Artiphon Chorda Review: A Nifty Toy for Non-Musicians Leave a comment

Artiphon’s complete factor is making simple musical instruments that concentrate on delivering prompt gratification. They’re sneaky gateways to the nerdy world of MIDI polyphonic expression, or MPE, which permits a participant to offer every word its personal distinctive timbre such as you may on one thing like a guitar. It’s a expertise that’s gaining recognition and has been embraced by some fairly large gamers within the music world, but it surely’s nonetheless type of area of interest—and the worth of entry can typically be excessive.

Artiphon’s Chorda is simply $250, and requires minimal ability 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 perform for including your personal sounds. Plus there’s a fairly first rate built-in speaker, so that you don’t want something aside from a cheap phone to get began.

The pads throughout the highest of the Chorda are quantized to a specific musical scale, which drastically simplifies issues for nonmusicians. Even with completely zero data of music principle or scales, it’s fairly straightforward to only choose up Chorda and make one thing midway first rate.

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.

In Use

Navigating Chorda can take slightly follow, however when you get the cling of it, issues principally make sense. Almost each pad has a secondary perform 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 machine. Some additionally require you to faucet the bridge to cycle by way of choices, like whenever you need to transfer up or down octaves or change presets. And not using a display screen to offer you visible suggestions, this could get slightly 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 fake 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 p.c of the time.

Sounds

The sounds themselves fluctuate drastically in fashion and high quality. Between the 4 completely different classes, there are effectively over 200 presets, starting from light 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 greatest 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 way extra highly effective than something discovered inside classic sport consoles.

Extra complicated sounds, particularly ones that try to mimic acoustic devices, generally is 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).