Chord synthesizer
A chord synth is a portable instrument built around dedicated chord buttons rather than a full keyboard: press one button and it voices a whole chord, usually paired with a strum surface (a touch strip or plate) to articulate it. The point is accessibility — you can play harmonically coherent music without knowing how to finger chords on a piano. Per chord-synths-compared, the lineage runs back to the Suzuki Omnichord (1981); the current crop adds onboard synthesis, sequencing, and battery portability.
Why it’s its own class here
The spoke’s other instrument classes are organized by what makes the sound — synthesizer (oscillators), sampler (recorded audio), mixer (nothing, just routing). A chord synth is organized by how you address harmony: the sound engine can be anything (the three compared span digital lo-fi to multi-model synthesis), but the defining move is the chord-button interface. So it belongs on the control axis, not the sound-generation axis — it’s the clearest answer yet to the synthesis’s recurring “who moves the controls” question: here the interface itself encodes music theory, so a non-pianist moves them. That makes it a sibling to the midi-controller (a surface that shapes sound) more than to the synthesizer, except a chord synth makes its own sound.
The three founding examples span three axes
- Workstation — HiChord wraps the chord buttons in a looper/drum/sampler/sequencer, “almost a mini groovebox,” tying into the groovebox thread (akai-mpc-one-g2).
- Harmonic intelligence — Orchid ORC-1‘s voice-leading engine and inversions/ extensions make the smarts about harmony, not features; multiple synthesis models (VA/FM/reed) sit under a chord-first surface.
- DIY / open-source — Minichord is the cheapest and simplest, an open-source Omnichord homage, extending the DIY thread (polyuanalog, korg-nts-4).
Related
chord-synths-compared · hichord · orchid-orc-1 · minichord · midi-controller · synthesizer