Unlock the potential of chords. Forge your music.

KORD Forge isn’t just a chord tool—it’s a creative playground for musicians and producers. Whether you’re a beginner exploring chord theory or an advanced producer looking for innovative harmonic possibilities, KORD Forge adapts to your workflow.

Most of the actions available in KORD Forge rely on selecting notes, either single notes when generating new chords or multiple notes when modifying existing chords. There's an intelligent chord detection algorithm in place, which allows applying any of the actions when you select multiple chords at once!

Let's briefly go over some concepts which KORD Forge deals in:

• Voicing - This is the order of the notes and octaves of a chord, f.ex: Cm -> [ C E G ] or [ E G C ] are both C minor chords
• Inversion - An inversion is a chord where the notes are rotated, placing a note other than the root (e.g., the third or fifth) as the lowest pitch.
• [Key required] - Certain functionality only works when a key is defined, which KORD Forge can detect via Ableton Live's global scale mode or when using the midi clip's name follows the same naming conventions as KORD Detect -> [C Major].
• Negative harmony - Is a musical concept where notes and chords are inverted around a central axis, often the tonic, by reflecting them across the circle of fifths, creating a mirrored harmonic structure while maintaining symmetrical relationships.

Actions in KORD Forge

KORD Forge offers a variety of powerful tools to help you generate and modify chords effortlessly. Let’s explore the key features:

Smooth Voicing

Simplify the chord arrangement to make them flow smoothly between each other, creating cohesive and natural-sounding harmonies.

Spread Voicing

Expand the notes of a chord, making your chords less dense and dissonant. The slider controls the minimum number of semitones between each note of the chord. If the slider is all the way up, you get into "Collapse" mode, which will do the inverse and turn the chord's voicing as tight as possible.

Invert

Modify the voicing of the chord, inverting the order of the notes.

Reverse Inversions

When the chord is known and the voicing of the chord is in a recognized inversion, Reverse Inversions will return the chord to the root voicing.

Negative Harmony

[Key required]

Dive into the fascinating world of negative harmony. Flip chords around a tonal axis to produce symmetrical, yet surprising, harmonic movements.

Generate Chords

[Key required]

With the Generate options, create new chords on the fly. Create a new midi clip and draw the root notes, then you can perform the following:

• 3-note chords for triads.
• 4-note chords for tetrads.
• Expand the chord with an extension. For example, with this you can easily turn a triad (Em) into a tetrad (Em7)
  

Customizable Qualities

Choose from:

• Major/Minor generates major/minor triads or diminished in case it's the 7th degree of the key
• Random Quality generates suspended chords, augmented, etc.
• Random Chord will generate a random chord (of random quality and root note) within the key

Verified systems

Ableton Live 12 running on:

• macOS Sonoma on a M2 arm chip
• Windows 10 64bit

Release notes

Version 1.0.1 - Initial release

Support

Any issues? Contact our support at machinelies@proton.me