HeartBeat Manual

HeartBeat is a 16-track groovebox for iPhone and iPad. A step sequencer in the hardware tradition drives samplers, synths, plugins and your external gear, and a layer of performance tools sits on top. This manual goes through all of it, one chapter per area. You don't need to read it in order.

The Perform screen

You'll spend most of your time on the Perform screen. Along the very top is the project's name with its colour square, a CPU meter showing how much of each audio callback the engine is using (amber past 60%, red past 85%, where glitches begin), and on the right four buttons: a waveform for PERFORM, the split-rectangle ARRANGE button (tap opens the arrangement, hold switches arrangement mode on or off; it turns amber while on), a folder for PROJECTS and a gear for SETTINGS, with the current screen lit. Below that, from the top down:

Turn the phone on its side and the same five bands rearrange into a two-by-two grid. The transport moves up into the header, the carousel sits next to the knob pages, and the steps sit next to the pads. Nothing is hidden and nothing shrinks. On an iPad the whole board grows to fill the screen in either orientation. If you'd rather have the knobs and pads under your left hand, Swap sides in landscape in Settings mirrors the two columns; the header stays where it is.

The colour language

A few colours mean the same thing everywhere, so once you've learned them you can read any screen at a glance.

• Each track has its own hue, and it follows the track onto its pad, its steps, its fader, its meter and its waveform.
• Amber means something is set on the step, or armed: p-locks, lock notches, a queued pattern, a page loop, FILL.
• Cyan is only ever MIDI learn.
• Violet is morphs, and red is record.
• Green and red LEDs on the keyboard and down the piano roll's gutter show which notes are in the pattern's scale and which aren't.

Five minutes to a beat

1. Pick a track. Tap pad 1. A new sampler track with an empty pool loads the factory drum kit for you.
2. Put some trigs down. Tap steps 1, 5, 9 and 13. Press play.
3. Shape it. Swipe the param area across to FLTR or AMP and turn things. The display above follows along.
4. Lock a step. Hold step 5 until it latches, then turn FREQ. The knob's arc and the step's corner go amber. That step now has its own filter setting. Unlatch and carry on.
5. Add some life. Hold FILL on the steps you want only in fills, drop a step's PROB under 100, or put an LFO on the filter. After that, have a look at the devices, the piano roll and morphs.

Chapters