User Manual

SoloVoice

A jazz-literate chord/scale companion & vocal-to-MIDI humanizer

Version 1.0 · September 2026
SoloVoice (the Conductor) + SoloVoice Satellite · macOS · VST3 instruments

SoloVoice lets you sing or scat a solo and have it come out as a musical, in-key, expressive MIDI performance — while a live on-screen harmonic map shows you exactly which scale to solo with over each chord. It never composes a line for you; the music is always yours. SoloVoice converts your voice (or wind controller) to MIDI, shapes human, breath-based dynamics from it, optionally snaps your pitch into the current chord, and merges in your pedal gestures — then drives a high-end instrument such as a SWAM sax — or, through the companion SoloVoice Satellite, a whole band of them.

Contents

  1. Introduction
    1. What is SoloVoice?
    2. Why SoloVoice Exists
    3. How the “SoloVoice” Is Made
    4. System Requirements
    5. Installation & Licensing
    6. First Launch
  2. The User Interface
    1. Interface Overview
    2. The Toolbar
    3. The Chord Track
    4. The Chroma Strip (Scale-Degree Ribbon)
    5. The Progression Grid
    6. The Control Strip
  3. Getting a Chart In
    1. Typing a Chord Sequence
    2. Loading MusicXML
    3. Chord Reductions & Shorthand
    4. Insert Chord & the Blank Canvas
  4. Scales & Overrides
    1. Key Center & Mode
    2. Per-Chord Scale Override
    3. Apply Scale to Range
  5. Performing with SoloVoice
    1. Riding the Breath
    2. Getting a Clean Signal
    3. Pitch Snap & Vocal Wavering
    4. The Chroma Strip as Ear-Trainer
    5. Loop & Count-In
  6. The Guitar Voicings
  7. Going Further
    1. Chords Out & MIDI Export
    2. PatchWork & Sync
    3. The Wider Ecosystem
    4. The SoloVoice Satellite — Conducting a Whole Band
    5. Building the Big-Band Rig
    6. The One-Person Band
    7. Saving Your Work
  8. Interacting with Controls
  9. MIDI & Automation
  10. Settings & Skins
  11. Troubleshooting & Known Limitations
  12. Version History
  13. Appendix A — Control Reference
  14. Appendix B — The Announce Protocol

1. Introduction

1.1 What is SoloVoice?

SoloVoice is a jazz-literate, real-time chord/scale companion and vocal-to-MIDI humanizer. The founding idea is simple: you should be able to sing or scat a solo into a microphone and have it come out as a musical, expressive, in-key MIDI performance driving a high-end virtual instrument — while a live harmonic map shows you the right scale to solo with over every chord.

The product has two cooperating halves:

The performance engine (audio → humanized MIDI). Your own monophonic line — a sung or scatted melody, or a wind controller such as an EWI — is the “solo voice.” SoloVoice converts that incoming audio to MIDI, derives human, breath-shaped velocity and expression from it, optionally snaps the pitch into the current key or chord, and merges in your foot-controller gestures. The result is clean, expressive, velocity-stamped monophonic MIDI. SoloVoice never composes or generates a solo of its own — the musical line is always yours.

The harmonic-guidance layer (chart + scale intelligence). A chord progression is displayed as a moving chord track with guitar voicings, a lead-sheet grid, and a color-coded scale-degree ribbon. A jazz-literate engine works out the key center and the correct scale for each chord, so the ribbon lights up the notes that sound “inside” over whatever chord is current. This is the visual guide you solo against — and the note pool the pitch-snap engine draws from.

And a third half, if you'll allow it: the band. SoloVoice announces its live palette to every other instrument in your rig, and a companion plug-in, the SoloVoice Satellite, inserted ahead of each instrument, snaps that instrument's notes to the same harmony. Sing one line into a voicing engine such as Divisimate with a Satellite in front of every chair, and a thirteen-piece big band follows the changes with you (§7.4).

SoloVoice and the Satellite ship as VST3 instruments on macOS for v1. Presets, MIDI-learn, automation and settings work the way you'd expect of any plug-in and are covered in the relevant chapters below.

1.2 Why SoloVoice Exists

SoloVoice was born through a combination of necessity and desire. Its founder always had a composer's melodic sensibility but not the gift of a great singing voice — and after years of writing melodies for other singers and handing the lead line to other musicians, the technology finally caught up with the wish to sing, scat, and solo without having to do it with the voice directly.

But the deeper truth runs past the origin story. The human voice is the most expressive, most nuanced instrument there is — the instrument we were each designed with. For a composer who plays melodies into a virtual instrument from a keyboard yet can carry a tune, melodies that come from the voice come truly from your musical soul. SoloVoice makes up the difference between the soaring melody in your mind's ear and the shape you can compose by hand — whether that melody belongs in an orchestra, on a lead sheet, or in a single soaring solo.

The creative process stays yours. The melody still comes from you; only the vehicle changes. You can voice that line as an aggressive lead guitar, a big-band brass section, a solo flute, or a walking bass — and because SoloVoice offers several snapping modes, the chords mode in particular lets you improvise convincing bass lines as the changes roll by. If your aim is recording, run cycle-record in your DAW until the take is right. SoloVoice can be an indispensable part of tracking and production, a live-performance companion, or both.

SoloVoice with a chart loaded — the whole instrument in one window.

1.3 How the “SoloVoice” Is Made

Because this is the concept people most often get wrong, here is the signal path end to end. The “solo voice” is your monophonic input, processed — never an algorithmic solo.

Meanwhile the harmonic-guidance layer runs in parallel: the chart advances with the transport, the guitar diagram and coral sweep track the current chord, the Key Center and Mode readouts show the detected key and scale, and the ribbon shows your target notes. It is guidance for you and the pitch pool for snap — it is never sounded as a solo.

The harmonic clock runs slightly ahead. Jazz players lean into the next chord before the bar line, so SoloVoice's chart, its snap palette, and the palette it announces to the band all advance a little early — by the number of milliseconds set on the PICKUP knob (never more than half the current chord). Anticipation moves only the harmonic clock; it never moves the notes you sing.

The conductor announces the palette. Every time the harmony changes — at a chord boundary, when you override a scale, at transport start, at a loop wrap — SoloVoice broadcasts the current scale, chord tones and root as a small burst of controller messages on MIDI channels 1–15. Nothing you play into it reacts to those messages, but a SoloVoice Satellite inserted in front of any other instrument does: it snaps that instrument's notes to the same live palette (see §7.4). This is how one sung line conducts a whole band, and it is why channel 16 is kept free for Chords Out.

1.4 System Requirements

ItemRequirement
Operating systemmacOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), current releases. v1 is macOS-only.
FormatTwo VST3 instruments: SoloVoice (the conductor) and SoloVoice Satellite (one per instrument you want conducted). Both are notarized for Gatekeeper.
HostAny VST3 host that can route audio into an instrument. Blue Cat's PatchWork is the recommended host (§7.2) — standalone for live use, or as a plug-in inside your DAW. The big-band rig in §7.5 is built as a PatchWork preset.
Audio inputAn audio interface and a microphone for singing/scatting (see §5.2), or a monophonic MIDI source such as a wind controller feeding MIDI in.
Sound sourceSoloVoice makes no sound of its own. It needs an expressive instrument on the other side of its MIDI output — anything that responds to CC11 (expression), CC1 (vibrato) and pitch bend. SWAM modeled winds and brass are the reference target.
For the full bandThe satellite/big-band workflow in §7.4–7.5 additionally assumes Divisimate Core as the voicing engine and a set of SWAM instruments. Divisimate Core is required: its per-port MIDI channel arrangement is what makes the PatchWork wiring possible, and Divisimate 2 does not offer it.

1.5 Installation & Licensing

Installing

SoloVoice is delivered as a standard Mac installer package (.pkg). Click Download SoloVoice on your download page, open the downloaded installer and follow its steps; it places the plug-in bundle(s) — SoloVoice VST3.vst3, and with the Orchestra edition SoloVoice Satellite VST3.vst3 — in /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/. When it finishes, SoloVoice appears as a VST3 instrument in your DAW or plug-in host; if it doesn't show up right away, rescan plug-ins in the host (in PatchWork, open any slot's plug-in picker and choose Rescan). Both bundles are signed and notarized, so macOS will not quarantine them.

