MusicLab, Inc. presents the Rhythm'n'Chords™ technology, making creation of a rhythm guitar part as easy as that of a hi-hat part in a drum track. Our revolutionary technology is now employed in our MIDI FX Plug-in for Cakewalk Pro Audio™ and in nearest future will also be presented in a MIDI application for Windows and a VST2 Plug-in.

Let's consider all the difficulties that may appear while creating a rhythm guitar part in a MIDI application. There are three conditions you must keep in mind if you want to make a rhythm guitar part as close to the real sound as possible:

• Guitar sound. Most of modern synthesizers have quite realistic guitar programs. Especially realistic sound can be achieved by using samplers, such as Akai's S-series, E-mu's E4-Ultra series, etc. So there's no problem with creating some realistic guitar sounds these days, and that's a really good news. But the rest of the problems are not that easy to solve.

• Guitar chords. Since guitar has unique design of its neck and string tuning, it has quite a specific way of chord construction. Not all chords can be played on the guitar. While playing chords any professional guitarist intuitively chooses chord inversions in a way that not only fits the arrangement, but also maximally provides smooth chord transitions and voicing .Only chord symbols are usually indicated in a guitar chord part, but the other factors, like chord's melodic position and construction totally depend on the guitarist's experience and taste. Thus for successful creation of a guitar chord part you need to know how to construct guitar chords, as well as how to join them in the proper way, which is not a very easy task for a person who wants to create a realistic guitar part via MIDI. Ignoring this condition leads to illogical chord sequence and finally you end up with a quite unrealistic sounding guitar part.

• Specific guitar techniques. If the first 2 conditions are considered, there's one more little thing to think about, that is how to perform the chords using appropriate guitar techniques. There are quite a few characteristic techniques you need to know for performing a guitar chord part, such as downstrum, upstrum, muted strum, glissando, bass and strum, strum on 3 or 4 upper strings, etc. It's impossible to simulate these techniques on a MIDI keyboard in real time since guitar chords have rather wide construction of 2 octaves and even more and you simply cannot simultaneously simulate certain guitar techniques while playing a wide chord with both hands. Thus the possibility of playing a guitar chord part with characteristic sound on a MIDI keyboard is more of a theory than a practical task.

The base of our technology is a simple idea of separate assigning the chords and creating rhythm structure for playing them. Parts of the technology is protected by patent pending.

Now in order to create a guitar track you only have to perform some actions similar to those of a producer creating a rhythm part for an experienced guitarist, that is: to create a chord progression using simple letteral chord symbols and create a one-line rhythm pattern of the part. All the rest will be done by the Rhythm'n'Chords™ as if it were a professional guitarist.

Our technology, which is the base of the product, is called KeyGuitar. It is based on our patented way of chord transformation, which turns any chords taken on a keyboard or written as letteral chord symbols into guitar chords. The KeyGuitar technology also contains lots of features , letting you automate the chord progression voicing process, as well as perform many characteristic guitar techniques. With our Rhythm'n'Chords™ you can create any chord progressions even without any knowledge of the most complex guitar chords you are going to use. We are very proud to introduce the chord assignment system employed in our Rhythm'n'Chords™ program, which lets you conveniently make all chord operations using only your intuition and ears (which are the only things you should trust as we believe). This doesn't mean the professionals can not employ their knowledge of chord constructing as the range of users we believe would bennifit from our program is rather wide, from the very beginners through the most experienced masters of theory and performance. To successfully create a rhythm part you only have to imagine the accompaniment rhythm, enter it as a one-voice melodic part in a Piano Roll window and let Rhythm'n'Chords™ do the rest. If you are experiencing difficulties in creating your own rhythm patterns, don't be sad as our Rhythm Library supplied with Rhythm'n'Chords™ will minimize this problem. You only have to select the appropriate rhythm pattern from the large number of available ones pre-recorded by our professional guitarists, and your work is done.

We think that such a tool as Rhythm'n'Chords™ will create a whole lot of new possibilities in MIDI arrangement work. We know about your problems.
We will help you solve them. With us everything ment to be impossible will come true.