online omnichord

  • recently discovered a website to play omnichord! big news for me as someone who doesn’t know how to play instruments but really enjoys jam nights

how to play

  • there are 3 types of sounds you can play on the online omnichord

    1. CHORDS. there are three rows of nine different chords that you can play by using the three rows of keys on your keyboard. so, the qwerty row is for the major scale, asdfg is for the minor, and zxcvb is for the 7th. you can only play one chord at a time.

      1. a 7th chord is a triad with a 4th note stacked on top

    2. HARP/STRUMPLATE: there are 12 keys in the row contains 1234 that you can use make cool harp sounds. the cool thing is that the strumplate isn’t a fixed set of notes. they can only be played in conjunction with a chord and are basically arpeggios (when you play each note in a chord in sequence instead of together) of that chord. this means they get reassigned every time you change the underlying chord

      1. let’s say you are playing the Eb chord major. this means the strumplate is comprised only of the notes contained in Eb major. so the “1” key on your keyboard would be Eb, the “2” would be a G, the “3” would be a Bb. then 4,5,6 would be Eb, G, Bb but an octave above.

        1. while it is common, not all chords have three notes

    3. RHYTHM NOISES: plays a beat & you can adjust the tempo

  • to play the instrument is that you have one hand that plays the chords, and the other plays the strumplate
  • you might notice that the omnichord does not contain all chords that exist, so you can transpose (shift all notes by a fixed number of semitones/half steps) the song you want to play in order to match the chords available to you on the omnichord
    • btw transposing notes does not mean moving notes by the # of letters, since some letters have different amounts of half steps between them. the unit is half steps
    • q: how does one know the # of steps to transpose and in what direction? a: somewhat trail and error. a standard octave is 12 semitones so shifting by the search space is small since -6 and +6 covers all notes before you wrap around back to the same note