Knobula excels at shortcuts; those well-placed, efficient, very nearly cheating—if you will—pathways to complex features when it comes to modular. If this sounds like a slight, it isn’t, it’s a compliment, and perhaps it’s no more apparent than in Chord Pilot, their module that easily brings chords (some that would either be impossible or a major pain in the Eurorack) to modular—all with no keyboard required, through the magic of MIDI.
Knobula's focus is on performative modules, and when it comes to chords in Eurorack, usually there’s not a whole lot of performing that happens, but definitely a lot of planning and patching, along with handfuls of cables and a mountain of modules. Chord Pilot changes all that, giving users the ability to create complex chords and chord patterns, and even sequence those, with enough knobs to tweak them, so that chord generation and manipulation in modular is fast and fun.
Chord Pilot has 192 chord memories and includes an arpeggiator, a strummer (for strumming the notes in a chord), and even an 8-step chord progression sequencer. With some initial twisting of the knobs, it’s easy to get Chord Pilot to generate chords, chord patterns/progressions, and to experiment with all sorts of abstract and esoteric chording/harmonizing. For those of us piano/keyboard players with small to normal sized hands who’ve always dreamed of having an eagle’s wingspan to stretch that barely octave reach to two or three octaves with one hand (or wing), Chord Pilot makes this easy—along with the resulting ability to create bizzaro chords—all without the need for some medieval hand-stretching device, wizardry, or some friends to literally lend a hand or finger. Of course, you can also play “normal” chords with Chord Pilot, but who wants that?
The controls that shape the chords do so in various ways; Note Count, Interval, Bias, Modal, Conform, Strum, Bass Note (which takes a selected note from the given chord and drops it an octave below), and Circle (a push encoder), all of which have a hand in how many notes are in a given chord, how spread out the notes are from each other, what notes are played, etc. There are only three CV inputs (Bias, Buttons, Gate) for modulation—who wouldn't love to modulate more aspects of the chords?—but it keeps things fast and simple, and easy to navigate.
Three gate modes—Chord, Orbit, and Arpeggio—determine how Chord Pilot plays. There are three preset banks to choose from with a toggle selector, and a Button selector switch for going between Modal, Circle, and Preset for the eight round-robin buttons at top. There are also buttons for saving and recalling presets (with all knob settings saved) and bank selection, and you can upload presets of chords/progressions (as well as arpeggiated MIDI sequences) manually or with CV/Gate control, which is pretty cool.
Tweaking the Conform control can get all sorts of chords; everything from perfect 5ths to what sounds like a random ham-fisted pounding of the keybed. While there is no text to denote whether you’re playing that B major 5th or a D minor 7th—it really makes you have to listen without relying on any sort of theory training, and it keeps things fresh. You can even do chord inversions, via the Modal control, which one of my old piano teachers, Gary, would always make me practice. He seemed very focused on those, and needless to say, if I have any strength at all in my piano playing, it would be my ability to play inversions.
Patch in some Gate CV or a MIDI in, or just push a chord button, connect it to a corresponding poly module via the TRS MIDI output and you’re good to go. It’s brilliantly simple, and you can create or load any chord you can think of, and you can easily edit each chord by entering the edit mode (hold down a chord button and push the Circle encoder), where each chord is broken down into its individual notes, which you can then change by tweaking the other controls. While it’s easy to get overwhelmed with button combos and menus, Knobula keeps this type of stuff to a minimum, and it’s intuitive enough to navigate without driving one mad. Again, you have to use your ears or patch into a tuner to know precisely what you’re doing as there is no screen, so if you are of the particular type who wants to know specifically what notes you’re choosing, you might want to use a tuner. As Chord Pilot is a polyphonic MIDI producing module that makes no sound on its own, it needs a partner, a polyphonic sound source to team up with, and wouldn't you know, Knobula’s 8-voice polyphonic module Poly Cinematic is just that. That doesn’t mean that Chord Pilot can’t go outside the Knobula family to control other multi-voice synths—it can—it’s just that Poly Cinematic and Chord Pilot are a darn good pairing.
