Midiocre. Online Manual

Midiocre is a chord progression workbench. You generate a progression, then push it around until it sounds like something. It is not an AI tool — it works from music theory, and it shows you the theory as it goes.

This page covers the ideas. Every individual control also documents itself inside the app: open Help & About (the ? button, or press F1) for a searchable reference of every parameter and the full keyboard shortcut list for your platform.

Getting Midiocre

Web — open midiocre.dustyroom.com. Nothing to install. You can add it to your home screen or dock it as an app, and it keeps working offline.

macOS — download the .dmg and drag it to Applications. It is signed and notarized, so it opens without warnings. The desktop version adds MIDI hardware support.

Windows and mobile versions are in progress.

The basics

Midiocre opens with a progression already playing-ready. Press Space to hear it.

Across the top you set what the generator draws from:

Key and Mood — the tonal centre and whether it is major or minor.
Detected — the key Midiocre hears in your progression. This is not the same as the Key setting. As you edit chords, the detected key follows what you actually wrote, and every Roman numeral on screen is read against it. Lock the key if you want it to stop moving.
Complexity — the harmonic vocabulary the generator draws from: dyads, triads, sus/add, sevenths, extensions, or alterations.

Regenerate builds a fresh progression from those settings. Anything you have locked survives it.

Working with chords

Each chord is a card on the timeline. The card shows its name, its Roman numeral, its role in the key (tonic, subdominant, dominant), and its length.

Select a card by clicking it. Shift-click for a range, and drag across the timeline to marquee-select.
Reorder by dragging.
Resize by dragging a card’s edge — that is its length in beats.
Lock a card (the padlock) and Regenerate will leave it alone. Lock a card’s length separately from the Inspector.
Hold any card to audition it without starting playback.

Cards can be split, joined, duplicated, and turned into rests. The kebab menu on the card and the Inspector below both reach these.

Type In is the fastest way to enter something you already know: type or paste chord names (Cmaj7 F G Am) or Roman numerals (I IV V vi) and Midiocre builds the progression. It reads what you paste from other apps too.

Transforming

The Inspector’s Transform row is where the tool earns its keep. Select one or more chords and push them:

Para / Lead / Rel / Slide — the Neo-Riemannian moves. Each swaps one note to land on a closely related chord: parallel, leading-tone, relative, slide. These are the ones to reach for when a chord is nearly right.
Func — swap the chord for another with the same function in the key.
Modal — borrow the chord from a parallel mode.
Spin — move it around the diatonic circle.
Surprise — a deliberate left turn that still resolves.
Bridge — build a chord that connects its two neighbours.
Smooth — re-voice so the notes move as little as possible from the previous chord.
Flip — negative harmony: mirror the chord around the key’s axis.
Conform — pull an out-of-key chord back into the scale.

Below that, Voicing & Pitch moves the same chords without changing their identity: transpose by semitone or by scale degree, shift octave, invert, stretch the voicing apart, or add Dirt — a controlled wrongness that roughs up a chord that is too clean.

Suggest Next opens a panel of chords that plausibly follow the selected one, and lets you preview each before committing it.

Voicings

A voicing is how a chord’s notes are spread out, as distinct from which chord it is. The Voicing dropdown applies a named voicing to your selection.

You can also build your own: arrange a chord how you want it on the keyboard, then Extract it to save that shape as a reusable preset. Your presets persist between sessions, and you can export and import them as JSON to move them between machines.

Playback

Space starts and stops.
Loop repeats a region. Drag the brackets on the timeline, or loop the current selection.
Arp arpeggiates instead of playing block chords — up, down, up-down, or stacked, at a rate you set.
The metronome clicks along with the tempo.

MIDI

Import a MIDI file and Midiocre reads it as a progression. It only accepts block chords — if the file is a melody or an arpeggio, it will tell you rather than produce nonsense from it.

Export MIDI writes a standard .mid file. Export WAV renders the audio.

On the desktop version, Midiocre also talks to MIDI hardware. Pick an output and your external synth plays along with playback, with auditioned chords, and with the MIDI trigger. Arm MIDI input and you can play chords in from a keyboard instead of typing them.

Share as Link copies a URL that carries the whole session — chords, key, mood, tempo, locks, voicings, and your presets. Nothing is uploaded; the progression is encoded in the link itself. Send it to someone and it opens exactly as you left it.

Keyboard shortcuts

Midiocre is built to be driven from the keyboard. The full list lives in the app, under Help & About ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts, where it is shown with your own platform’s keys — ⌘ on a Mac, Ctrl on Windows.

Privacy

Midiocre collects nothing. No accounts, no cookies, no analytics, and the app makes no network requests of its own. Your progressions never leave your device — there is nowhere for them to go. See the privacy policy for the details.

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