Your license

One license covers both SoloVoice and SoloVoice Satellite. When you buy, your license key is emailed to you automatically within a few minutes, in a separate message from support@solovoice.ai (check spam the first time). To activate:

  1. Open SoloVoice on an instrument track in your DAW or host. Until it is licensed, a red ENTER KEY IN BOX message sits just above the CHORD SEQUENCE field.
  2. Copy the key from your email, paste it into the CHORD SEQUENCE field — the same field you type chords into — and press Enter. SoloVoice recognizes a license key by its format and never confuses it with a chart.
  3. Be online for this one step. SoloVoice confirms the key with the license server once, ties it to this machine, and stores the result locally. From then on it runs fully offline — no check-ins, no internet required at a gig.
  4. The red message changes to ACTIVATING…, then ACTIVATED flashes and the line clears. Press CLEAR to remove the key text, and you're ready to type chords or load a chart. Hover over the CHORD SEQUENCE label to see the licensee details for support purposes.

No trial, no risk. There is no time-limited trial version; instead, every purchase carries a 14-day money-back guarantee. Email support@solovoice.ai with your order number within 14 days for a full refund (the license key is deactivated when a refund is issued).

Every SoloVoice Satellite instance on the same machine reads the same license automatically; nothing to paste there.

Machines. A license may be active on up to three computers at once. If you replace a machine, deactivate the old one yourself from the license portal linked in your purchase email and activate the new one — no support ticket needed.

1.6 First Launch

Insert SoloVoice ahead of an instrument in PatchWork or your DAW, plug in a mic, and play. When SoloVoice opens, its panel fills the plug-in window (see §2.1). Two things are worth knowing in the first minute:

Type a few chords into CHORD SEQUENCE (§3.1) or load a MusicXML chart, sing a line into the mic, and watch it become MIDI — the framed cell on the chroma strip is the note your voice landed on after snapping. If anything ever hangs, the orange PANIC! button sends all-notes-off to every instrument downstream and re-announces the palette; it never touches your chart.

2. The User Interface ↑ Contents

2.1 Interface Overview

The SoloVoice window has four horizontal zones stacked top to bottom: the chord track with its voicing diagrams, the chroma strip (scale-degree ribbon), the progression grid with its key and scale readouts, and the control strip. Above them sits the toolbar. The numbered figure below is referenced throughout this chapter.

Figure 1 — The SoloVoice interface with numbered callouts. Each number is described in the table below.

#ElementPurpose
1ToolbarBypass, presets, undo/redo, control settings, the Quick Start (?) and about (see §2.2).
2Chord slotsThe chords in the current window, named above each diagram (up to four may share one measure). An asterisk after a name means the diagram beneath is a deliberate reduction of that chord (§3.3).
3Voicing diagramsFour-note guitar voicing (root in the bass) for each chord (§6).
4Current chordThe chord in focus, with its diagram highlighted — the reliable “you are here” indicator, even inside a multi-chord measure. The thin coral bar above the diagrams is the playback position.
5Beat lampPulses on the beat while the transport runs. Switched on and off by the BEAT switch on the control strip.
6Chroma stripTwelve cells, C to B: interval labels of the scale governing the current chord (R = root), a gold band on every chord tone, the note your voice lands on framed in lavender, and a static row of note names beneath (§2.4, §5.4).
7Key Center & Force ModeDetected key of the tune, in a dropdown you can override at a true modulation; Force Mode corrects the major/minor label (§4.1).
8Scale readoutThe scale in play over the current chord — yellow when the engine chose it, green when you did. Click it to override (§4.2).
9Range Scale Root / Range ScaleDropdowns that choose the scale for Apply Scale to Range (§4.3).
10Progression gridThe chart as a 32-measure lead sheet, chords laid across the bars; teal bars above measures mark a painted range.
11◄ Prev / Next ►Step chord-by-chord (and page through longer charts) to target a chord for an override or an insert.
12Chord Sequence, LOAD XML, CLEAR, EXPORT MIDIType or paste a chart; import a MusicXML chart; clear it; write the chart to a MIDI file (§3, §7.1). The license key is pasted into this same field (§1.5), and the red license banner sits just above it until you do.
13PANIC!Orange rescue button: all-notes-off to every instrument downstream, tracker reset, palette re-announced (§11).
14ROOT / QUALInsert Chord: place a chord on a blank measure, or Reset to Blank (§3.4).
15Dynamics knobsNOISE GATE, DRIVE, RESPONSE, VEL CEIL — shape the generated MIDI (§2.6, §5.1).
16PICKUPHow far ahead of the bar line the harmonic clock runs, in ms (§2.6).
17OCTAVEFive-position transpose of the MIDI output in whole octaves, centered on 0.
18Count-In / Bars, Time Signature, GO TO BARCount-in offset for backing tracks with a baked-in count; 4/4 or 3/4 rocker; jump the cursor to a bar number (§5.5).
19Loop, In / Out, Clear, Apply Scale to RangeLoop between In and Out; the same In/Out fields define the range for Apply Scale to Range; Clear next to Apply removes a painted range (§4.3, §5.5).
20BEATSwitch for the beat lamp.
21MIDI CC lanesFixed-function output switches CC1, CC2, CC11 and the three-position CC15 pitch-bend switch (±2 / +2 / −2).
22S+C TOLTolerance knob for Scales + Chords mode, 0–50 cents (§5.3).
23Snap modeCoral readout beneath S+C TOL; click it for the dropdown: SCALES / CHORDS / S+CHORDS.
24CHORDS OUTVelocity knob for streaming the block chords on channel 16; 0 = off (§7.1).

2.2 The Toolbar

The strip along the very top is the plug-in's own toolbar, identical in SoloVoice and the Satellite. On the left, the power button smoothly bypasses the instrument. In the center, the preset area shows the current preset name (a * means unsaved changes); the arrows step through presets and clicking the name opens the preset menu. The toolbar icons give you the main menu, the MIDI/automation control-settings menu, undo/redo, the Quick Start (?), and the about box. Right-clicking the background also opens the main menu, and a zoom option scales the interface from 70% to 200%.

Note on the input meterThe input level meter in the toolbar shows the raw audio upstream of SoloVoice's engine, so it is not affected by the Noise Gate — that is by design. The Noise Gate acts on note triggering, not on the meter.

2.3 The Chord Track

The chord track shows a window of the progression as a row of chord slots (callout 2). Each slot carries the chord name — A7b9, Dm7, C6, and so on — over a guitar voicing diagram (callout 3). The diagram uses the standard convention: the number at the left is the starting fret, dots are fretted notes, the numbers along the top are the fingering, and × marks a muted string. Every SoloVoice voicing is exactly four tones with the root in the bass — no rootless or shell voicings and no inversions in the shipping engine. The reasoning behind these shapes is its own chapter (see §6).

The thin coral bar above the diagrams is the playback position, sweeping left to right in time with the transport. The chord whose diagram is highlighted (callout 4) is the current chord — the one SoloVoice is analysing, and the source of the ribbon and the snap pool.

TipUse the guitar voicing diagram as your precise “you are here” indicator — it tracks the current chord even when several chords share one measure.

2.4 The Chroma Strip (Scale-Degree Ribbon)

The row of twelve colored cells (callout 6) is your soloing guide. Each cell is one of the twelve semitones, running C to C, each in its own constant hue; the static row of note names underneath tells you which is which. Inside the cells, SoloVoice labels the intervals of whatever scale is governing the current chord — for C Ionian, R · M2 · M3 · P4 · P5 · M6 · M7, with R always marking the root of the paired scale. Cells with no label are outside the scale.