Poly Cinematic is a pretty self-contained 56-oscillator stereo synth voice with four distinct sections. First, is an Envelope section that has Attack, Decay/Sustain, and Release controls with a CV Trigger input. This section also houses the blinky Trigger/(Save Chords) button. There’s a multimode Filter section with LP, Notch, or an HP filter (there’s even a hidden filter mode to choose three other special filter types), a Frequency control, Resonance, Envelope Depth, and a Key Follow toggle for configuring the filter cutoff with the note being played. An Oscillator section contains all the necessary tuning controls (Pitch, Fine Tune, etc.), including Detune, which shapes how the notes in a chord are tuned harmonically. There are three waveforms on order—supersaw, square, and tonewheel—and there’s a Mode selector, which, depending on the waveform selected, performs different functions. Lastly, there’s a nice sounding DSP reverb section that can go from subtle to super shimmery.
A lot of the controls on PC are dual function, when held in conjunction with the Shift button, such as Shift+Frequency, which controls the width of the Stereo Voice Spread, Shift+Reverb to customize the reverb size, and Shift+Trigger to save chords to a preset memory or to toggle Chord Mode. There is no indication on the front panel for most of these secondary functions, so you’ll probably be referencing the manual for these like I did. As on Chord Pilot, there are some CV inputs (Chord Select, 1V/Oct, Trigger, and Filter Frequency), which is enough to get some decent modulation going with neighboring modules, but the name of the game here is to patch CP and PC together and get to work.
I ran pitch and gate out on various sequencers into Chord Pilot and via the included light blue MIDI TRS cable, I connected it to Poly Cinematic and put on my space helmet and oxygen tank and went exploring. It’s impressive how much ground just these two modules can cover. From slow-clocked ambient interstellar pulses to shifting sequenced atonal chord progressions, to massive swirls that would make you swear you were wearing Organmaster church shoes, these modules really lend themselves to soundtracking, soundscaping, and songwriting.
It’s pretty easy once you set things up with both modules to explore textures and sounds, and for this I opted for CV instead of MIDI in for triggering. As per Knobula’s penchant for the performative, I wanted to do more hands-on exploration to correlate my tweaks to change in sound. This was a great approach, as some controls, like Strum on CP get tripped up on themselves in really interesting and unexpected ways, depending on a few factors (mode, gate/clock tempo, etc.), kind of eating themselves, almost like in a feedback loop of functions that I’m not sure I would have figured out if I was focusing on changing MIDI values instead of turning a knob.
Other than needing the manual for deeper functions, I did run into something that took a minute to figure out operation-wise, namely that if I wanted to CV Chord Pilot’s Gate and 1V/Oct, so that in Arpeggio mode I could arpeggiate the whole chord and not just the initial note on each trigger, I needed to use ratcheting so I could arpeggiate the entire chord.
There’s so much at play between the two modules—chord shaping and sequencing and tone shaping—that just a subtle change in a given parameter setting can yield a completely different sound and feel. I also patched in Knobula’s Pianophonic (reviewed in Waveform, Issue 12) and really enjoyed that as well, just scrolling through the sounds on hand. Pianophonic is a really incredible module and some of the sounds (toy piano hammer with synth drone body?) you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. Both Pianophonic and Poly Cinematic are very self-contained (onboard EG, VCF, and reverb) which makes it really easy to focus on either module while sculpting. It’s this MIDI or CV hands-on ease of use (minus the “hidden” type of alternate features) along with the scope of sounds available that have gained Knobula a loyal following in just a few years.
Polyphony and chord creation in Eurorack may have been here for a while, but not like this. There are definitely longer-winded ways to get there that offer more control over any/every aspect of chording, but Knobula has weeded out a lot of the hassle of doing so, adding some improbable and interesting features with both Chord Pilot and Poly Cinematic.

Price: $399 each

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