Bend between chords with Pitch Innovations Fluid Chords 2, the latest iteration of the MIDI plugin, now with an internal wavetable synth and MPE sampler, and lots more. It’s on sale for $49 until July 18.
Sometimes a company lives up to its name. We first encountered Pitch Innovations when we featured its Eternal Arps app in our modern arpeggiator tutorial, When Is An Arp Not Just An Arp? Now the company is back with its latest, erm, innovation, Fluid Chords 2, an update to its rather unique MPE MIDI chord bender.
The original Fluid Chords, which won the MIDI Innovation Award in 2022, offered you a way to bend notes between chords, sort of like polyphonic portamento. The latest version of Fluid Chords 2 expands on the original with a number of new features, including real-time performance enhancements and a built-in sound engine.
Bend ‘Em If You Got ‘Em
For the new Fluid Chords 2, Pitch Innovations promises smarter chord bending with a brand new voice-leading engine for more musical bends. This includes the Strum feature, which lets each note bend one after the other, adding a natural expressive feel, according to the developer. There’s also a Flow function for choosing how chords resolve and how the notes bend between chords, “even allowing for pitch crossovers and other unusual changes,” the company says.
The new Fluid Chords 2 also offers an intelligent harmony engine for generating chords based on key, scale, and genre, with chord slots upped to 16 from the original plugin’s eight. You can trigger these chords with single key presses on your MIDI controller or even create splits to allow you to play melodies with the opposite hand.
Also new is the Real-Time Mode, which allows you to bend chords in real time as you play them, with a control for how long the glide will take between chords.
Fluid Sound Engine
Fluid Chords 2 is more than just a MIDI plugin, though, as it now offers a complete internal sound engine, making it an instrument as well. This Fluid Sound Engine includes two sound sources, the Wavetable Synth and MPE Sampler, and offers built-in Gater, Reverb, Delay, and Compressor effects.
If you’d rather use your own sounds, you can host MPE-compatible VSTs within Fluid Chords 2, or drag and drop the chord progressions as MIDI within your DAW. The plugin will automatically map each chord to a trigger key.
Fluid Chords 2 looks like another solid offering from Pitch Innovations. The regular price is $99, but it’s on sale for $49 until July 18. Buy it here.