Two more things are drawn live. A gold band along the bottom of a cell marks a chord tone — the notes the band obeys in CHORDS mode — so you can read scale and chord at a glance. And a lavender frame around a cell marks the note your voice is landing on after snap. The frame moves as you sing; everything else changes only when the harmony does. That was a deliberate choice: the strip stays still so you can read it while you play. Its ear-training uses have a chapter of their own (see §5.4).

The satellite's palette strip (§7.4) is the same picture with the labels replaced by lamps — the two plug-ins share one visual language.

2.5 The Progression Grid

Below the ribbon is the progression grid (callout 10) — a lead-sheet view of the tune in a fixed 32-cell (4×8) display. Measures are numbered and chords are laid across the bars, one or more per measure (e.g. Dm7 A7b9 in a single bar). Above the grid, Key Center (callout 7, left) shows the detected key of the tune and the scale readout (callout 8, e.g. C Ionian) shows the scale in play for the current chord — yellow when the engine paired it, green when you overrode it. Both come from the jazz scale-pairing engine, and both can be overridden (see §4).

◄ Prev and Next ► (callout 11) page through charts longer than 32 measures and let you step chord-by-chord to set a scale or key-center override on a target chord. Longer charts also auto-page: the display advances to measures 33–64, 65–96 and so on as playback crosses each 32-measure boundary.

2.6 The Control Strip

The dark panel across the bottom holds chord entry, performance, transport and output controls. Chord entry is covered in §3; the performance and output controls are summarised here and explained in depth in §5 and §7. Every knob has a hover tooltip; double-click a knob to type an exact value.

Performance & Dynamics

These act on the generated MIDI (the humanized note stream), not the raw audio.

ControlDefaultWhat it does
NOISE GATE0.7Level below which incoming audio is treated as silence, so room noise and breath rumble don't trigger notes.
DRIVE5.9How hard your breath level pushes into expression and velocity — the expression “gain and curve.” Higher lifts more of your dynamic range toward the top. For a whole band, keep DRIVE low (the big-band rig in §7.5 runs it at 0) and raise the interface gain instead, because DRIVE re-weights the breath-to-velocity proportion as it rises (§5.1).
RESPONSE8.5How quickly SoloVoice follows your pitch and level changes. Lower is smoother and more legato; higher is snappier and lets fast flourishes through.
VEL CEIL127Clamps the maximum output velocity. Velocity only — expression (CC11) is untouched. On modeled instruments a lower ceiling also smooths half-step zippering; reeds often like it, brass usually sounds best at 127. Set it per instrument, by ear.
PICKUP175 msHow far ahead of each bar line the harmonic clock runs (0–500 ms). Small values simply forgive pickups into the next chord; large values let you play ahead of the change, at the cost of the last part of each chord. Never more than half the current chord, whatever the tempo. The shipped value sits in the pocket at a swing tempo around 120 bpm. Satellites inherit it automatically (§7.4).
OCTAVE0Five-position transpose of the output in whole octaves. If a modeled instrument goes silent on your lowest or highest notes, it is out of that instrument's range — reach for this knob first.

Tempo, Meter & Navigation

COUNT-IN / BARSCount-in offset: the number of bars (or beats, with BARS off) your backing track counts in before bar 1, so SoloVoice's chart stays in step (§5.5).
Time SignatureRocker switch selecting the meter — 4/4 (up) or 3/4 (down) — used for playback beat math and the grid.
GO TO BARType a bar number and the cursor jumps there. Handy with the transport stopped: park on a bar to audition its chord, set an override, or fill a blank.
BEATSwitches the beat lamp on the chord track on or off.

Loop & Range

The Loop switch (callout 19, blue light when active) repeats the region between the In and Out fields; Out is exclusive, so bars 1–8 is In 1, Out 9. Clear removes the points and plays straight through. The same In/Out fields define the measures for Apply Scale to Range (§4.3). Full loop workflow in §5.5.

MIDI CC Lanes (fixed-function)

These are on/off switches for specific, purpose-built output lanes — not user-assignable CC numbers.

SwitchDefaultWhat it emits
CC1OnForwards CC1 vibrato from an expression pedal to your instrument (SWAM vibrato).
CC2OffEmits your breath envelope as CC2 (Breath) for instruments that expect it.
CC11OnEmits your breath envelope as CC11 (Expression) — the minimum a SWAM instrument needs to make a sound.
CC15+2Three-position switch for the foot pitch-bend lane: ±2 (a spring-loaded pedal swings two semitones either way around center), +2 (a standard pedal bends up to two semitones), or −2 (the pedal bends down — press before the note and release into pitch for a horn player's scoop; press at the end of a phrase for a fall). See §5.1.

Snap & Output

ControlDefaultWhat it does
Snap modeCHORDSCoral readout with a dropdown: SCALES (the full scale color), CHORDS (strictest and most consonant — states the changes), or S+CHORDS (the union, most permissive, gated by the tolerance knob). Snapping is always on; the mode and the palette decide what “in” means (§5.3).
S+C TOL35 centsIn S+CHORDS mode, how close to a scale-only tone you must land at the onset for it to count; chord tones always count. 0 behaves like CHORDS; 50 admits every scale tone. Think of it as how much chromatic reach you earn by accuracy.
CHORDS OUT0 (off)Streams the chart's block chords out on MIDI channel 16 at this velocity. Channel 16 is reserved for it: the band announce goes out on channels 1–15 only, so whatever you park on 16 never hears band traffic (§7.1).
EXPORT MIDIWrites the chord progression to a Standard MIDI File wherever you choose. See §7.1.
PANIC!All-notes-off on every channel to every port, pitch bend centered, tracker reset, palette re-announced. Press it, keep singing.
The control strip. Every control here is covered in §2.6.

3. Getting a Chart In ↑ Contents

There are two ways to get a progression into SoloVoice: type or paste a chord sequence as text, or import one from a MusicXML file. Either way, the chord track and grid populate automatically and the scale engine pairs each chord immediately.

3.1 Typing a Chord Sequence

You can type or paste a chord progression directly into the Chord Sequence field using simple text — no special software needed.

Bars (measures). Separate each bar with a vertical bar |. A new line works exactly the same as |, so you can spread a long song across multiple lines if that is easier to read.

Chords within a bar. If a bar has just one chord, type the chord name:

C6|Dm7|G7

If a bar holds more than one chord (up to four), separate them with a comma , or a space — both behave identically:

Dm7,G7        Dm7 G7

Timing. SoloVoice automatically splits the bar evenly among however many chords you enter — you never calculate or specify this yourself. In a 4/4 bar: one chord fills all four beats; two chords take two beats each; three chords about 1.33 beats each; four chords one beat each.

Example — a five-bar sequence mixing all of the above:

C6|Dm7,G7|Em7,A7,Dm7|C6,Am7,Dm7,G7|C6

Extra spaces are ignored, so space things out for readability. Leave a bar empty (nothing between two | marks) and it is simply skipped as a blank measure — which is exactly what Insert Chord (§3.4) is built to fill.

Type the chart as writtenType the chord as it appears on your lead sheet, tensions and all. The guitar diagrams show a playable four-note reduction (see §3.3 and §6), but the engine hears everything you typed: every alteration and added tension is a legal snap target and is broadcast to the whole ensemble. The diagram is what the guitar plays; the engine is what the band hears.

Spellings. Standard lead-sheet spellings are accepted — Cmaj7, C7b9, Dm7b5, G7#11, Cadd9, C6/9 and C69 (the same chord, either way), slash chords such as C/E. Cross-tool aliases from Band-in-a-Box and iReal Pro are recognized too. A bare C is a triad to the engine (the diagram shows a big-band C6 comping shape — see §6 — but the snap palette holds only C–E–G); type C6 if you want the sixth in the palette.

This is also the field where you paste your license key (§1.5). SoloVoice tells a key from a chart by its format.

3.2 Loading MusicXML

LOAD XML imports a chord progression from a MusicXML file — the format exported by Band-in-a-Box and most notation software. The importer reads the structured root/quality/tension fields directly, and when the file carries a key signature, SoloVoice uses it to set the key center. CLEAR empties the current chart.

