Quord is a soundbath synthesizer and harmony exploration machine.

Four Sawtooth Waves provide the raw sound. Sawtooth waves have a nice brassy timbre when filtered and also provide a good amount of overtones to process.

The long sliders control these four pitches. Carefully slide them to find pockets where two, three, or more voices sit together - either with ease or with tension. The pitch ranges of the oscillators are limited from bass to alto to allow for some tuning precision by hand. Quord lacks a traditional keyboard. Instead you play it by tuning the oscillators. If Quord were an acoustic instrument, it would be like a guitar that you play by retuning the strings.

The Mixer, with four short sliders, combines the sawtooth voices into one sound stream. Look for (green) caps to show how Voice 1 maps between the mixer sliders and the pitch sliders.

The mix flows into two sound shapers: a Filter (yellow) followed by a Distortion (red). The filter tames the sound before the distortion adds edge, highlights beating rhythms, and glues the sound together.

Surprisingly, we found that the Resonance works great as a fifth voice. At the right settings, it latches onto overtones of the blended sawtooth waves. These overtones combine to make a new musical scale that always compliments the drone. Simple melodies can be teased out for ancient campfire music

Rhythm (blue) is a low frequency oscillator for timing and mood. It has a sawtooth wave for sharp rhythms and a sine wave for soft ones. Like traditional LFOs, Rhythm can wiggle the filter cutoff. Rhythm can also bias the audio mix for some unexpected results, including a bass drum/sidechain effect.