Just want to share this with everybody who might not have heard about it yet. Xfer Cthulhu, here’s the video of Steve Duda at Icon Collective showcasing the plug in. I bought it last night and it’s blew my mind for coming up with chords and melodies. The bloke is a genius. £20 for something that can do this for youbr
br
iframe width=“560” height=“315” src=“YouTube” frameborder=“0” allowfullscreen/iframe
Seems pretty similar to “the schwarzenator”
Yeah, I’ve just had a look at it, looks ok too but the bloke who designed it doesn’t really know anything about music theory, hence why the preset scales he uses are given random names and not C Minor, Eb Major etc. I don’t have max for live either, but it does look pretty good still
I wouldn’t be too quick to assume how much Steve Duda does and doesn’t know about music theory! He is incredibly knowledgable, and has designed Cthulhu’s presets around a number of chorales and classical progressions. This is why they don’t correspond to particular ‘keys’ as such, because they were written specifically in a way that changes key as they develop.br
br
However, someone on the Xfer forum has posted a link to a number of keys and scales that correspond to specific keys in Cthulhu. This might help if you are looking for progressions in specific keys?
Yeah, I wondered why that was. On the video he mentions he done years of classical piano (if I remember right) and he fell into certain comfortable progressions etc so he made the plug in. I asked him why he used the chorales and this is what he said “the Bach chorales were just my inspiration for coming up br
with cool chord progressions due to the voice leading (and being public br
domain). They play back the default chorale by playing chromatically br
up the keyboard” Then he told me about the user presets that had been made too. Just instead of using standard scales, I guess he was coming up with better music by experimenting with these chorales
I totally agree with your subtitle to this thread. I’ve found Cthulhu such a great plugin to use, both as something to noodle around with in a spare 10 minutes here and there, and also as a great learning tool. I’m ashamed to say my own music theory knowledge is low to nil, and this has inspired me to learn more.
Yeah, I’m loving it at the minute. The thing with me is, I’ve never had the time to learn an instrument (Piano/Keyboard would be my choice if I could) and now I want to make my own house tracks so I’ve had to make up for the lack of motor skills with theory. There’s obviously a LOT I still don’t know but I would say I know enough, I’ve spoke to lads in bands and they are surprised about how much they don’t actually know what they are doing with their instruments, where as I’m envious that I can’t do what they are doing with the instrument, but I’ve made some of my own presets now and playing chromatically up the keyboard I can play all the basic chords then sus2, sus4 and all inversions of these. Haven’t got round to throwing 7th/9th’s in there yet but I’m loving deep house at the minute so I might have to get that sorted soon. Anyway, it’s only because of that plug in that I can do this. I love it. The arpeggiator is amazing too. Shame it’s not a bit more straight forward to use in Logic so i have to use Live instead
I’ll perfect the presets and throw them up on the xfer forum aswell mate
Nice one - thanks Martin! br
br
I’ve just bought a Novation Impulse and it works a treat with Cthulhu. The Impulse has a built in arpeggio that you can modify through the drum pads (ie. knock out certain steps etc.) When this is run through Cthulhu you can create some great chord progressions that are arpeggiated in time with the host program. Add to this the swing functionality on the Impulse and you can get some pretty wild results. I’ll post a YouTube video when I get the time and post a link here.