Loaded chart vs. typed chordsA loaded MusicXML chart and a typed sequence are mutually exclusive — loading a file expects a clear field, and typing expects no file loaded. If a load doesn't take, press CLEAR first, then load. This is a safeguard, not a fault: it keeps an imported composition from being silently overwritten.
A note on Band-in-a-BoxBand-in-a-Box reads only its own proprietary chord events, not the standard chord markers SoloVoice writes on export (§7.1). To bring a SoloVoice-exported chart into BIAB, use its Chord Wizard with the Jazz preset; be aware that some dense tensions may be simplified on the way in. This is a BIAB import behavior, not a limitation of SoloVoice's file.

3.3 Chord Reductions & Shorthand

SoloVoice is deliberately jazz-literate, and its guitar diagrams favor clean, playable four-note shapes over literal transcriptions of every tension. A few reductions are by design, and knowing them prevents surprise:

Two guard rules keep the chord palette honest against clashing tones: a dominant chord won't admit a natural 11 against its major 3rd, and a typed b13 replaces the natural 5 in the chord palette. In both cases the excluded tone is still reachable as a scale tone, so nothing is lost to your line — only to the block voicing.

An asterisk after a chord name in the diagram header (C6/9*, C11*) means “the diagram is a deliberate reduction of this chord” — the full spelling still drives the engine.

When SoloVoice meets a tension pile it doesn't have a named voicing for (say 7b9b13 or 13#11), it doesn't drop the chord — it plays the changes fully, pairs a scale from the nearest base chord, and shows that reduced base name in the diagram header, with no asterisk, by design. If a chord arrives blank instead, the spelling itself wasn't recognized — Insert Chord (§3.4) is the repair.

3.4 Insert Chord & the Blank Canvas

Not all chord charts are created equal. When you load a MusicXML file, you may find a chord or two arrives blank — either because the file held musical gibberish at that spot, or because the chord was voiced in a way that falls outside SoloVoice's jazz-literate vocabulary (see §3.3). SoloVoice never guesses at a chord it doesn't recognize; it holds the measure open and hands the decision to you. Insert Chord is how you make it.

Filling a blank. Use the ◄ Prev / Next ► buttons to walk the coral cursor to the blank measure. Then, in the Insert Chord cluster, click ROOT and choose from the twelve roots, and QUAL and choose from the thirty-two qualities, organized by family — Major, Minor, Dominant, and Dim/Aug/Sus. The instant both are chosen, the chord appears: its symbol lands in the grid cell, its voicing appears in the Chord Track, and the scale-pairing engine fires immediately, assigning the chord its default scale. Root first or quality first — it doesn't matter; the chord lands the moment the pair is complete.

Making it yours. An inserted chord is a full citizen of the chart. Its default scale pairing (shown in yellow) can be overridden to any scale in SoloVoice's bank, exactly like any imported chord — and when you do, the readout turns green to show the choice is yours (see §4.2).

Auditioning with Reset to Blank. Change your mind? Click QUAL and choose Reset to Blank. The chord vanishes from the grid and the slot returns to a clean canvas. Nothing is permanent until you decide it: audition as many chords as you like — try a quality, hear it against its neighbors, reset, repaint — until the connection sounds just right.

The safety guard. Reset to Blank only works on chords that Insert Chord placed. Any recognized chord that arrived with the original file is protected — attempting to reset one simply does nothing. You can experiment as freely as you like without ever risking a chord that's critical to the imported composition.

Composing from a blank canvas. Insert Chord was born to fix broken imports — and grew into one of SoloVoice's flagship creative tools. Because it operates on blank measures, a chart of all blanks becomes an empty score. SoloVoice includes a free composition template — load it, and every measure is an open slot. Navigate measure to measure, auditioning from nearly four hundred root-and-quality combinations, building your song one chord at a time — unshackled from your instrument and unconstrained by any pre-existing chart at all.

Good to knowAs a convenience while auditioning, after a Reset to Blank the scale readout continues to show the last governing scale until you navigate to a chord with a different pairing — on a blank measure, the last chord's scale is still “the sound in the air.”
Insert Chord: pick a family, then its quality — Reset to Blank sits at the top of the menu.

4. Scales & Overrides ↑ Contents

SoloVoice pairs every chord with a scale automatically, following standard jazz idiomatic expectation. But taste varies by composer and by era, so SoloVoice makes its best attempt at an excellent-sounding pairing and then leaves the final call to your ear. It respects the real tenet of jazz: if it sounds good, it is good. This chapter is how you take that final call.

4.1 Key Center & Mode

When you load a chart, SoloVoice analyzes it and suggests the key in the Key Center dropdown; Mode shows the scale in play over the current chord. For most jazz standards you never need to touch Key Center — the detection is reliable and the harmonic rules work from it automatically.

The one real use case is a true modulation — not a borrowed chord or a passing modal-interchange moment, but an actual change of key. At the measure where the key changes, set Key Center to the actual root of the new key (D for D minor, not its relative major). Setting the literal new root is what keeps the resolution-to-tonic logic pointed at the right note.

About Force ModeForce Mode's job is to correct the displayed mode label and its broadcast when auto-detection guesses the mode wrong. It changes what SoloVoice shows and announces — it does not change which harmonic rules fire.

4.2 Per-Chord Scale Override

Every chord's scale is one click from being yours. Open the scale readout on the chord you want to recolor and pick any of the forty-two scales in SoloVoice's bank — from the modes and melodic-minor family through bebop, blues, pentatonic and symmetric scales. A yellow readout means the pairing is the engine's; a green readout means the choice is yours. Reset to Default in the dropdown returns the chord to the engine's pairing.

Overrides are where you paint. Give a minor chord a temporary bluesy feel with a blues scale instead of Dorian or melodic minor; try unusual territory over a dominant. The engine's foundations are built around jazz-era big-band pairings, but those same foundations sound great in pop, rock, and beyond — so treat the default as a strong starting point, not a rule.

Chromatic — the override that turns snap offAt the very bottom of both scale menus sits Chromatic: all twelve notes, never chosen by the engine, only by you. In SCALES mode a chromatic scale means nothing to snap to, so your line comes through exactly as sung — the way to switch snapping off for a chord, a section, or (with Apply Scale to Range over the whole tune) the entire song. Its best trick is with a band behind you: put the lead on Chromatic and leave the satellites on CHORDS, and the band holds the changes while you roam freely over them (§7.4).

4.3 Apply Scale to Range

Sometimes you want one flavour across a whole section rather than chord by chord. The classic case is a 12-bar blues: the engine pairs by traditional modal/jazz theory, not the blues idiom, which is exactly why the Blues and Pentatonic scales live in the bank. Apply Scale to Range lets you lay one scale over a stretch of measures in a single move.

The ritual:

The Clear button next to Apply removes the bars and returns the readouts from green back to yellow. You can define multiple ranges in one song (1–4 and 9–12), or paint the whole tune at once — say straight diatonic C major over a pop progression. This is the broadest customization SoloVoice offers, and it's especially powerful for rendering a known song in a different flavour or style.

Apply Scale to Range: the scale menu open, the teal range bar above the measures, and the readouts in green.

5. Performing with SoloVoice ↑ Contents

5.1 Riding the Breath

One of the things SoloVoice does best in its conversion from audio to MIDI is harness the energy of your breath. As your melody rises and falls and your volume waxes and wanes, SoloVoice rides that wave. The usual weakness of audio-to-MIDI translation is a robotic note onset and note-off mapped to static values; SoloVoice instead follows you from the instant a note sounds until the moment your phrase ends, tracking every nuance up and down with your breath pressure — and it does so in a way that humanizes the MIDI into a believable performance on modern modeled instruments and dynamic sample libraries.

And just as the keyboard player triggering a virtual instrument has a mod wheel and a pitch wheel at his disposal, SoloVoice answers with a set of continuous controllers of its own, so your performance carries the same living detail:

The point of all of it is meaningful, continuous controller motion — the thing that truly humanizes the result. Your expression is sent only when it has moved by about a decibel, so a steady note stays steady, and the natural hover of a real diaphragm still comes through. Put a band behind that and every instrument breathes because you do.

