Reviews » Gear/Software » Purrfect Grooves? A Chord Cat Groovebox Review

Purrfect Grooves? A Chord Cat Groovebox Review

The new Chord Cat from AlphaTheta is a surprisingly useful beast and it’s amazing we haven’t had something like it already.

Please welcome to the stage, Chord Cat. AlphaTheta (previously Pioneer DJ) have been crafting innovative, performance-oriented, stage-friendly studio instruments and sequencers for some time, and now they’ve surprised us with a compact, battery-powered device for jamming chords.

‘A what now?’ you ask.

We just told you… a compact, battery-powered, device for jamming chords.

Seriously, though, you use it for composing chord progressions and arpeggios. As a number of people have commented, it’s a bit like Scaler 3, but hardware.

Truthfully, it’s a pretty uncomplicated and highly specialized device, but a surprisingly versatile one. You can use it standalone or as an input device for your DAW and other kit. It works on the go or in the studio. And, crucially, it all feels a bit like the first time somebody said ‘What if we sliced the bread before we sold it?’

Let’s investigate.

U Got the Look

Using Chord Cat for the first time it’s striking how retro it feels. From the colour and the size to the lightweight plastic case and battery compartment, it’s incredibly reminiscent of some 80s and 90s goodies from Yamaha or Casio. In fact, from a purely technological standpoint, they probably could have designed and built this thing in the 90s (more on that later).

A quick look at the front panel reveals three main sections: a 4×4 button matrix on the left; an XY pad on the right; and a row of 13 contact pads along the bottom (let’s call them keys).

Top middle there’s a little screen, and scattered around are 20 function / navigation buttons.

Touch Responsive

That XY pad can function either as a 4×4 matrix (for auditioning different chords, for example) or as a continuous sliding input (volume and pan etc.). The 13 keys can be used for playing chords or individual notes in a scale. The 4×4 buttons can be used as a step sequencer or for adjusting things like pattern lengths.

In fact, most input controls have dual functions, depending on what you’re up to, but everything’s clearly labelled and intuitive.

It’s also pretty compact, which is a definite plus. It fits comfortably on your lap on a train. It fits nicely on a small tray table on the plane. And it fits easily on the desk in a mate’s studio, without needing to move stuff.

The battery life is pretty good too – up to five hours from six AA batteries.

In terms of musical variety and depth, the selection is huge and cuts no corners

To the beat of the drum

Playing Chord Cat is quick and simple. You start by selecting one of up to eight drum and musical parts, called Tracks. Each can be drums or music, it’s entirely up to you.

Yes, despite the name, Chord Cat also lets you program drums – either hit ‘record’ and play them to a metronome with the 13 keys, or program them using the 4×4 grid as a step sequencer. Editing steps and quantising is easy and familiar to anybody who’s ever used an MPC.

It’s a fun time and welcome addition, but not why we bought a ticket to this party. We’re here for the music.

Off the scale

There are a few ways to start playing music with Chord Cat but all begin with selecting your key / scale.

In terms of musical variety and depth, the selection is huge and cuts no corners. If you want to be ignored at a cocktail party, say ‘the only thing diminished about this thing’s library are the chords’. Specifically, we’re talking over 10,000 variations.

If you’re musically trained, you can dive deep into your chosen scales. Beginners looking to play along to an existing project can throw a demo of it into RekordBox or Mixed In Key, find the scale, then match that on Chord Cat. And those seeking track-starting inspiration can browse scales by genre and start from there.

With your scale selected you audition compatible chords with the XY pad buttons (the screen will display the notes in each chord as you play), then assign any you like to those 13 keys, ready to jam them into your DAW or record into a pattern in Chord Cat itself.

Top tip: You can assign the chords to any keys, but it’s easier to play them if they’re assigned roughly in the order of your planned chord progression.

