Random Chords

If you randomly pick 2 or 3 notes from a scale or mode, you ll end up creating random chords. They wont necessarily sound good, but since we will use JavaScript for this, we can generate a bunch of chord progressions and tweak something that we like from that bunch. We will use lodash for the random picking.

Here’s a sample of what we will end up creating

If you d like to watch a video of how it’s done, you can do so from here

If you do not want to write code OR are not a JavaScript programmer, then simply use this UI to generate and download MIDI files right from your browser.

Please note: The audio is generated using your browser’s capability to produce sound, hence the quality cannot be compared to a synth running in a DAW! Download the MIDI file to try it in your DAW.

Write your own script

We will create a new file called random-chords.js and start by importing our dependencies.

const _ = require('lodash');
const scribble = require('scribbletune');

For the set of notes, we ll start with the C major scale and a simple pattern

const setOfNotes = scribble.scale('C3 major');
const pattern = 'x___'.repeat(4);

Now we need to get the count of x in this pattern so that we can generate that many random chords. The count here is 4, but some times a pattern can be a bit intricate and the count may not be very evident. Hence we ll compute the count.

const count = pattern.replace(/[^x]/g, '').length;

Now we will randomly pick 2 notes from our set of notes for each count and construct our notes array along the way.

const notes = [];
for (let i = 0; i < count; i++) {
  notes.push(_.sampleSize([...setOfNotes], 3));
}

And that should be good enough to produce our MIDI file for this simple chord progression

scribble.midi(
  scribble.clip({
    notes,
    pattern,
  })
);

Finally, execute this file in your terminal with Node.js

node random-chords.js

Ready to roll

You can use any DAW to do the rest of the steps. I use Ableton Live and a bunch of fancy third party VST instruments, hence I created a new group instrument by combining Arturia’s Jupiter 8 V3 and U-he’s Hive 2. I use the presets Space Osborne and HS Chapel Flowers respectively. On rendering the MIDI clip it sounded like this (your results may vary a bit as we pick notes randomly from the set of notes)

To make this a bit more interesting, I used the C lydian scale from 2 octaves and made the patttern a bit more intricate

const setOfNotes = scribble
  .scale('C3 lydian')
  .concat(scribble.scale('C4 lydian'));
const pattern = 'x__[xx]x_x_'.repeat(8);

I left the rest as is and rendered again, this is how it turned out.

The final code is around a dozen lines. Here is a gist for your reference.

What next?

Try out different scales, or notes from chords or manually set up the notes to get interesting chord progressions. Alter the pattern a bit and use the R character. Optionally use the randomNotes property in the clip method to pass the notes to be used for R. If you dont do this, then Scribbletune will simply adjust the level of that note or simply mute it randomly.