Drive is your master control over how hard that breath energy pushes into expression and velocity. For a single soloing instrument, the shipped Drive setting sits in a musical pocket. For a full band driven through many instruments at once, players often prefer to keep Drive low and bring up the audio interface's input gain instead — because as Drive rises it re-weights the whole breath-to-velocity proportion, which you may not want across thirteen instruments at once.

5.2 Getting a Clean Signal

Accurate audio-to-MIDI tracking depends on keeping background noise out of the microphone — sub-bass frequencies and ambient room sound in particular. If you're an experienced musician this probably goes without saying, but a more directional mic suits this job far better: ideally a dynamic mic with a tight polar pattern built to reject off-axis noise, rather than a condenser.

You don't need a big budget. The better the off-axis rejection and isolation, the better SoloVoice tracks — and that doesn't necessarily cost more. Ultimately, start with the mic you have, right where you stand, and mind your placement and your monitor volume. You'll find the sweet spot.

SoloVoice also gives you two tools to clean up the input from inside the plug-in. The Noise Gate trims low rumble that would otherwise cross the mic, and together with careful gain staging it lets you get rid of room and close-in rumble so SoloVoice focuses on the sounds that translate cleanly — open vowels as you sing or scat your melodies. A little practice goes a long way toward learning how SoloVoice responds; you'll find it intuitive to dial in.

PatchWork standalone setupSet PatchWork's audio engine to the M2S (1 in – 2 out) configuration with the mic on input 1. SoloVoice needs one mono input; the stereo output is for your instruments.
Gear that changes with timeFor our current suggested microphone and companion software — the specific models we're recommending right now — see solovoice.ai. Gear advice dates quickly, so we keep it on the website where it stays current rather than baking it into the manual.

5.3 Pitch Snap & Vocal Wavering

Audio — especially from the human voice — is a sliding scale of pitch. Notes don't leave the voice at the calculated perfect intervals a piano produces; the natural fluctuation of the vocal apparatus can cause a wavering between semitones, an unstable trilling between two adjacent tones when you're trying to hold one. In the audio world there are tools for this; in MIDI, which is quantized to the twelve-tone scale, it's much harder to tame — a wavering voice simply skips back and forth between two MIDI notes, which is rarely what you want.

SoloVoice's answer is the snap engine, and it is always on. What changes is the palette it snaps to — which is where the harmonic-guidance layer and the performance engine meet. Three controls shape it:

Snap mode (the coral readout on the control strip; click it for the dropdown):

S+C TOL (0–50 cents, shipped at 35) is how much chromatic reach you earn by accuracy. At 0 it behaves like CHORDS; at 50 every scale tone is live all the time; in between, a scale tone you land squarely on comes through and one you merely brush is pulled to the nearest chord tone. Around 25–35 the effect is a grace-note mode — colorful when you mean it, safe when you don't. Set it by ear for your own voice. (Only SoloVoice itself has this knob: satellites receive finished MIDI notes, not your pitch in cents, so their S+CHORDS is the plain union.)

RESPONSE governs how quickly SoloVoice follows your pitch changes. Dial it lower and long, smooth legato lines — a sustained background violin in a concerto, say — hold steady instead of chattering between two narrow intervals; dial it higher for crisp, articulate passages and flourishes. Between the mode, the tolerance and RESPONSE, you can find just the right performance feel for your own voice.

If you're a strong singerThere is no snap on/off switch, because with the right palette you don't need one: override a chord, a range, or the whole tune to Chromatic in SCALES mode (§4.2) and your true, real-time pitch comes through untouched. Bring a narrower scale back when you want the assist.

5.4 The Chroma Strip as Ear-Trainer

The twelve colored rectangles across the middle of the interface (§2.4) represent the twelve chromatic semitones of Western tonal music, running from C to shining C. Whatever scale SoloVoice has paired with the current chord appears here with its intervals labeled in real time along the ribbon — and here's the part that makes it more than a legend: as you sing, SoloVoice frames whichever cell your voice is landing on after snap, so you see where you were pulled to as well as where you aimed. You see the scale's intervals and where your voice sits against them, together.

That opens real doors for interval and ear training, but its everyday value is as a navigation tool. Say you want to lean on the minor third to bring a wistful color to a phrase. If you don't yet know what a minor third sounds like, a few sessions with SoloVoice will fix that — you can circle that note and land on it at will, and truly begin to understand what it means to solo with your voice.

It also powers a lovely compose-by-ear workflow. If the automatic pairing isn't giving you the color you want, override the chord to Chromatic (so nothing pulls you) and just sing until you find the note you're after, watching the frame settle on the strip. Say it lands on a D — third rectangle from the left, since the strip runs C to C. Now that you know it's a D you want, find a scale that includes D and sounds good over the chord, set the snap mode to Scales, and you've got your composition.

The chroma strip over a D7: R on D, gold bands on the chord tones, and the sung note framed in lavender.

5.5 Loop & Count-In

The Loop function is a wonderful way to drill a passage — to nail a guitar part, to rehearse soloing over a tricky stretch, or, in a writing session, to circle the main few chords of your song again and again until the right melodic shape reveals itself. If SoloVoice's snapped output is driving a downstream saxophone or lead guitar, you can shape a melody over the loop to real advantage.

Type or set the chords the loop should cover, then click the Loop switch on. The switch's blue light illuminates and the looped measures highlight in a soft lavender background — visible even while the coral sweep crosses each measure, so you always see exactly where the loop begins and ends.

For convenience, your loop In/Out values persist even when the loop is off. If you always warm up on the first eight bars, put 1 in the In field and 9 in the Out field once, then simply toggle the loop on and off without retyping.

The mental modelThink of it like the knobs on a synthesizer: the dials stay turned to your preferred position even when their effect goes quiet. Your knob positions persist; their effects don't.

Count-In Offset. Many songs — including those generated by backing-band apps like Band-in-a-Box — have a two-bar count-in baked into their export. Many musicians like to keep the count-in even on stage. Put the number of measures your backing track counts in straight into the count-in field, and SoloVoice delays its transport by that many measures when you press play, so its chord stays highlighted on the right bar in step with your backing track.

GO TO BAR is the loop's companion for parked work: type a bar number and the cursor jumps there, transport stopped, so you can audition the chord, set an override, or fill a blank without waiting for the sweep to arrive. And the BEAT switch turns the beat lamp on the chord track on or off — useful to keep in view at a gig, easy to dim in the studio.

Host loops winWhen your host has a loop or cycle range active, it drives SoloVoice's grid in real time and always outranks SoloVoice's own Loop switch. Use whichever is closer to hand; they never fight.
Loop engaged: In and Out set, the switch lit blue, and the looped measures highlighted across the grid.

6. The Guitar Voicings ↑ Contents

SoloVoice's guitar diagrams were designed to be strictly playable note shapes that generally use no open strings — jazz-centric grips that repeat up and down the neck, sitting in the sweet spot of the guitar's jazz register. This is a matter of taste, of course, but the engine curates its voicings on purpose.

The curation comes down to two things: economy of motion from one chord to the next, and, in some cases, economy of tones — voice leading. But at the end of the day it's about playable shapes, all in root position, that let the guitar be a driving rhythmic instrument in the ensemble — even when the ensemble is just you and your voice.

No doubled root. As in traditional jazz comping, a SoloVoice shape rarely doubles the root — and SoloVoice is no different in that regard.

The major-6 on bare majors. Even in our bare major-chord construction we use a major-6 interval, in keeping with the consonant sound of the sixth against the tonic — versus the more dissonant major-7. In the big-band music of the 1930s and early '40s, when the rhythm guitar was comping and not holding a grand position in the orchestration's harmony, the major-6 chord became a common, pleasing substitute for what would otherwise be a plain triad. So SoloVoice employs that major-6 voicing on all bare major spellings.

Reductions leave room. With that spirit in mind, the grips in the Chord Track often reflect a more pared-down voicing, sometimes reducing more complicated extensions to their seventh-chord equivalents — to leave room for other elements in the orchestration: horns, strings, or, in the case of a slash chord, the bass.

