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Message: [QUOTE="Bombastus, post: 91793, member: 2178"] Melody Rack’s Echo can move each repeat by a scale step and snap it to the chord sounding at its new position. Ordinary MIDI delay usually cares about when a copied note returns, not whether the harmony underneath has changed. You hear the problem most clearly when a repeat crosses a chord boundary. A note can remain perfectly legal in the key and still rub against the next chord in a way you never intended, because key membership and chord membership are different tests. [HEADING=2]Delayed notes inherit a new harmonic moment[/HEADING] Suppose a melody note lands over C major and an eighth-note repeat carries it into an F major chord. E belongs to the C major scale, so a simple keep-it-in-key rule has no reason to touch it, yet E is not one of the F major triad’s notes. Nothing is outside the scale, but the harmonic job changed while the echo was travelling. Melody Rack treats the timestamp as musical information, not bookkeeping. Echo does more than schedule another MIDI event later. With chord keeping enabled, the repeat is evaluated against the chord at its destination instead of blindly carrying the source pitch into whatever harmony happens to be there. Listeners are sensitive to this kind of shift. Research on [B][URL='https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7602268/']how harmonic context changes pitch perception[/URL][/B] found that in-key pitch changes were more obvious when local harmony did not imply them. Staying inside a scale and fitting the chord are related jobs, but they are not interchangeable. A plain MIDI delay can sound perfectly good when the harmony sits still. Once delayed MIDI notes survive into the next chord, though, timing stops being only a rhythmic parameter. The repeat has arrived in a new musical neighborhood with a different set of strong notes. [HEADING=2]Scale steps and chord tones solve different problems[/HEADING] Melody Rack separates two choices that often get mashed together. Its repeats can climb by scale steps instead of raw semitones, while another control can keep each repeat inside the chord it actually lands on. One protects the contour from chromatic drift, while the other reacts to the progression. A diatonic climb matters because moving one scale step does not mean adding the same number of semitones every time. In C major, E to F is one scale step and one semitone, while F to G is one scale step and two semitones. Fixed chromatic movement ignores that uneven spacing and can pull a melodic echo away from the shape you expected. Chord snapping is stricter. A delayed note may already be diatonic and still need adjustment because the destination chord uses a smaller set of pitches than the key does. [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/song-cage-introduced-melody-rack-for-midi-harmony.77150/']Melody Rack’s harmony-aware MIDI effects[/URL][/B] matter here because Chords supplies the progression Echo can read rather than leaving it with only a global scale. None of this requires forcing the original melody onto chord tones. Echo is solving the notes it creates at the moments they appear, while the source line can still contain passing tones, suspensions, and deliberate tension. A repeated figure can therefore respond to chord changes without turning the lead into a tidy little arpeggio. [HEADING=2]Delay time can change the pitch result[/HEADING] Delay time can now alter pitch indirectly. Change the repeat interval, and you may change not only the rhythm but also which chord each repeat reaches. A quarter-note echo and an eighth-note echo can begin from the same source note yet encounter different harmony later in the bar. Chord rate matters for the same reason. One chord per bar gives the tail more room to stay under the same harmony, while two chords per bar create more boundaries to cross. Longer repeat chains make the effect easier to hear because later notes have more chances to land somewhere the source pitch no longer fits. Audition it like an audio delay, and you can miss the important part. An audio delay moves copies of sound through time. A harmony-aware MIDI delay can let the new timestamp influence which note is finally sent to the instrument. You can also turn chord keeping off when the friction is the point. A pedal-like echo, chromatic climb, or stubborn repeated pitch can sound better when it refuses to accommodate every change underneath. Harmony awareness is useful because it is optional, not because every delayed note must behave politely. A busy progression exposes the difference quickly. Set several repeats, use enough delay time to cross at least one chord boundary, then compare chord keeping on and off while leaving the source phrase alone. What changes comes from the destination of each repeat, not from a blanket key correction smeared across the whole line. [/QUOTE]

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