I made a few midi files in Reaper, if that's what you mean.

 

Supurb. I got it. Might work with it tonight.

 

There is not much there you couldn't do by yourself with basic knowledge of chords and playing and experimenting things on the keyboard.
The problem I have with these kind of plugins is that they don't teach you anything and take away the opportunity for being creative yourself. You end up dialing knobs and being dependent on them.

 

yes it absolutely can! You should also check out Re:midi 4, if you are into chopping midi. Its a midi sampler. You load a midi file, and you can either chop it up yourself, or have it autochop, like serato etc do with audio. Its so much fun. It comes loaded with a bunch of creative commons classical music, baroque, gospel, bach, jazz, etc. Load one up, set auto chop, find the chops you like, and tweak them further if wanted, with a fair amount of onboard midi fx and editing tools, then play them into your session like you would a sampler. Just so fun. Super underrated tool. I use it almost daily and very rarely see it brought up.

 

Is learning a requirement for making music? As far as creativity, I could say the opposite. This tool provides an opportunity for me to be creative. As the generated midi slowly walks around, constantly evolving, I can focus on experimenting with sound design. I split the voices across a few synths, get in the flow and create a cacophony of sound, using multiple synths and fx. I set the tempo to something ridiculously slow, like 30 BPM, and "perform" the individual channels faders, send FX, and insert FX. Creating a piece of art that to some is just a strange drone, but to me is a beautiful, evolving, harmonic bliss.

To say using this type of tool lacks creativity is to be close minded. In your eyes there is only one way that is the "correct" way of doing things. You MUST play the keyboard and experiment with chords and voicings or else you are not creative. Severely limiting yourself with such strict rules. Experiment, have fun, enjoy the process. For what its worth, I can play the keys, i have been playing for over 20 years. I write many songs for many people, by playing the notes in. I also learned a long time ago that without experimentation, sound design, painting with sound, this life can start to look more like a job. I got into music because it was fun. Creating with a tool like this as the co-pilot is fun. PS - i hope this made sense and is not too all over the place. I slept literally ZERO hours last night, im on hour 30 something right now lmao.

 

No actually the problem is if you can't hear music no chord generator will help you.

 

What plugins do you use that actually teach you anything, aside from tooltips when you hover the mouse over a control?

If any plugins actually did teach you things, there wouldn't be a million youtube videos trying to explain them to people.

 

Ultimately music is about feel. That's what Geddy Lee said. It's 100% emotional processing of information.

 

It’s tough out here - people can be pretty harsh. A plugin that might be the holy grail for one guy can get a lot of criticism. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all. There’s nothing quite like discovering something exciting and then getting shut down by the community.

Over the years, I’ve come across some simple plugins that filled gaps that were important to me. Gaps that might seem trivial to veterans but were game-changers for me. There’s no reason to tear someone down just because they like something. I may hate mustard and mayo, but I don’t go into hotdog or sandwich forums just to tell people they’re wrong for loving them.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. Peace out.

 

It seems to exist on the sister site unless my eye's are playing tricks. I think I am getting your drift Arctic, and I agree in that I do not care in the least what I am conforming to or not conforming to in the rule book. Sometimes I will hand draw stacks of spaced notes on the timeline and after adjusting semitones and blah blah enough, I find something by luck. ANd I don't care what the musi-maticians say I did or call it. lol. You can tell in a nano second if you like something. And if you can't that was why I said some people can't hear music.

I am BIG on chord generators. I felt the same way about Improvisator as the OP does about this now. Sometimes the message gets lost or inverted.

 

LANDR Composer would be great if it could drive different synths with each of it's modes: chords, bass, melody, etc. at the same time. However as far as I could tell it isn't a midi driver like SpaceWalk. Maybe SpaceWalk will introduce separate modes like LANDR Composer in future versions. Or, maybe there's a way to set up four instances of SpaceWalk running four different synths on four different tracks in your DAW and route the output of each synth in sync to four empty tracks. Then again, maybe I should get a more powerful computer. LOL!