A reminderThe diagram shows what the guitar plays; the engine hears everything you typed. Reductions live in the picture, not in the harmony that reaches your band (§3.1). The one place this cuts the other way is the bare major: the diagram adds the comping sixth, but the engine keeps a bare C a triad — it never volunteers a color you didn't write. Type C6 to put the sixth in the band's palette.
Chord slots and voicing diagrams — four-note grips with the root in the bass (red).

7. Going Further ↑ Contents

7.1 Chords Out & MIDI Export

SoloVoice can send the exact chords its diagrams represent out as block-chord MIDI. Two features share that idea, one live and one to file.

Chords Out (live). The Chords Out knob streams the block chords out in real time at a velocity you dial in (0 = off, the shipped default) on MIDI channel 16. Channel 16 is reserved for this: SoloVoice's announce to the band goes out on channels 1–15 only, so whatever you park on 16 — a piano, a pad, a scoring engine — never hears band traffic and needs no filtering. This becomes doubly powerful behind a soloist: send those chords to a cinematic scoring engine and let that be the entirety of your backing bed — no other instruments required. With the chords sounding behind you, distributed across a rich orchestral palette, you can improvise your melodic themes over the top until the motives that belong in your score, cue, or trailer reveal themselves.

Export MIDI (to file). The EXPORT MIDI button opens a save dialog and writes the chord progression and its voicings to a Standard MIDI File, which you can drag anywhere — straight into a DAW to drive the chords, or onto a MIDI track to trigger a hosted instrument. Because SoloVoice generates no solo, this exports the chord track, not a solo line. The file carries the block chords, a chord-name marker at every change, tempo and time signature, the key signature — re-stated wherever the tune modulates — your filename as the track name, and a “Created with SoloVoice” credit. Bring it into Band-in-a-Box and BIAB's Chord Wizard (Jazz preset) names the chords from the notes; see the note in §3.2 about tensions.

A beautiful DAW workflowIn Cubase, export the MIDI, drop it on a track, and Cubase's “MIDI to Chord Events” reads SoloVoice's chord names straight into its Chord Track — one click turns the block-chord MIDI into the exact chords, ready to control an orchestra from the changes.

7.2 PatchWork & Sync

SoloVoice was designed primarily to work in tandem with Blue Cat's PatchWork — a lightweight live-performance host with its own transport (play, pause, rewind) that controls SoloVoice's chord track. PatchWork can also act as a MIDI Time Code or MIDI Clock slave, and as an MTC or MIDI Clock generator — and the remarkable thing is it can do both at once. So you could have a backing-band app like Band-in-a-Box send its MIDI clock into PatchWork, where SoloVoice lives, and PatchWork send something more sophisticated onward — MTC to trigger a DAW holding a large orchestral template. The connectivity possibilities are broad.

Two habits make PatchWork standalone feel native. First, its transport is running the moment the app opens — so once a chart is loaded, press Pause and then Rewind before your first take and the transport is cued at the head. Second, keep the audio engine on M2S (1 in – 2 out) with the mic on input 1 (§5.2). Inside a DAW, host SoloVoice in PatchWork just the same and let the DAW send MIDI Clock to PatchWork: that is what makes SoloVoice DAW-agnostic, with no sync settings of its own.

Who leadsWhen a host loop range is active, it drives SoloVoice's grid in real time, and the host's loop always outranks SoloVoice's own Loop switch. If an external MIDI-clock master stops, stop or re-sync the slaved host so the two don't drift.

7.3 The Wider Ecosystem

A handful of harmony and backing applications are real standouts in today's music-software world — some of them unsung heroes for how deep they are, yet not always a natural fit for the studio-DAW workflow. SoloVoice was designed in part to make those applications more fully usable.

Band-in-a-Box is the clearest example. It's an authentic backing-band generator — built not on synthetic AI, but on tracks played by seasoned session musicians — and by typing the same chords you're using in SoloVoice, you can create a backing arrangement that's both compelling and theoretically accurate, then sync SoloVoice to it while you solo with your voice over the changes. The idea is a multiplication of musical power: run some of the best tools in the scene together, and SoloVoice helps bridge the gaps between them.

All product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners, used for identification only; no affiliation or endorsement is implied.

7.4 The SoloVoice Satellite — Conducting a Whole Band

Because SoloVoice effectively operates as a DAW-agnostic chord track, every melody that leaves its MIDI output can be snapped to the paired scale, to the chord tones themselves, or to a combination of both. That gives you melodic freedom on a single line. The SoloVoice Satellite extends that freedom to every other instrument on stage: it is a second, tiny plug-in you insert directly in front of any instrument, and it snaps whatever MIDI passes through it to the very same live palette the conductor is showing you — chord by chord, override by override, automatically.

That's where a tool like Divisimate comes in. Divisimate takes your one sung line and spreads it into a full voicing across a band — a five-part sax soli, a brass shout chorus — but it voices by interval, and intervals don't know about the Em7b5 in bar three. A Satellite ahead of each instrument fixes that: the line reaches the band harmonically correct on every change. Put a SoloVoice Satellite in front of thirteen SWAM instruments and one voice conducts a big band; put one in front of a string section and it conducts an orchestra. Nothing in the protocol knows what a trumpet is. For a proper sense of it, see the demonstration videos at solovoice.ai.

How it works

SoloVoice announces its palette — the scale, the chord tones and the root of the current chord — as a short burst of controller messages every time the harmony changes (§1.3). The burst is stamped onto channels 1–15, so any instrument's channel carries its own copy, and Divisimate Core passes controllers through to every voice it creates, so the announce arrives at each chair riding beside that chair's notes. The Satellite listens on whatever port and channel its slot is set to, decodes the palette, swallows the announce so the instrument behind it never sees it, and remaps each note that follows. Note-offs follow the remapped pitch, so nothing sticks when the palette changes under a held note; a held note keeps sounding and only new attacks take the new scale.

Satellites are followers. They carry no chart, no scale bank and no overrides of their own — every scale you green-light on the conductor, every range you paint, every chord you insert reaches all of them through the palette itself. PICKUP is inherited the same way: the conductor's harmonic clock already runs ahead, so the announce lands at each chair a little before the bar line.

The Satellite panel

The SoloVoice Satellite: palette lamps, MODE on CHORDS, and the SCALE ROOT / TONES canary readouts.

Choosing a mode per chair

Modes are per instrument, and that is the whole point of announcing scale and chord separately: the arranger's color lives at each chair, not on the conductor. In practice, section instruments want CHORDS — five saxes on CHORDS is the big, sweet big-band sound, exactly what a voicing engine's drop-2s and add-9s want to be pulled into — while the lead sounds good on either CHORDS or S+CHORDS. Mixing is the fun: saxes on CHORDS with brass on S+CHORDS gets colorful. Two boundaries to know. SCALES mode sees only the scale mask, so a typed tension that lies outside the paired scale is deliberately excluded there (it is always present in CHORDS and S+CHORDS). And a Satellite's S+CHORDS is the plain union of scale and chord, with no tolerance knob: it receives finished MIDI notes, not your voice in cents, so there is nothing to grade.

The chromatic-lead recipeOverride the conductor to Chromatic (§4.2) and leave the band's Satellites on CHORDS: the band holds the changes, tight and consonant, while you roam freely over the top — a classic big-band texture, and the two-palette design doing exactly what it was built for.

Syncing and rescue

A Satellite knows nothing until its first announce. After loading a rig, press play once on the conductor and sing a note — the transport-start burst plus a note for Divisimate to voice bring every chair up together; until then a Satellite passes notes through unsnapped. With nothing loaded, or before the transport has ever run, the conductor announces the key's plain diatonic scale, so freestyle intros over an idle chart stay in key on every chair. And PANIC! on the conductor reaches the chairs: each Satellite closes every note it owns and the palette is re-announced in the same breath.

The one-page announce protocol, for anyone wiring a Satellite behind a different voicing engine or writing their own follower, is in Appendix B.

