Making Sound Machines - Plinky 12 Chords

Chords turns the Plinky 12 into a hands-on harmony instrument for discovering progressions and immediately playing around them. Rather than asking you to construct every chord note by note, it presents groups of harmonies that can be explored, combined and reshaped directly from the large pressure-sensitive surface. The results can become sophisticated quite quickly, but the process itself stays very approachable.

Its 13 chord palettes each contain 45 chords, giving you plenty of harmonic material without locking you into a single scale or progression. Four dynamically adapting melody surfaces then offer different ways into the selected harmony: you can play chromatically with visual guidance, stay within its scale, pick through its chord tones or move towards related chords. This makes Chords great for improvising, sketching out a song or simply for finding combinations that might not occur to you at a normal keyboard.

Underneath it all is the twelve-voice Plinky synth engine, divided between six chord voices and six melody voices. Bass, upper chord tones and melodic parts can use different sounds, while XY modulation, tape delay and shimmer reverb allow the individual layers to blur, move and spread out. You can also run external audio through its effects section.

A polyphonic arpeggiator and 128-step chord sequencer provide structure once an idea begins to take shape, with editable patterns, probability, independent track lengths and shuffle available for more involved movement. MIDI routing also lets the playing surfaces control external instruments, so Chords can function as the harmonic centre of a larger setup rather than only as a self-contained synthesizer. All in all, this is a well thought out harmony-lab.

Features:

• Expressive polyphonic desktop touch synthesiser for chords and melodies
• 16 × 16 RGB pressure-sensitive capacitive touch surface
• Twelve-voice polyphony with six chord and six melody voices
• 13 harmonic palettes containing 45 chords each
• Direct control over chord selection, shape and voicing
• Four dynamically adapting polyphonic melody surfaces
• Chromatic, scale, chord-note and related-chord playing modes
• Polyphonic arpeggiator with 32 editable 16-step patterns
• Circle-of-fifths transposition
• 128-step chord-shape sequencer
• Independent track lengths, modulo and per-step probability
• Pattern generator and Stolperbeats shuffle
• Polytimbral synth engine with separate sounds for bass, treble and melody
• XY modulation for morphing between sounds
• Tape-style delay and reverb with shimmer
• External audio processing through the onboard effects
• MIDI routing for controlling external instruments
• Stereo audio input and output
• CV clock and reset inputs, configurable clock output, two CV inputs and two CV outputs
• TRS and USB MIDI plus class-compliant USB audio output
• SD-card storage for presets, samples and songs
• USB-C powered
• Dimensions: 305 × 305 × 12 mm
• Designed by Making Sound Machines in collaboration with mmalex (Alex Evans)

About the Plinky 12 system: Blocks, Chords and Toadstep are three distinct instruments built around the same pressure-sensitive touch hardware and polyphonic synth engine. Their panels can be exchanged, and Plinky 12 automatically recognises which one is fitted and loads the corresponding instrument.