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Synths that are good with chords?


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The more movement, brilliance, harmonics, swirling and effects a single note has, the worse it works with chords. And since synths sell by the impressiveness of those one-finger-sounds, even more bombast gets put into them. It's the pressure of the marketroids on the sound designers.

 

Tone down those flashy sounds, pull back their resonance, tame or even take away one or more of the six effetcs stacked on it, go easy on the detune and other fat. You'll find that chords work much better now.

 

But now you need to know how to play chords.

 

That's the definition of anti-marketing right there. You negate the entire target group with that statement. Imagine the Apple glossy-sheet, where it had "Sound like a musician", it will have added "...if you know how to play chords"

 

Heh. Sales would drop to zero. Steve Jobs would hunt you down.

 

Christian

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There are SO many synths in Logic that allow polyphonic playing (chords) that I find it hard to believe that you can't find one that plays chords. Try ES-2. Try EXS-24 (though a sampler, it has many synth-oriented sounds).

 

There are some synths which, by design, only play one note. Maybe you're just looking for presets in those synths? In any case, take my suggestions above.

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El-bo,that's my 'joke'!

Years back killing time in Kendal before a gig we were in a clothes shop browsing and the assistent chick came up to us by the cords and asked if she could help us...

"Have you got the chords for Misty?".

Guffaw,chortle,wheeze and exit.

 

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

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The more movement, brilliance, harmonics, swirling and effects a single note has, the worse it works with chords. And since synths sell by the impressiveness of those one-finger-sounds, even more bombast gets put into them. It's the pressure of the marketroids on the sound designers.

 

Tone down those flashy sounds, pull back their resonance, tame or even take away one or more of the six effetcs stacked on it, go easy on the detune and other fat. You'll find that chords work much better now.

 

But now you need to know how to play chords.

 

That's the definition of anti-marketing right there. You negate the entire target group with that statement. Imagine the Apple glossy-sheet, where it had "Sound like a musician", it will have added "...if you know how to play chords"

 

Heh. Sales would drop to zero. Steve Jobs would hunt you down.

 

Christian

 

What do you mean by 'need to know how to play chords' I am grade 8 at guitar, grade 5 theory and 4 at keyboard, so I know how to play them, but I don't think thats what you meant is it? Could you elaborate please, i'm kinda confuzzled :)

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some synths have too thick sound to my taste for chords..

 

but this is quite easy to remedy in synths

 

look for unison and slight detuning that sound designers use to fatten sounds

 

remove an oscillator if you need to

 

you don't even have to get under the hood of the synth..just slam a channel after the sound and start carving out the frequencies that are causing issues when playing chords

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Anything that has quite a dense overtone series will naturally be resistant to chords as you will start getting clashing partials. Use sounds with less overtones or less pronounced overtones especially if the first 5th, space out your voicing, and sync as much of the parameters as you can so that each voice coincides with it being pressed on the keyboard. Unless you want a sound that has more movement and phase shifting.
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Hey guys,

 

I am having a little trouble trying to find a synth sound that works with chords. Do you know any? Like in logics own synths, because I have tried loads of presets and none of them are good with chords.

 

Cheers :)

 

Have you tried the apple loops? - There's quite a few nice sounding green loops that you can try. If you're happy with the sound then you can change the chord sequences as you like.

 

Andy

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