Satellites inside a DAW

The tested, supported way to run Satellites in a DAW is the same as on stage: host PatchWork as a plug-in on one track, build the conductor-and-chairs rig inside it exactly as in §7.5, and let the DAW send MIDI Clock to PatchWork (§7.2). Everything in this manual then applies unchanged, whatever the DAW.

Wiring Satellites directly on DAW tracks also works, with one principle to keep in mind: a Satellite must sit between the MIDI source and its instrument, and everything on the path from SoloVoice to the Satellite must pass controllers 20–24 through untouched (Appendix B). Two common hosts:

Either way, the SCALE ROOT / TONES readouts on each Satellite are your wiring check: press play on the conductor, sing a note, and every chair should show the same root and counts. Remember that without a voicing engine every chair receives the same single line (unison, or octaves via each instrument); the harmonized big band in the videos is Divisimate Core doing the voicing between SoloVoice and the chairs, as described in §7.5.

7.5 Building the Big-Band Rig

The band in the SoloVoice videos is a single PatchWork preset with the whole thing wired: SoloVoice conducting Divisimate Core, and three nested PatchWork instances — a sax bus, a trumpet bus and a trombone bus — each holding a SoloVoice Satellite ahead of every SWAM instrument. This section explains how it is put together, layer by layer, so you can build the same rig from your own Divisimate Core and SWAM instruments — or adapt the pattern to any band you own.

LayerWhat it does
Rows 1–4Deliberately empty — they're yours, for a backing-track player, a pad, an effect, whatever you layer in.
SoloVoice (pre-slot)The conductor. Its MIDI output feeds Divisimate on internal Port A, and Chords Out on Port C (channel 16) to a utility row for a piano of your own.
Divisimate Core (pre-slot)MIDI In = Port A, channel 1 only (the sung line and its expression); MIDI Out = Port B in direct plug-in-out mode. Core voices your line across channels 1–5 (saxes), 6–9 (trumpets) and 10–13 (trombones) and passes your CC11, vibrato and pitch bend to every chair.
Three bus instancesNested PatchWork instances, one per section, each subscribing to Port B and only its family's channels. Inside, every chair is a Satellite (MIDI In = the instance's input on that chair's channel, MIDI Out = a private internal port) followed by a SWAM instrument listening to that private port on the same channel — and nothing else. Each Satellite carries its own MODE; section chairs sit on CHORDS.
Utility rowChords Out's destination: an insert-your-own slot on Port C, channel 16.

Settings that matter. Divisimate's CC Value humanization must stay at 0 — it is the one setting that can corrupt an announce (a randomized controller value flips palette bits); Note Timing, Velocity and CC Timing humanization are free to use. Set every SWAM to MIDI Profile Legacy, channel Any, so bend and expression scale identically across the band; if you use MPE controllers, switch them back per instrument. Suspend On Silence is off on every sound-making slot. Run the conductor's DRIVE at 0 in this rig and let interface gain do the work (§5.1), and save the preset with the transport stopped at bar 1.

Pitch bend. The pedal's bend depth follows each instrument's own pitch-bend range setting, so the same pedal travel can scoop further on brass than on reeds. Set the range inside each SWAM's MIDI page if you want the thirteen chairs to bend uniformly.

Two places state livesSatellite modes, SWAM settings and all the wiring above are saved in the PatchWork preset. Your chart, its overrides, ranges and inserted chords are saved in SoloVoice's own preset inside it (§7.7). Save each bus from inside its nested instance as well as the master preset: a bus preset is a self-contained building block you can drop into any rig.

Because a Satellite listens wherever its slot points, none of this is specific to a big band or to Divisimate. Any voicing engine or splitter that passes controllers through untouched and doesn't react to them will carry the announce; a Satellite directly on SoloVoice's own output (no voicing engine) gets fifteen conductable channels per port. Divisimate Core simply happens to be the first engine that complied out of the box.

7.6 The One-Person Band

As the name implies, SoloVoice works beautifully for the solo performer — the one-person band who wants to accompany himself. Take your laptop, send the output from your mobile audio interface to the house mix, and run your sub-mix right there with SoloVoice as the heartbeat.

Because SoloVoice saves its full state — natively in the VST3 or in any compatible DAW host — each song's scale overrides, range applications, and inserted chords save as a preset, and that single preset becomes your song on stage. In PatchWork, the parallel slots can hold a backing-track generator like the Band-in-a-Box VST alongside a cinematic scoring engine, or the thirteen-piece Satellite big band of §7.5. The advantage of a light rig like this for live use is real: most DAWs are cumbersome to switch between projects on stage, whereas assigning a footswitch to change a PatchWork preset is instantaneous. There are workarounds, sure — but for a lightweight performance powerhouse, PatchWork as host with SoloVoice as the primary chord-and-scale intelligence is a formidable combination.

7.7 Saving Your Work

SoloVoice saves state either natively in the VST3 itself or in any compatible DAW host. A preset holds it all — every scale you green-light, every range you painted, every chord you inserted. That's what lets a single preset stand in for a whole song, and it's what makes the footswitch-per-song live workflow above possible.

Save it from the toolbar's preset menu (§9) — Save As with the song's name. In PatchWork, the surrounding rig (Satellite modes, instruments, routing) lives in the PatchWork preset, so a song on stage is really two saves: SoloVoice's preset for the chart, PatchWork's for the band. Save the PatchWork preset last, and don't be alarmed that the preset name grows an asterisk a moment after you save: the live mic and the running transport mark the state “changed” within a moment, and it means nothing.

8. Interacting with Controls ↑ Contents

The cursor changes (to a hand or arrow) over an active control. Depending on skin and host, a control takes keyboard focus on hover or on click.

Mouse

ActionResult
Left clickTake focus and start dragging, or push (for buttons).
Left click + AltSet the control to its default value.
Left double-clickOpen the fine-tuning edit box (except buttons).
Right clickSet the control to its default value.
Mouse wheelIncrement / decrement the value (focus required).
DragChange the value with mouse movement (except buttons).

Keyboard

Some hosts capture certain keys before they reach the plug-in.

KeyAction
/ Small increment.
/ Small decrement.
Page Up / Page DownLarge increment / decrement.
+ / Small increment / decrement.
dSet to default value.
eOpen the fine-tuning window.
Shift (hold)Fine-tuning mode: higher precision until released.
EnterPush a focused button.

9. MIDI & Automation ↑ Contents

SoloVoice can be driven by MIDI and automation, and its parameters can be remotely controlled.

Presets

SoloVoice has a full preset manager, opened from the toolbar preset name or the main menu: read-only Factory Presets; your own user presets and folders; Load / Save / Save As; Copy / Paste; and Save As User Default, which makes the current state the preset for every new instance (Clear User Default restores the factory default). User presets are stored as individual files under ~/Documents/SoloVoice.ai/SoloVoice/Presets (the Satellite keeps its own beside it, under ~/Documents/SoloVoice.ai/SoloVoice Satellite/Presets); the folders appear the first time you save a preset, where you can create sub-folders.

MIDI Program Change

Recall presets remotely with MIDI Bank Select and Program Change. Enable it from the MIDI Program Change item in the presets menu and choose the channel to listen on. Each root preset folder is a bank (factory presets are bank 0).

MIDI & Automation Control

Any parameter can be mapped to a MIDI CC or automation curve. Click the control-settings icon in the toolbar for per-control menus: MIDI Learn / Learn Once, MIDI Unlearn, and the advanced Control Settings panel (channel, control type, control number, response curve, min/max range). Settings can be saved per preset or as global defaults and locked so they survive preset changes.

The CC Lanes (CC1 · CC2 · CC11 · CC15)

Unlike a generic assignable controller, SoloVoice's four CC buttons are fixed-function output toggles wired to the performance rig: CC1 forwards pedal vibrato, CC2 sends breath, CC11 sends the breath-derived expression SWAM needs to sound (on by default), and CC15 is the foot pitch-bend lane with its ±2 / +2 / −2 switch. Turn on the lanes your target instrument responds to. These are what make the output expressive rather than flat; the musical detail behind them is in §5.1.

