Why did you?

Our general philosophy in product fit and design revolves around getting the sound and function of our studio hardware without having to patch and route everything into the DAW. Bluntly: we're lazy, but like the capabilities of the hardware we've collected but can't bother to use. This one came to me while cleaning up the studio to make room for more gear that I won't use and I was thinking about how fun the Chord Memory on the MC-909 is. After spec'ing out what I was thinking of and getting a rough draft working, it turns out that there's a ton of other options out there. 🤦‍♂️

Why should I?

Honestly? I don't know. Most DAWs already have this and a strict MIDI effect is a pain to set up with MIDI routing and all. However, if you use Cakewalk, you're going to love this! You have no choice but to love this. You love! Cakewalk has no alternative to this. For all the built in Chord/Multi-note/Note Stack/Chorderize MIDI effects, we offer something a little bit beyond what's built-in in each case. Is it worth the faff? You decide.... for FREE!!

Huh? Wha?

Le'sigh - Roland put Chord Memory on the Alpha Juno in 1985 and again on the MC-505 in 1998, and everybody stopped adding it by the mid-2000s. It was replaced by the "smart chord" plugin — the kind that knows what key you are in, quantises to a scale, and substitutes a chord it thinks you meant. Stabmatic is not that. It is a MIDI effect that holds one chord form and slams it onto whatever note you play, unaltered.

What a chord form is

A set of semitone offsets. Nothing else. The form does not know what key it is in, because it has no concept of key; it is a shape, and the shape does not bend. Play a note a semitone higher and every note in the form moves a semitone with it. That rigidity is the whole product — it is what makes parallel harmony sound the way it has sounded in house, techno, rave and jungle for thirty years, and it is precisely the thing a scale-aware plugin can't do.

Two ways in, one engine

• Capture — the Alpha Juno approach. Arm it, play a chord, let go. That is now the working form. No menus, no browser, no save dialog standing between you and the next idea.
• Library — the MC-x0x / Fantom approach. 64 factory forms, transcribed verbatim out of the Roland manual rather than approximated, plus a user library you can fill up as far as you like and a pad grid for editing a form by eye.

Both feed the same transposition engine, so a captured form and a factory form behave identically. An EDIT light tells you the working form has changes you have not saved, which is the one piece of state a performer actually needs to see.

One chord at a time

Incoming MIDI is reduced to a single mono voice before the form is expanded, on last-note priority — so the plugin plays one chord, not a pile-up of every note still under your fingers. Retrigger gives you the stab; Legato lets a returning note slide without re-articulating. Every non-note event passes straight through untouched, velocity included, because a MIDI effect that eats your CCs is a MIDI effect you will uninstall.

Five parameters

Exactly five things are exposed to the host for automation. Everything else — the working form, the user library, favourites, the theme — is plugin state, not a knob for your DAW to fight you over. It runs as VST3 and CLAP on Windows and macOS, and LV2 on Linux. There is no standalone build, because a MIDI effect outside a host has nothing to send MIDI to.