 

I explained a few comments back that is one of the ways i use Spacewalk. Each note gets its own synth voice. Its pretty simple to setup in ableton with some M4L devices, if you use ableton. Im sure there are ways in other daws as well that are not very cpu heavy.

 

If anyone cares,

Improvisator outputs Bass, Tenor, Alto, Soprano (4 notes in a chord in the Improvisator universe) on MIDI channels 1-4. Actually it's hard wired that way. There are boxes you can check to add up and down octaves on each part too. Up to 5 octaves sounding at once per part.

 

Thanks, shinyzen. I must have missed it in your previous post. I'm very grateful that you pointed this out. I'm going to try this in my DAW (reaper). I'll post with the results if I can get my cat to quit turning off my computer. She does this when it's her dinner time.

 

I used to go to a bar where they had a band playing Brazilian music, 5 hours without repeating a song. They could play anything (jazz, pop, rock...) in any key.

To say, that a skilled musician, who dedicates years of learning and perfecting their skills has less creativity it is to say, that learning has no value...

NO plugins can create that...learning gives you more possibilities

I still use a plugin called books...

 

Last edited: Feb 22, 2026 at 5:39 AM

The Brazillian band sounds great, bar bands like that are a lot of fun. I think you misunderstood my sentences tho. I asked the question "is learning a requirement for making music" in response to your "The problem I have with these kind of plugins is that they don't teach you anything". I stated "As far as creativity, I could say the opposite" in response to the second half of your sentence "take away the opportunity for being creative yourself".

To clarify, I was asking if learning was a requirement for making music in response to your not liking these plugins because they don' teach you anything. Regarding creativity.... while you said "because these plugins do not teach you anything they take away the opportunity for being creative yourself", my view is the opposite. These types of plugins can empower me to be creative. In sound design and arrangement / live performance.

But now that you bring it up, just because a musician is extremely skilled, and can tell you the chords to a Jobim classic, does not necessarily mean they are creative. They are skilled? yes. Disciplined, yes. Technically trained, yes. Creative? Thats not a guarantee.

Somebody with zero training can be more creative than the most skilled graduate of Berklee. Being technically savvy uses a different part of the brain than being creative. in my experience, the most creative people I know and have worked with have little to no training. I do a lot of sessions as a producer / songwriter, with many different levels of collaborators. The majority of them have little technical training, maybe taking guitar lessons in high school etc, yet are signed with Warner Chappell, Sony, Pulse and so on. When I do work with an extremely skilled musician, many of them can be equally as creative, but some are so skilled its impossible to actually create lol. Too much time spent figuring out chord inversions or what the right harmony is instead of just vibing and laying shit down.

Of course I think its important to perfect your skills and to never stop learning, but within music, and especially music creation / production there are many types of skills. Having a chord generator, that spits out flowing, evolving progressions allows me to put on my sound design hat, and work on building that skill. Or to put on my "ambient performance art piece" hat and practice my skill of arrangement, live mixing, and live sound design. Could I spend the time to build out a progression that is forever evolving ? No, I cannot, because im not a computer, and I do not have an algorithm that allows for me to build an infinitely evolving progression. Could I spend 30 seconds and lay down 32 bars of evolving chords and melody? yes, I could. But I don't want that, I want an infinitely evolving progression and melody, and more importantly I want to just enjoy the meditative practice of sound design and live mixing, without having to think about the progression.

As far as The girl from Ipanema, no I can't tell you the chords, and why should I? Me knowing the chords does not mean anything except that I have spent time to learn the chords. I can create a solo on the fly without needing to know the chords, because I do it by ear. Great song by the way. I have something like 20 versions of it on vinyl lol. The Getz/Gilberto version is likely one of my all time favorite songs.

 

So funny that you use "The Dude" as your avatar here.
You seem almost the OPPOSITE of "The Dude".