10. Settings & Skins ↑ Contents

Two settings windows are available from the main menu: Preset Settings (skin, MIDI and automation for the current preset) and Global Settings (the defaults used by every instance unless a preset overrides them). Choose the interface skin from Preset Skin in the main menu. Every knob, switch and readout on both plug-ins carries a hover tooltip — rest the pointer on a control for a moment and a one- or two-line explanation appears. Appendix A collects the same information as a reference.

11. Troubleshooting & Known Limitations ↑ Contents

Common checks

Known limitations (v1)

12. Version History ↑ Contents

VersionNotes
1.0 (macOS)First release. SoloVoice: native audio-to-MIDI engine with breath-derived humanized velocity and CC11/CC2 expression; per-chord jazz scale pairing across a 42-scale bank plus Chromatic; chroma strip with interval labels, chord-tone bands and note names; guitar-voicing chord track; typed and MusicXML chord entry with full-tension honoring; Insert Chord and the composition template; Key Center, per-chord override and Apply Scale to Range; SCALES / CHORDS / S+CHORDS snap with the S+C tolerance knob; PICKUP anticipation; OCTAVE; three-way CC15 bend; PANIC!; Chords Out on channel 16; MIDI export with key signature, markers, track name and credit; palette announce on channels 1–15; in-app licensing. SoloVoice Satellite: per-instrument follower with SCALES / CHORDS / S+CHORDS mode, palette lamps, root and tone-count readouts, stuck-note stewardship and panic flush.

Appendix A — Control Reference ↑ Contents

A one-line reference for every control on both plug-ins, in the spirit of their hover tooltips. Defaults in brackets.

SoloVoice (the conductor)

ControlReference
Power / BypassSmoothly bypass SoloVoice (toolbar).
?Opens the built-in Quick Start.
Chord slot / diagramChord name over its four-note guitar voicing, root in the bass; an asterisk marks a deliberate diagram reduction. The highlighted diagram is “you are here.”
Position barLive playback position sweeping across the chord track.
Beat lampPulses on the beat; BEAT switch turns it on or off.
Chroma stripInterval labels of the scale in play (R = root), note names beneath. Gold band = chord tone — the notes the band obeys in CHORDS mode. Framed cell = where your voice lands after snap.
Key CenterDetected key of the tune; set it to the new key's actual root at a true modulation.
Force ModeCorrect the displayed major/minor label when detection guesses the mode wrong; doesn't change the harmonic rules.
Scale readoutScale paired to the current chord — yellow = engine's choice, green = yours. Click to override; Reset to Default restores the pairing; Chromatic (bottom of the menu) = no snap in SCALES mode.
Range Scale Root / Range ScaleScale to paint over the In–Out range with Apply Scale to Range.
Apply Scale to Range / ClearPaint the chosen scale over measures In to Out (Out exclusive); teal bars mark the range. Clear removes it.
◄ Prev / Next ►Step chord by chord (and page the grid) to target a chord for an override or an insert.
CHORD SEQUENCEType or paste a chart: bars split by | or a new line, chords in a bar by comma or space. Also where your license key goes.
LOAD XML / CLEARImport a MusicXML chart (CLEAR any typed chart first) / empty the chart.
EXPORT MIDIWrite the chart as a Standard MIDI File: block chords, chord markers, tempo, meter, key signature, your filename as track name.
PANIC!All-notes-off to every instrument on every channel, pitch bend centered, tracker reset, palette re-announced.
ROOT / QUALInsert a chord on a blank measure (twelve roots, thirty-two qualities); Reset to Blank clears inserted chords only.
NOISE GATE [0.7]Ignore input below this level so room noise and breath rumble never trigger notes.
DRIVE [5.9]How hard breath level pushes into expression and velocity. Keep low for a whole band; raise interface gain instead.
RESPONSE [8.5]How fast SoloVoice follows pitch and level: lower = smoother legato, higher = snappier, flourishes through.
VEL CEIL [127]Clamp maximum output velocity; expression untouched. Lower smooths zippering on reeds; brass usually best at 127.
PICKUP [175 ms]How far ahead of the bar line the harmonic clock runs. Small values forgive pickups; large values let you play ahead of the change. Never more than half the current chord.
OCTAVE [0]Transpose the output in whole octaves (five positions).
COUNT-IN / BARSDelay the chart by your backing track's baked-in count-in, in bars or beats.
Time Signature [4/4]Meter for playback and the grid: 4/4 up, 3/4 down.
GO TO BARJump the cursor to a bar number.
Loop / In / Out / ClearLoop between In and Out (Out exclusive); values persist when off; Clear removes the points.
BEAT [on]Beat lamp on or off.
CC1 [on]Forward pedal vibrato (CC1) to your instrument.
CC2 [off]Send breath as CC2.
CC11 [on]Send breath-derived expression as CC11 — required by SWAM.
CC15 [+2]Foot pitch-bend lane: ±2 spring swing, +2 up, or −2 down. −2: press before the note, release into pitch — the horn player's scoop.
Snap mode [CHORDS]SCALES = full scale color; CHORDS = strictest, states the changes, typed tensions included; S+CHORDS = the union, gated by S+C TOL.
S+C TOL [35]In S+CHORDS, how accurately (in cents) you must land on a scale-only tone for it to count; chord tones always count. 0 = chords only, 50 = every scale tone.
CHORDS OUT [0]Stream the block chords on channel 16 at this velocity; 0 = off. Channel 16 never carries band announce.

SoloVoice Satellite

ControlReference
Palette stripLit lamp = scale tone, gold band = chord tone, bright top edge = the note sounding through this chair after snap. Dark strip = no announce yet — press play once on the conductor.
MODE [S+CHORDS]SCALES = full scale color; CHORDS = strictest, most consonant, states the changes; S+CHORDS = the union, most permissive. One setting per chair, saved in the PatchWork preset.
SCALE ROOTRoot of the announced scale.
SCALE TONES / CHORD TONESCounts of lit lamps and gold bands — a canary for a broken announce (a typed 9th showing four chord tones = upstream trouble).
?Opens the built-in Quick Start.

Appendix B — The Announce Protocol ↑ Contents

SoloVoice's palette announce is an open protocol: the Satellite is simply the first follower built against it. Anyone building a rig with a different voicing engine, or writing their own follower, needs only this page. The same specification is published at solovoice.ai.

Messages

ControllerCarriesValue
CC20Scale mask, low halfSix bits each: bit 0 = C … bit 5 = F on CC20; bit 0 = F♯ … bit 5 = B on CC21. A set bit means that pitch class is in the current scale. Value = sum of set bits (0–63).
CC21Scale mask, high half
CC22Chord mask, low halfSame split and encoding; a set bit means that pitch class is a chord tone of the current chord — every typed tension included, not the diagram's four-note reduction.
CC23Chord mask, high half
CC24Root0–11 = C–B: the root of the paired scale.

Example. A D7 measure paired with D Mixolydian announces CC20 21, CC21 43, CC22 5, CC23 9, CC24 2 — D Mixolydian on the scale mask, D–F♯–A–C on the chord mask, root D.

Where and when

Rules for anything between the conductor and a follower

  1. Pass CC20–24 to every output lane unaltered. No value humanization, scaling, smoothing or curve: one flipped bit is a wrong palette. Timing jitter is harmless; value changes are not.
  2. Never react to CC20–24 as your own controls. They are freight, not commands.

Divisimate Core meets both by default (controllers pass through to every voiced chair; CC Value humanization must be 0). A follower should decode all five, swallow them so the instrument behind it never sees them, remap the notes that follow, keep note-offs on the remapped pitch, and pass every other message through untouched. A follower directly on SoloVoice's own output, with no voicing engine, gets fifteen conductable channels per port; add ports through any compliant splitter for more.


SoloVoice User Manual · Version 1.0 · September 2026. Blue Cat and PatchWork are trademarks of Blue Cat Audio. All other product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners, used for identification only; no affiliation or endorsement is implied.