If you’re good at music theory, you can probably find all the chords and progressions you need just by using your fingers and a suitable instrument. For a lot of musicians, though, remembering huge banks of chords can be difficult, and experimenting with combinations can quickly become tedious and tiring. Enter the minichord, a tiny version of the Omnichord synth designed by [Benjamin] that offers to help out by putting all the chords you need a mere button press away.
The minichord is based around the Teensy 4.0, a capable microcontroller platform if ever there was one. It’s paired with a bunch of tactile buttons which are used to tell the Teensy which chord you desire to play. Various combinations of buttons can be used to play more advanced chords, too. There are potentiometers on board as well for volume control, as well as a touch pad for “strumming” arpeggios and other fine control tasks. An online interface allows modifying the presets onboard, too.
[Benjamin] hopes to get the minichord into production; it’s currently in a Seeedstudio competition that could see that happen, based on likes on the project video. The minichord isn’t the only player in this space, of course. The Orchard synth has been making similar waves this week. We’ve seen [Benjamin’s] work before, too. Video after the break.
Neat! This kind of chording synth is always cool to see. I have a similar device, Johan Berglund’s T.Chordstrum — a less polished thing, based around a Teensy 3.2.
Agreed, playing chords is fun. I have a “le strum” but this look like even more fun to play with.
On the guitar, chords are my nemesis…. except power chords. Those are easy.
I’ve got a box of power cords in my garage.
I like to salvage them from discarded appliances, just in case I need to replace one.
60 Hz is fine but if you add the fifth (90Hz) and the octave (120Hz) to fill in the power chord on the power cord, it seems like some current is going to be flowing in ways you don’t want
nothing wrong with making a new instrument but i don’t really care for the implication that existing instruments are too hard for experimenting with chord progressions. you don’t need to be able to figure out how to make every chromatic chord on the guitar in order to play around with all the relations between chords — the 10 beginner chords are enough for most progressions. piano, it’s just a few simple rules. accordion typically gives you a grid of buttons on the left hand for convenient chord accompaniment. notably, the accordion uses circle of fifths because it was designed by and for musicians. a lot of electro-mechanical reed organs have the same button grid. if you don’t know music, you might think that ordering chords by alphabet is simpler, but you don’t have to learn much before you realize that’s actually more complicated.
my point is both that there’s no substitute for learning music, and also that learning music isn’t that hard with traditional instruments. reinventing the wheel is fine and great but the old wheel is fine too. you don’t need to spread FUD about the old wheel just to justify playing around. just play around!
i do feel like this probably would have been better as a cellphone app :) if it was a really keenly-thought-out interface, the advantage of hard buttons would really be something, but it seems to me like this is one person pushing their own musical education through a certain phase, and for that, there’s nothing like the flexibility of a touch screen :)
Agree completely! The accordion Stredella bass system is just about perfect for chord accompaniment.
Well, maybe now I can find the secret chord. Hallelujah!