Ripchord Free VST Plugin for Composing

Ripchord is a free MIDI plugin for creating and remixing chord progressions

You can create custom chord presets from scratch, load expansion packs, or import any MIDI file that contains chords and Ripchord will automatically create a preset from it. Ripchord helps you easily compose progressions by playing single notes to trigger full chords. You can watch the tutorial on YouTube: Ripchord Overview

Expansion Packs

Anyone is welcome to make expansion packs for Ripchord, and give them away or sell them, without any further permission required. We don’t sell any expansion packs directly, or take any kind of cut from third party expansion pack sales.

Open Source

Ripchord is open source under GNU GPLv3. You can check out the source code on Github: Source Code

Plugin Formats

Ripchord is avalailable as an AU or VST3 for Mac, and a VST3 for Windows. We get a lot of requests for a VST2 version of Ripchord. Actually the first version of Ripchord we made was a VST2, and then we found out that Steinberg would not let us give it to anyone. Steinberg stopped granting any new VST2 licenses in 2018 because they are trying to retire the format, so unfortunately that is the end of the story. This also means that whatever DAW you use must support the full VST3 MIDI spec in order to use Ripchord. More details can be found here: VST2 is Discontinued

Two modes

Ripchord has two modes, play and edit. Most of the time you will be in play mode, in which you can either play an external MIDI keyboard, or click on the input keys with a mouse, in order to trigger the chords in your preset and compose progressions.

Edit mode can be used to create a new preset from scratch, or to edit an existing preset. In edit mode, when you mouse click on the input keys, instead of triggering the chord, it will select the input key so that you can assign or modify the output keys that are mapped to it. You can still trigger the chords in edit mode if you have an external MIDI keyboard hooked up, that way you can preview the chords as you edit them.

Presets

This view allows you to easily organize and access your Ripchord presets. Presets are at the core of what Ripchord does. If no preset is loaded, Ripchord essentially does nothing.