We recently gave away 3 copies of Captain Plugins by Mixed in Key – Read on to find out why these are the only composing plugins you’ll need for production!
Writing music ‘in the box’ can be extremely difficult, especially when you’re on the go. There have been countless moments of inspiration on a plane with no simple way to play complex chords and melodies using just your computer keyboard.
MIDI is quickly becoming more and more popular, evidenced in the meme-like status of plugins like Massive and Serum. It’s a powerful feeling knowing that you can create whole songs with just a laptop and a pair of earbuds. With so much freedom, however, it can be hard to express musical ideas through a machine meant mostly for other purposes, at least physically. Well, look no further because Mixed In Key/Odesi have created an awesome new suite of plugins to inspire creativity, elevate your productivity, and maybe teach you a thing or two about music theory along the way!
Captain Plugins (aptly named) is an impressive suite of MIDI-writing tools for electronic music composition. The four devices — Chords, Play, Melody, and Deep — communicate with one another to make sure your MIDI instruments stay in tune with each other. You can use Captain Plugins in many different ways: as a musical sketchpad, for building loops and patterns, or to compose entire melodies!
Tinkering around with different chord progressions and timings in Captain Chords.
We used all four plugins in the compositional process for a remix for another local Seattle artist. The built-in sampler instruments actually sound pretty amazing and we ended up using several in the song. There’s also easy to access effects to dial in the instruments with decent specificity.
Here’s what we came up with, expect a release on a local label in the next few months!
The bass, chords, and some atmospheric sounds are all resampled from the included library.
Click here to learn more about Captain Plugins from Mixed in Key!
How do you typically write your MIDI chord progressions, basslines, arpeggios, and melodies? Let us know in the comments below!
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