not, on the grounds that a part you played is a part you meant.
3. Effects retune to it
The smallest group and the easiest to miss, because these do not write notes at all. Harmonisers pick their intervals from the current chord instead of a fixed setting. Retuners pull audio towards it. Resonator and sympathetic-string modules tune their resonances to it, so a percussive sound rings in the harmony rather than beside it.
What this is for
Change one chord in the panel and everything above moves with it: the generators write a different part, the following regions land on different notes, the resonances retune. You did not edit any of them.
That is the argument for putting the harmony somewhere central rather than settling it separately in each track. It makes the progression a thing you can still change late, which is usually exactly when you want to.