About the new song feature on the Chorda

 With the Chorda a new feature with songs that seems to have confused people. Sadly Artiphon didn't explain it well which really didn't help.

First let's understand the songs that come with the Chorda at the start. I should say here I get annoyed by their use of the word "song" in this context. Being old school, a song needs to be sung and have some degree of structure as minimums. Artiphon songs have neither, but never mind for now.

The built-in songs are really just a set of settings. When you press "play" in the app you are setting the presets for each mode (Lead, Chord etc.), and also you set the key, the speed - Beats Per Minute, and the scale, Major or Minor. The Lead preset loaded will contain the setting for whether its scale is Pentatonic or Diatonic - that's not part of the song. These songs contain no musical content - I refer to them as "empty songs" in my own head. Once your Chorda has been set to a particular song you can change things, choose a different key, use a different Bass preset etc. whatever you want, and you can save this new set of settings as a new song in the app, giving it it's own name. You can also record content if you want -  your drum beat, melody etc. and save that with it. (I note that saving songs has been a problem for some. It's not a feature I have used except to try it out so if you want more help on that someone else will have to help.) This is how it is for the Chorda and it is the same as the Orba 2. I believe it's the same for the Orba 1.

Just for clarification I should mention that songs and presets start as files in the app. When you first "load" a preset or song the files needed are sent to the Chorda and that song or preset will play. After that, having used other presets, if you want to play that item again the files do not get sent again to the Chorda (unless they have changed in the app or been deleted). Once loaded onto the Chorda, samples cannot be deleted. Those files remain on the device.

However, Artiphon added a new feature with the Chorda and it involves 12 "songs" that can be set and switched between on the Chorda, without using the app. These songs are similar to the original ones but they reside solely on the Chorda itself. They can be copied and given their own name into the app, but these are distinct to those on the Chorda. Songs that are in the app can not be altered if they were made by Artiphon (well, they can but that's something we're not supposed to be doing). All you can do is create something new and make it into a new song, even though it may only be an alteration of another. Songs you have created can be altered in the app by using "Save", using "Save As" will create a new song. The songs saved on the Chorda alone have no name and can be altered on the Chorda, and they can be over-written on the Chorda and that can happen automatically. You can only navigate through these songs on the Chorda. They exist as files kept solely on the Chorda.

The apps have no access to these songs -  they can only create a song into the app, with the same settings and content as you are currently running on the Chorda, as a new entity stored in the app (and that can then be loaded onto to Chorda at later time through the app).

The main point to be clear about here is that the two are different things - those that are named, included in the app and can be loaded to play on the Chorda,  are fixed, and those that reside only on the Chorda device and are volatile. I admit this confused me for some time and it's only became properly clear to me recently while trying to do other things. (I always imagined Artiphon would have done this in a simpler way - quite why they did it this way escapes me.)