Step Up Your Synth Chords

Do you find yourself reverting to the same familiar chords? Technology can help...

One of the pitfalls of becoming familiar with an instrument is that we can default to the same kinds of shapes and patterns we’ve used over‑and‑over. When I was learning guitar I was shown a trick that helped break out of this, and a comparable idea can be employed with polyphonic synthesizers (or keyboard instruments in general).

With the guitar the trick was simple: the player simply tunes to a different tuning, such as open G or DADGAD. As re‑tuning causes all of the notes to move from their normal positions on the fretboard, the shapes you would default to don’t work, or if they do, they lead to a different combination of notes from usual. This re‑tuning therefore forces the player to find different shapes and to use their ear and then, once back in good ol’ EADGBE, to start thinking in a different way about approaching chord voicings in general.

The way I’m going to do this on a synthesizer is to choose an instrument that has at least two oscillators per voice. This can be hardware or software, it doesn’t matter, but it’s crucial that two pitches sound when each single key is pressed because of the dual oscillators.

If you don’t want to use a synthesizer, you could load up two instances of a piano patch in your DAW, set them to the same MIDI track and then view them as ‘oscillators’ 1 and 2 when reading the explanation below.

If we tune the second oscillators at different intervals to the first and then play chords, all sorts of unexpected and interesting things happen.

Figure 1: The notes physically played on the keyboard have black noteheads. These are also the pitches that sound from the first oscillators. The notes with red noteheads are those created by the second oscillators that are tuned at an interval — in this first case, a perfect fifth.As you’ll see, if we tune the second oscillators at different intervals to the first and then play chords, all sorts of unexpected and interesting things happen, even if we play the same shapes we’re familiar with. Better still, we can analyse what is happening and take ideas from it.

Tuning In Perfect...