Push the button

When you’re ready, recording chord progressions as patterns is as simple as hitting record, either on Chord Cat or your DAW, depending on your workflow, and then jamming away. You can also apply an arpeggiator made from the notes of your chords. And you can either set your DAW or the Chord Cat as the MIDI sync control.

Once you have some patterns, it’s simple to arrange them into songs and there are a number of tools for introducing variations, such as reversing the order of steps. How easy you find this depends entirely on how comfortable you are with hardware. Some of us love arranging with the buttons on our grooveboxes, but it’s like creative Kryptonite to many DAW-centric producers.

And if you’re the latter? Is Chord Cat still worth it? Probably, yes. Our two favourite use cases involved playing chord sequences directly into Ableton Live for on-screen editing or coming up with loop ideas on the train then recording them into our DAW via USB MIDI. Both require minimal menu diving.

I like the sound of that

And the onboard sounds? They’re okay… 145 sounds and 16 kits. Leads, basses, pads, basic keys, and a few genre-themed drum kits are what you get, with basic controls for amplitude envelope, a low-pass filter, and portamento.

In general we found the synths a bit more convincing than the drums, but there’s no point pretending you’ll release many club-ready hits with them. Some have a bit of lo-fi, quirky, budget charm, and a couple are pretty legit, but mostly you’ll be composing in Chord Cat then using other sounds in your DAW later. (Check out a few examples below… )

Drum and Bass factory demo.

House factory demo

In the mix

Moving on to mixing capabilities… well… this is an unashamedly retro MIDI groovebox, so you get to control the level and the pan for each track. That’s all you need. That’s all you get. More would have required onboard DSP which would have added huge cost for a feature you don’t need.

There is, however, a pretty cool MIDI-based delay and a ducker.

A stroke of genius

So that’s what it does. But if Chord Cat is so fun and versatile, and not exactly cutting-edge tech, why are we only seeing it now?

Well, when old farts (sorry… ‘industry veterans’) talk about how far production tech has come, the conversation is always about plugins, virtual analog, DAWs, etc.. But they’ve been around for over two decades now, it’s been ages since there were any real breakthroughs. Things are smaller. Cheaper. But there have been no new sounds or leaps in quality for years.

Consciously or otherwise, then, the industry has turned to one of the last remaining frontiers… bypassing musical theory training and knowledge. After 30 years of musically-illiterate chancers churning out dance floor bangers, the industry has finally embraced the idea of helping people who don’t know a stave from a semiquavers to write actual music. Whether it’s Scaler, in-key DAW features (Expressive Chords in Live 12.2), or chord modes on controller keyboards, we’re seeing more and more tools for playing and sequencing complex chords.

But if Chord Cat is so fun and versatile, and not exactly cutting-edge tech, why are we only seeing it now?

Nobody’s purrfect

In terms of actual criticisms, the only one we have relates to screen brightness. If you planned to sit in a sunny park or garden and play it, think again – the screen’s invisible in direct sunlight.

There’s also a file management app, but it wasn’t ready in time for our review, so we can’t comment.

Finally, input-quantise would be cool, so that you could jam with Chord Cat live, safe in the knowledge that everything the audience heard played on the quantised value.

Two enthusiastic paws up

At the end of the day, though, on-stage performance is not the point. Chord Cat isn’t meant to be your standalone stage hub, or your go-to step-sequencing percussion powerhouse, or even your central sequencer.

No, the clue’s in the name. It’s meant to let you compose effective, genre-suited chord progressions, arpeggios and b-lines with ease, irrespective of your musical knowledge. It’s meant to be as practical to use on the bus as it is in the studio. It’s meant to push you down creative pathways you wouldn’t otherwise travel. And it’s meant to do all that for a price that makes sense, given that it is, unashamedly, not a jack-of-all trades. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Nobody needs one. Not everybody will enjoy one. But it’s already developed quite a hardcore following of producers importing from Asia.

And us? We love it. So here’s two tracks we made with it: