Veery Genre Chord Deck

Install & activate

Install the plugin first — the VST Install Guide covers Windows and macOS step by step. The first time you open Veery in your DAW it shows an Activation Required screen instead of the deck.

• Type your serial — paste or type the serial number from your Members Area into the field (it looks like XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-…) and click Activate.
• Or use the .lic file — click Load .lic File… and pick it, or just drag the .lic file straight onto the activation window.
• You'll see a confirmation — on success the status line reads Activated with your expiry date, and the plugin interface loads.

Activation is fully offline — no account, no iLok, no internet connection needed. It's verified and stored on your machine, so it only happens once; every session after that opens straight to the deck. If you reinstall or move to a new machine, activate again with the same serial.

Load it as an instrument

Veery is a VST3 instrument, not an insert effect. Add it to a MIDI or instrument track and route your keyboard to it. It defaults to Mode: Synth, so it makes sound the instant you load it — no extra routing.

• Play sound directly — leave Mode on Synth and pick a Sound. Every key you press fires a full chord through the internal polysynth.
• Generate MIDI chords — set Mode to MIDI Out to send chord notes to another instrument, or Both to hear Veery and send MIDI at the same time.

Set the key, scale & genre

These three choices define the deck. Any change rebuilds it instantly and re-deals the chords onto your keys.

• Key — the tonal centre, C through B.
• Scale — 38 scales, from Major and the modes through Harmonic/Melodic Minor, pentatonics, Blues, exotic and world scales, out to Bebop — plus All Notes, the full chromatic, which makes every chord in the dictionary reachable (pads show flat-based numerals there). Default is Natural Minor. Every chord in the deck fits the scale you pick.
• Genre — filters the deck to a style's characteristic chord vocabulary. There are 33 genres — Neo Soul, Deep House, Brostep, Amapiano and more — plus All Genres, which applies no filter and shows every fitting chord.

The deck is never empty: if a genre and scale combination would leave nothing, degree triads are kept as a fallback.

Shape the hand — Fit, Complexity & Slots

These trim the pool of fitting chords down to a playable set.

• Fit — Strict keeps only chords where every tone is in the scale. Borrow allows the root in-scale plus at most one colour tone outside it, unlocking altered dominants (7#9, 7b9) and idiomatic tension.
• Complexity (0–100%) — sets the highest chord rank admitted, from dyads and triads up through 7ths, 9ths, and 11/13/altered chords. It's monotone: turning it up only ever adds chords, never removes them.
• Slots (12/24/36/48/60) — caps how many chords are dealt onto keys. Fewer slots is a tight, focused hand; more spreads a wider palette across the keyboard.
• Banks — nothing is thrown away. When more chords survive than Slots allows, the overflow is paged into banks: a ‹ bank 1 / 3 › bar appears at the top of the deck and the arrows step through the rest. If everything fits on one page the bar stays hidden.

Deal & map onto the keys

Deal orders the surviving chords and Mapping lays them onto keys, starting at the Start Key.

• Deal: Cycle (default) — round-robins the scale degrees at rising complexity, so adjacent keys walk the scale (I, ii, iii…) and every degree stays represented.
• Deal: Stack — groups all chords of degree I, then all of ii, and so on. This is the classic Cthulhu-style layout.
• Mapping: Chromatic — deals onto every semitone.
• Mapping: White Keys — deals onto white keys only, so you can play freely without ever hitting an unmapped pad.
• Start Key (12–84) — the lowest MIDI note the deck begins on. Default 36 (C2). Move it to sit under your controller or clips; any keys past 127 are dropped.

The mini piano strip is a scale lens: every in-scale key wears a soft tint and the roots carry a marker, mapped trigger keys light aqua, held trigger keys light orchid, and the exact pitches sounding right now glow bright — spin Invert while holding a pad and watch the notes walk. Above it, the spell line writes your key out in full (C Natural Major · C D E F G A B), and a marker sits at the Start Key.

Voice each chord

Voicing is applied at trigger time, so you can reshape how chords sound without rebuilding the deck. Your incoming velocity carries to every note.

• Octave (−2..+2) — transposes the whole chord by octaves.
• Invert (−3..+3) — rotates chord tones; positive values lift the lowest notes up an octave. Shown the way players say it: ROOT / 1ST / 2ND / 3RD. Ignored while Voice Lead is on.
• Voice Lead — auto-picks the inversion whose centre of pitch is closest to the previous chord, for smooth, player-like motion. Greys out manual Invert. The first chord after silence uses the plain voicing.
• Spread (0–100%) — deterministic open voicing; progressively lifts inner tones an octave for a drop-2, then drop-2&4 style.
• Low Root — adds the chord's root an octave below everything else for an 808-friendly bass anchor.
• Strum (0–60 ms) — staggers the chord's onsets low-to-high through a sample-accurate scheduler. Release is never strummed. 0 ms fires the whole chord as a block.
• Latch — the Latch pill sits at the top-right of the deck. With it on, a tap on a pad or key sustains the chord until you tap the same one again — so you can hold a chord hands-free while you reach for Sound, Tone or Invert, or just sit on it and read the glow. Two gestures deliberately stay momentary so they never leave a chord stuck on: gliding across the keyboard strip, and dragging a pad off to export it.

