One Shape. Twelve Colors.
The Superimposition Lab is a free browser instrument from Ed The Wave. Choose a pentatonic and a bass note, and it names the chord, plays it, voices it for two hands and saves it as MIDI.
Free. Runs in your browser. No sign-up. Works on desktop and phone.
The bass decides what the notes mean.
A note has no color on its own. Its color is the interval it makes with the bass. Hold C major pentatonic and change only the bass, and the same five notes become a 6/9 chord, a minor 11, a Lydian halo or an altered dominant. You already know the shape. The Lab shows you everything it can become.
Four tools. One idea.
Twelve Colors
Pick a shape (major, minor, Lydian or Malkauns pentatonic) and a bass note. The Lab names the chord, rates how stable it is and plays it. Hold the shape and move the bass, or hold the bass and move the shape, then walk all twelve in order of stability, chromatically or around the circle of fifths. A pitch wheel and a keyboard move with every change.
Grip Lab
Eleven left-hand grips from Ed's Quartal & Pentatonic Voicing system, for minor, dominant, altered, half-diminished, 6/9 and Lydian chords, in all twelve keys. Each grip shows the right-hand pentatonics that fit, or a simplified triad when you want something easier to play. Tighten either hand to a closed voicing within an octave. Then play full ii-V-I and iiø-V7alt-i cadences in all 24 keys.
The Symmetrical Families
Three diminished 7ths, two whole-tone scales and four augmented triads: the engines behind every dominant chord. See which dominants each shape serves and where they resolve, hear the resolution, and slide a shape by its own interval to hear that its notes never change.
Real sounds, real MIDI
Play everything on piano, electric piano, piano pad, strings, folk guitar or jazz guitar. One click exports what you hear as a MIDI clip at your tempo, with the bass, left hand and right hand on separate tracks, ready to drag into your DAW.
From shape to track in three moves.
Set your home note.
Put your track's root in the bass and play your hook's pentatonic over it.
Walk the colors.
Step through all twelve bass notes and mark the two or three that match the feeling you're after. That's a full harmonic movement under one top line.
Voice it and export it.
Load the right hand over a grip, tighten the voicing, and save the MIDI straight into your project.
Built from the Elemental Composition Framework™.
The Lab is the harmony tool from Water, the element of flow and emotion in Ed The Wave's Elemental Composition Framework™. It turns the pentatonic superimposition lessons into something you can hear and play: the same charts, the same grips and the same symmetrical families, live in your browser.
Ed The Wave is an electronic music producer and coach. He built the Lab for The Elemental Composition Framework™, the first pillar of his Elemental Producer Accelerator, so producers spend their sessions making decisions instead of searching.
The Trinity of Diminished and the Adam and Eve whole-tone names follow Alan Jay Palmer's presentations. Minor-pentatonic placements follow Whit Sidener's pentatonic guide.
FAQ
Hear it. Then finish it.
The Lab gives you the colors. The Elemental Composition Framework™ shows you where they go in a finished track: groove, harmony, motif, arrangement.