Padme: Hacking the Circle of Fifths With Shepard Tones 

the chord "brightness" setting at the end blew my mind this all works so elegantly, it's so cool!!! I wonder if there are any market synthesizers out there that work similar to this, it's pretty darn unique!

Great work! Is Padme available for download?

The shepard illusion demonstration blew my mind

WOW!!! 😲 amazing trickery!! BTW: i always knew that the Amiga mouse was made to be a foot paddle.

Att some point lft will have such a large collection of amazing instruments that he can just go somewhere with 4 copies of himself and just go play Space Debris

We need a video on how you built the samples too! We need it! Or… well… *I* would be amused by it :-) You’re awesome! ❤

oh my goodness - came for the amiga retrocomputing, but subscribing for the music theory

Your videos are pure gold.

It would be super cool to have a 'legato' mode modifier key that when pressed would keep playing and transposing the same sample. This would result in changing the brightness while also changing the pitch with the correct amount. Resulting in the ability to play connected melodic phrases in the original amiga/tracker style.

The next step could be to introduce a gate/stutter step-sequencer to automate the rhythmic gated effect and just focus on performing the chords and harmonies. Either by recording your gate pattern live, or through a TR drum machine pattern styled interface where a row of keys each turn on/off 16th or 8th positions within a bar.

Wow! Looking forward to hearing more music based on this. Concert at Fjälldata 2025? ;) Thumbnail name approved btw. :D

Everyone: Hacking is better than music because you can't use tricks like reusing registers and memory between different instructions in music. Lftkryo: Hold my keyboard.

Space Debris mentioned, summon @MarkusKaarlonenMusic

That's a clever way of managing both inputs and memory. There's a fairly obvious gap in chord coverage, with no Dominant 7th, but apart from that it gets almost everything.

Having experienced Sonix on Amiga in the 90's, I am really amazed by this! The only thing missing would be a filter to get a sharper/more mellow sound.

Honey, look, someone plays music using an Amiga keyboard. And he uses a mouse as a foot pedal. Honey, put that bloody smartphone away, you have to see this. 😉

What is the video allowing the amiga to play hi-fi samples lft?

Thanks for featuring Space Debris in the video! 😊 And a great explanation of how we tried to use sampled chords in mods back in the day. A funny (?) little detail I don’t think I have mentioned elsewhere: You can briefly see at 1:32 that I’m calling the suspended chord variation “arrested”. Well, I was still in the very early stages of learning both English and music theory, and I had no idea what this kind of chord is called in English (I barely knew “major” and “minor”). I knew the special chord can be called “pidätetty” in Finnish, and one way to translate that is “arrested”… which is of course totally wrong, and I’m pretty sure I knew it’s most probably wrong. But I didn’t let small details like that matter too much, as long as the sound itself worked properly. 😄 Also, Padme looks & sounds great, some clever programming & interesting music theory in there!

An Amiga accordion! Neat.

So many little clever and intuitive design choices here! Each step made perfect sense as to why that's the way you'd go about it, but I don't think I'd have thought of it all myself! And that's the mark of good design really isn't it? Something that seems obvious in retrospect. I particularly enjoyed the use of pitch shifting alongside remapping there at the end, of course! But also wow! What a fun project this is, and thanks for sharing it with us :)

holy shit i did NOT think the circle of fifths could be effed with that much

Impressive yet again.

and sure ... it HAD to be space debris.

Mind blowingly concise and well explained video. Thanks for sharing

Excellent video! When you're stacking two fifths CG and GD to get a Csus2 or Gsus4, do you hear G more pronounced since two channels are playing it? (And thus perhaps making it sound more like a Gsus4?) I couldn't really make it out myself, but I wonder what your experience is when building it. The trick of stacking chords to make others can be used on an accordion too, by the way, but in that case each note would only be played by one "channel".

Music on tracker need a lot of patience and dedication, 4 track one note a the time was very limitating, but thanks to the sampling chord trick, it was even difficult to do that on a famicom tracker or C64 one, by using arpegio for emulate the chord, on the SNES it was the memory limited to 64kb that was a pain in the ass to deal for sampling continuous strings or pad sound, you must use a very short and lofi sample for that convert in there BRR format, the megadrive feel more friendly with there FM and master system chip plus sampling for the drum and some extra.

I wish my Amigas still worked... I have to play My music on a fancy Yamaha keyboard.

Amazing. You are a wizard of dark magic when it comes to the old machines.

You blew my mind once again.

Is that keyboard the same age as me?! That intro was hott.

Amazing as always!

We already know you're a Wizard... "A Mind Is Born" and the Chipophone... but can you tickle the MC68000 + Paula into becoming a software defined synth?

Awesome! Great design and a brilliant use of the Shepard illusion. One minor correction: at 7:34 you call this chord an E minor 6th chord, when in fact minor 6 chords consist of a minor triad with a major 6th, so E minor 6th would be E G B C#... confusing and inconsistent I know, but that's just how it is. The chord you played consisting of E G B C has no better name than "C major 7th in first inversion" as far as I am aware. Correct me if I'm wrong but this system therefore doesn't allow for minor 6th chords, half diminished chords, fully diminished 7th chords or dominant 7th chords. These could all be achieved by adding tritones to the palette of available intervals (and you would only need 6), then you would have access to pretty much every chord you could ask for!

damn you re a genius

jamil

You are a genius!

Mind. Blown. (also AMIGAAAAAH!)

Nice

very cool!

grande!

Awesome man!

Delightfully clever design! I dig it. On an unrelated note - could you tell me about your piano? It's been a pleasure hearing it over all these years, and I've grown quite curious about it. :)

I was blown away by tracker music when I first heard it on the Atari and later PC, but the memory constraints on 16 bit machines did tend to reduce the variations of chord samples, and there was a big influence of rave music so a lot of tunes sounded a bit samey at that time. In contrast on the C64 people were writing fast arpeggiators to simulate more voices, and there seemed to be more chord qualities being used -- the Follin bros certainly seemed to like maj/min 7s and some altered dominants.

Excellent design! A pad synth that abstract away the concept of chord inversions and replaces it with more/less brightness!

Amazing work as always! Great to see Amiga getting all the love. And nice shoutout to @MarkusKaarlonenMusic there as well. :)

Amazing stuff as always! Very clever!

Watched the video, enjoyed every second of it.

This is incredibly ingenious! *Thumbs up*

Bedankt

You never fail to amaze. This one was particularly fun for the added fourths 😊

oh well... ...clears throat... AMIGAAAAA!!!!!111111111

That is a brilliant, elegant and ingenious design. Wonderful.

Laxity will approve your horror chord ;)

Genius music theory implementation!

Nice idea, wonderful sounds!

Incredible!

1:11 No. The stairstep effect is a myth.