Artiphon’s entire factor is making easy musical devices that concentrate on delivering instantaneous gratification. They’re sneaky gateways to the nerdy world of MIDI polyphonic expression, or MPE, which permits a participant to provide every be aware its personal distinctive timbre such as you would possibly on one thing like a guitar. It’s a expertise that’s gaining reputation and has been embraced by some fairly huge gamers within the music world, but it surely’s nonetheless form of area of interest—and the worth of entry can typically be excessive.
Artiphon’s Chorda is simply $250, and requires minimal talent to choose up and begin making music with. It’s an instrument that vaguely resembles the neck of a guitar, with 12 capacitive touchpads and a strummable “bridge” throughout its floor. Inside is a comparatively easy synth engine that covers every thing from chiptune leads, to easy bass and synth pop drums. There’s even a sampler operate for including your personal sounds. Plus there’s a fairly respectable built-in speaker, so that you don’t want something apart from an inexpensive cellphone to get began.
The pads throughout the highest of the Chorda are quantized to a selected musical scale, which vastly simplifies issues for nonmusicians. Even with completely zero information of music idea or scales, it’s fairly straightforward to simply decide up Chorda and make one thing midway respectable.
There are 4 modes: Drum, Bass, Chord, and Lead. Drum, clearly, performs drums. Bass offers you monophonic low finish. Chord places a full chord on every pad, and Lead offers you a polyphonic palette from which to solo.
{Photograph}: Terrence O’Brien
In Use
Navigating Chorda can take a bit of observe, however when you get the hold of it, issues principally make sense. Practically each pad has a secondary operate for choosing sounds, triggering the loop recorder, altering the tempo, and so forth. To entry these features you simply maintain down the A button on the finish of the gadget. Some additionally require you to faucet the bridge to cycle by choices, like once you need to transfer up or down octaves or change presets. And not using a display to give you visible suggestions, this will get a bit of irritating, but it surely was by no means sufficient to make me hurl the Chorda throughout the room.
One factor that’s routinely fairly irritating is the looper. I’m not going to faux to have excellent timing (there’s a motive I’m a guitarist and never a drummer), however I’ve been utilizing varied guitar pedals and Ableton’s Push controller to do stay looping for round 20 years. I’ve by no means struggled fairly as a lot as I do with the Chorda (or Artiphon’s Orba, for that matter). I don’t know if it’s the results of over-aggressive quantization or simply very unforgiving controls, however I’d say I fail to get an ideal loop about 25 % of the time.
{Photograph}: Terrence O’Brien
Sounds
The sounds themselves fluctuate vastly in model and high quality. Between the 4 totally different classes, there are nicely over 200 presets, starting from mild Fender Rhodes piano sounds to industrial drums and ambient synth leads. The synth engine inside Chorda, just like the Orba earlier than it, is designed particularly to be extraordinarily low energy. This ensures that it runs easily on the {hardware} and maximizes battery life, but it surely additionally means there are some limitations.
Chorda is at its finest when it leans into its stripped-down nature and delivers plucky FM leads and clear pads. It’s additionally fairly adept on the lo-fi edges of chiptune, the place even the meager processor is much extra highly effective than something discovered inside classic recreation consoles.
Extra complicated sounds, particularly ones that try to mimic acoustic devices, is usually a little spotty. Shiny Violin and Clear Guitar aren’t a lot better than what you’d discover on a ’90s ROMpler (a sample-based synth).