Setting up
This is the first note from a new place. Here’s what it is.
Choice City Music is a small lab making tools for people who play with sound. iOS apps, Ableton devices, and eventually more. The work lives at the intersection of experiment and instrument. Software that wants to be turned the wrong way around. Devices that produce something interesting when you stop trying to make them behave.
If you’ve spent time with Chase Bliss pedals, or Mutable Instruments modules, or any gear that treats the player as a collaborator rather than an operator, you already know the posture. Tools that reward curiosity. Tools that earn their place by being useful even when they don’t do what you expected. Especially when they don’t. Around here, a happy accident is the point, not a bug report.
The name “Choice City” is the nickname Fort Collins picked up in the middle of the last century, in the same atomic-age moment that gave us the visual world this brand draws from. The earnest mid-century lab: blueprint blue, oscilloscopes humming in the corner, neat notebooks full of strange ideas. Mad scientist who keeps neat notebooks. If that’s a posture you can live with, you’re in the right place.
There are two products on the bench.
Asterism is an Ableton Push 3 device for chord exploration. It’s currently in testing. If it sounds interesting and you have a Push 3, details here. More coming as we work through what wants refining.
Selenite is an iOS AUv3 MIDI plugin that takes a single note and refracts it through a graph you build, fanning it out into multiple voices across channels and ports. It does for a single key press what a prism does to a single beam of light. The first release is coming soon. We’ll share more here when it’s close.
This is the first of an ongoing series of Field Notes. No fixed schedule. We’ll send one when there’s something worth saying: a product update, an observation about something we’re working on, a piece of gear behaving unexpectedly, an idea that someone else might find useful. The goal is signal, not noise.
If you want to follow along: subscribe to the newsletter, find the work on Instagram and YouTube, or stop back here when the mood strikes.
More from the bench soon.
Choice City Music Fort Collins, Colorado