a Chord Strum Thingie

A little sound-toy for playing chords with your hands. Pick a chord (one hand sets the root on the keybed, a couple of buttons stack the flavour: major, minor, 7th, 9th) and then sweep the rainbow SONIC STRINGS to strum it, like running a thumb across an autoharp. It isn't trying to be an exact clone of the Suzuki Omnichord; it's its own thing.

Play it

(Sound needs a tap first, since browsers block audio until you click. If it misbehaves in the little frame, open it fullscreen.)

How it works

A one-octave keybed along the bottom picks the root and fires the chord. One row of buttons picks the chord type, another toggles modifiers that stack freely, and a voicing dial cascades the whole chord up and down through inversions and octave-spreads. Turn it while a chord rings and you hear the chord re-voice live. Above the keys sits the rainbow strum plate: drag across it, with a mouse or your fingers, and the chord plays as a harp glissando.

It picks up a band

The fun part is the flavour chip. Leave it neutral and it's a plain chord toy; flip it to BOSSA, YACHT or CITYPOP and a whole backing personality comes along. The comping rhythm, the voicing, the timbre and the groove all change together, so the little band follows your hands into that genre. There's a drum machine and a real-time chord looper under the hood too, so you can jam over yourself.

It shares its guts with the other dreamengine instruments, the same synth voices and the same sound engine, so nothing quietly drifts apart. I'm still learning to play the thing myself, and it's very much still in development, but it was already too much fun not to show.