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Play & Create Tunes as intricate as snowflakes - Chords

You can use chord progressions with the fractal tunes.

These ones use a chord progression for Greensleeves. In fact you can sing or play the tune along with them (key Am).

Greensleeves fractal tune

Greensleeves chords just intonation harp

- well you'll need to sing rather slowly for that second one :-).

For the other chord progression tunes that come with the program see: Chord Progressions. For the symbols you can use, see the Chord Player

You can play these tunes with Tune smithy, and transform them to make them into your own tunes. If you are ready to download the program right away, go to next.

To find out more about how you make the chord progression tunes, read on.

 

How to make fractal tunes based on chord progressions in Tune Smithy

Go to Seed Options | Chord Progression for Arpeggios (Ctrl + 151) and enter your desired chord progression there. You will notice that the main window arpeggio changes - moving through the chords in the progression as the tune progresses - that's how it works.

You also want the tune to be one that plays chords, there are various ways to do that. You can use seed skips or choose parts by other with formulae in L to increase the polyphony, but if you do it that way you will get lots of suspended notes from one chord to the next.

Another way is to make a seed with the sustain set to several notes, and then start each seed with several notes of zero length which will get sustained through the note that follows, so making a chord.

You can make the current arpeggio into a seed from the Play Seed, Arpeggio or Scale - Options window (Ctrl + 28). In that window, Select What to play | chords, and then choose the button "Make this chord, broken chord or sequ. into a main window seed."

Or, just take any of the existing chord progression tunes that takes your fancy and use it as your starting point, go to the chord progression window, and change the existing progression to something else.

More example chord progression tunes

All the chord progression based tunes are in the 2.4 list in the player, as the feature wasn't present until after the release of FTS 2.4.

Other tunes that use chord progressions that you can take as your starting point, using twelve tone tunings include:

cathedral, daybreak over the ocean, Endless Early Baroque Movement, fairground tune, In Just Intonation Dorian Mode, jungle frog chorus, just intonation noodling, Leisurely chord progression, triadic dance in three time, woozy drowsy

Ones with chord progressions but unusual tunings include: microtonal sea scape piano romance, seven equal chord progression , seven equal romp, squaring the fifth quintet,

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BTW if you hear something unusual in the tuning of the Greensleeves chords just intonation harp - it is tuned to just intonation, with the chords kept beautifully in tune within themselves, but permitting minute pitch shifts from one chord to the next in the tune. Listeners seem to differ a lot in what they make of music tuned in this way. Some find it wonderfully in tune, while others find the pitch shifts from chord to chord make it sound out of tune.

Although you can have the best of both worlds sometimes - all the chords beautifully in tune with themselves, and no pitch shifts, normally that's impossible. So the usual thing is to go for a compromise - either a best fit type tuning system with a fixed set of pitches - or you do something in between - what they call adaptive tuning - permit small pitch shifts and have chords as in tune as they can be while minimising the pitch shifts as well.

This clip explores what happens if you just decide to go for the most in tune chords possible internally, and don't worry about pitch shifts from one chord to the next at all. What I hear myself is a feeling of clarity in the chords, and a sense of crispness, and better definition.

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What to do next

Freeware / Shareware status: This feature is shareware.

To continue reading about the fractal tunes, go on to the Fractal Tunes with mp3s and midi clips of some of the tunes that come with the program.

You are recommended to try out the program first. If you decide to purchase, you need to buy the Play level. If you want to use a music keyboard with FTS as well, or use it to retune your notaiton software or sequencer, you need the Complete level.

The program comes with a Free Test drive with all the features completely unlocked (start the test drive at any time):

Download Tune Smithy

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To find this feature:
look in the
Tune Smithy Tasks window for:
Fractal composer
or to mainly listen to the tunes:
Player

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the tunes you can create with Tune Smithy or play endlessly

Review
Review in Sound on Sound, October 04

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