Follow the guidance

The guidance layer only marks pads — it never plays or writes notes for you, and changing it never rebuilds the deck.

• Progression — pick one of 14 classic degree patterns (Pop Axis 1-5-6-4, 2-5-1 Jazz, House Vamp, EDM Anthem, Trap Lift, Andalusian and more). They're positional, so they read correctly in any key or scale. Member pads wear a step badge; other pads dim but stay playable.
• Good-next glow — after each chord you play, the pads that "sound right next" breathe aqua. With a progression active they're the next step(s), wrapping at the loop end. With no progression, a functional-harmony flow table lights the tasteful successors.
• The gold ⌂ home pad — a permanent landmark on the tonic, wearing a gold ring and a small ⌂ badge. It's where a phrase resolves. It never dims, even when a progression greys the other pads, and it pulses when the chord you just played is pulling back to it — that's your cue to land.
• Voice Lead pairing — combine a progression guide with Voice Lead for the smoothest results: the glow tells you where to go, Voice Lead makes the move sound connected.

The synth & MIDI output

Mode routes triggered chords to the internal synth, out as MIDI, or both.

• Sound — six voices: Saw, Piano, Pad (default), Pluck, Sub, Strings. Each has its own envelope; Saw, Pad, and Strings add a subtle dual-oscillator detune. The polysynth has 64 voices and holds the sustain pedal (CC64).
• Tone (0–100%) — scales the low-pass cutoff on every voice, from dark to bright.
• Level (−24..+6 dB) — the internal synth's output. MIDI output is unaffected.
• MIDI Channel (1–16) — the channel chord notes are emitted on. Note-offs are reference-counted, so two held keys sharing a pitch never cut each other off.
• MIDI Thru — when on, unmapped incoming notes pass through instead of being dropped.

On-screen pads and the piano strip drive the same path as hardware MIDI, so clicking a pad also feeds the MIDI output.

Route Veery into another instrument

To play someone else's synth with Veery's chords, set Mode: MIDI Out and point that instrument at Veery's MIDI output. Every host does this slightly differently, but it's always one of two shapes: put Veery before the instrument on the same track, or put them on two tracks and tell the second one to listen to the first.

Ableton Live

1. Put Veery on a MIDI track and set Mode to MIDI Out.
2. Make a second MIDI track and load the instrument you want to play.
3. On that second track, set MIDI From to the Veery track. In the dropdown just underneath, change Pre FX to Veery — this is the step people miss.
4. Set the second track's Monitor to In.
5. Play into the Veery track. The second track sounds. Record-arm it to capture the chords.

The receiving track (left) is set to MIDI From: 3-Veery, and critically the dropdown just below it reads Veery rather than Pre FX — that's the setting that picks up the plugin's MIDI output. Monitor is set to In. The Veery track itself (right) stays on All Ins.

Capture & drag out MIDI

Everything you trigger is remembered and ready to drop into your project as a standard .mid file — no recording pass needed.

• Drag a pad — press to play, drag off the pad to export that chord: voiced exactly as it would sound right now (Octave, Invert or Voice Lead's pick, Spread, Low Root), one 4/4 bar at your session tempo, with Strum baked into the note timing.
• The PLAYED lane — your last 8 triggered chords land here as chips; consecutive repeats collapse, so a jam reads back as a progression. Hold a chip to audition the exact voicing that was recorded.
• Drag a chip — exports that one chord. Drag the ☰ MIDI grip — exports the whole lane as one progression, one chord per bar at host tempo.
• SAVE / CLEAR — SAVE writes the progression through a file dialog (it also lights up if an OS drag can't start); CLEAR empties the lane for a new take.
• Chord inspector — the Keys panel reads out the last chord: symbol, the inversion actually applied (including Voice Lead's auto pick), and the exact pitches played.

Presets & the help card

The preset bar in the top-left names the current patch. A preset stores the whole plugin state — key, scale, genre, the whole deck setup, voicing, guidance and synth settings — so it's a complete starting point, not just a sound.

• 13 factory presets — Init plus twelve genre starting points: Dusk Writer, Neo Keys, Brostep Dark, Deep House Rhodes, Trance Anthem, Lo-Fi Loops, Future Bass Stack, Drill Sparse, Ambient Drift, Indie Anthem, Synthwave Nights and Liquid Roller. Most ship with a matching progression guide and Voice Lead already armed, so the first pad you click is already steering you somewhere musical.
• Browse them — step through with the ‹ › arrows, or click the preset name to open the full list.
• Save your own — click SAVE, type a name, and it's stored as a user preset alongside the factory ones.
• The ? button — opens the welcome card, a one-screen refresher on how to read the deck (pads and their keys, the glow and the gold ⌂ home pad, progressions, the PLAYED lane, Latch). It shows itself once on first run; the ? reopens it anytime.