Song Cage has announced the release of Melody Rack, a MIDI effect plugin for macOS and Windows.
A melody goes in by singing it, by playing it on a controller, or by letting the plugin listen to what the track already sends past it, and it lands on the session’s grid as MIDI. A chain of fourteen MIDI effects then works on it.
The chain runs on harmony rather than on a scale setting. The Chords slot writes a chord progression from the melody that went in, and the thirteen slots after it read the chord under each note, so correction snaps to it, the harmony line follows it, the note delay lands inside it and the arpeggiator runs through it. Change a chord and everything after it moves.
Melody Rack keeps the frame-level pitch behind each note instead of rounding it away, so it can tell how far the voice sat from the note it was rounded to. A flat third that was aimed at and held is left alone, a missed note is corrected, and there is a switch to turn that off. The same pitch curve travels to the export, where MPE writes it in as per-note bend.
The fourteen slots are Chords, In Key, Harmony, Expression, Bones, Reply, Morph, Arp, Motif, Euclid, Echo, Register, Chance and Feel, and they run in any order. Nothing in the rack generates music from a prompt: every note it writes comes from the melody that went in.
Output is live MIDI to the instrument on the track, or a clip dragged onto one, carrying everything, the sung line alone, the parts alone, or the chords alone. The plugin makes no sound of its own. In Logic it appears under MIDI FX rather than under instruments, because the Audio Unit registers as a MIDI processor.
One button sends the take to Song Cage, the songwriting app Melody Rack shares its engine with: the chords the rack wrote, the melody as it came through the rack, and each part the rack made as its own take. In Song Cage the words sit on the same timeline as the notes, a word at a time under the melody note that carries it, so the line that was hummed into the plugin can be finished as a whole song with verses, a chorus and lyrics.
Pricing & Availability
Melody Rack is $59 with a 14-day trial, and $39 for owners of the Song Cage desktop and plugin licence. It is a separate product from Song Cage and does not require it.
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