Sequencer

Sixteen tracks, sixteen patterns, and a step grid where any step can carry its own pitch, chord, length, timing, probability and a pile of parameter locks. This chapter is the heart of the app.

The shape of a pattern

A project has 16 patterns, P01 to P16, and you can name them. Each pattern has 16 tracks, and each track hosts one device. Within a pattern every track gets its own length, anywhere from 1 to 128 steps (16 to a page), its own speed from 1/8× up to 4×, and if you want it, its own swing. So a 12-step hi-hat against a 16-step kick is nothing special, it's just two tracks of different lengths.

A step is a sixteenth note split into 24 ticks for micro-timing, so a nudge can go from −23 to +23 ticks, which is just short of a whole step either way. Tempo runs 30 to 300 BPM and swing 50 to 80%. Each pattern can also hold a scale and a root note, with 22 scales to pick from, or Chromatic to turn that off.

Trigs

Tap a step to put a trig on it. Tap it again to clear it, and clearing really clears: everything the step was carrying goes with it, so if you put the trig back it starts fresh. Every value a trig can hold is optional. If it's unset the step follows the track default, and if it's set it's a lock on that step and shows amber in the editors.

Trig conditions

A condition decides whether the step fires at all on a given pass. The ¬ versions are the opposite of the plain ones.

Retrig (ratchet)

Pick a rate from 1/4 to 1/64T on a step and it repeats the hit at that rate for as long as the gate lasts. That's the whole trick: the GATE knob is the length of the roll, so to get more hits you stretch the gate rather than counting anything. You can set a retrig as a track default too, so every step rolls unless a step says OFF. On a sampler with Voices above 1 the hits overlap and ring into each other; on a mono device each one chokes the one before. The piano roll draws divider lines on a retrigged note, and on the step grid the pad shows the rate.

Parameter locks

Here's the rule, and it's the same one the classic hardware grooveboxes use: while a step is latched, every knob on every page writes to that step rather than to the track. Hold a trig until it latches (the TRG editor opens), turn anything, and the knob's arc goes amber while the step gets an amber notch in its corner. Unlatch and you're editing the track's base sound again.

• Double-tap a knob to clear its lock. Double-tap also puts any value cell back to the track default.
• On a MIDI track a lock is a real CC, sent just ahead of the note. The setup knobs lock as well, so one step can switch channel or send a bank and program change.
• A step's note and its locks share one probability and condition roll. They play together or not at all.
• The display follows along: with a step latched, the filter curve, the envelopes and the rest of the visualizer show that step's locked values rather than the track's.

Editing on the grid

• Holding a step for about a fifth of a second latches it. Hold more steps and the selection grows, and every edit then lands on all of them. A tap moves the latch to a new step, and tapping any selected step drops the lot.
• COPY and PASTE look at what's latched. With a step latched they copy that step, and a multi-selection keeps its spacing and lays back out from wherever you paste. With nothing latched they work on the whole track, and PASTE turns into a menu: Paste Whole Track, Paste Sequence or Paste Device.
• A single copied step pastes onto every step in a selection at once.
• UNDO and REDO keep 50 project-wide snapshots. Quick runs of edits are grouped into one.
• The strip above the steps has the length picker, the page dots, the follow-playhead toggle and 2×→, which doubles the loop and copies the content into the new half. Hold a page dot to loop just that page; it gets an amber ring. That's a section loop, next.

Section loops

A section loop replays part of the pattern in musical time. The region is a span of bars, so a half-speed track, a 2× track and a 32-step track all replay the same bars together and stay in phase, whatever their own lengths. Hold a page dot to loop that page, or drag along the piano roll's ruler to draw braces.

• While playing, the loop takes effect on the next bar line and restarts the section from its first beat. If you're stopped it applies at once, and play starts from the top of the loop.
• Letting the loop go doesn't jump anywhere. Playback just carries on from wherever the looped playhead was.
• A loop survives stop and start. It ends when you turn LOOP off, tap the page ring, or switch pattern. It's a live move and never saves.
• Recording under a loop puts the notes where you heard them, in the looped bars, not at the transport's raw count.

Track defaults

With nothing latched, the TRG page shows the track defaults: NOTE, VEL, GATE and NUDGE over PROB, VEL SEN, COND and RETRIG. This is what every unset step inherits, so it's where the track's default note (the pad's pitch), its default gate and its default probability live. VEL SEN is how much velocity affects the level. Defaults belong to the pattern, like the rest of the track setup, so a track can play a different note or roll by default from one pattern to the next. Loading a sound preset leaves them alone.

Recording

Arm REC and play something. The on-screen keyboard, a MIDI keyboard and the pads in PLAY mode all record. Pad hits land on the pad's own track; keys and MIDI land on the selected track.

• Hits snap to the nearest step and the difference is written as nudge, so the feel is kept. Gates round to the nearest half step. Notes played together become a chord, up to 6 voices.
• Q is record quantize: lit, hits snap hard to the step. Hold Q for the quantize panel, which has a global slider and one for the selected track. Those two are playback quantize, always on and independent of the Q light, pulling micro-timing toward the grid by whichever of the two is larger. Nothing is rewritten.
• Turn a knob while recording and it writes an automation lane at full tick resolution. Recording over an old sweep replaces it rather than mixing the two. Clear a track's lanes from its track sheet.
• Count-in is off, 1, 2 or 4 bars and only applies when recording. It's in the tempo panel along with the metronome and its level.

Transport bar

Patterns

The pattern sheet is a four-by-four grid. Tap a pattern to queue it for the next pattern boundary (its pad gets a pulsing amber ring), or hold it to jump straight away with every track keeping its place. While stopped, a tap just selects. Hold for the menu: Restart Now, Play Once Then Return, Name, Copy Current Here, Copy Pattern, Paste Pattern, and Clear. Copy Pattern and Paste Pattern work across projects: copy a pattern here, open another project, hold a slot there and paste. Everything the pattern needs to sound the same comes along: trigs, each track's device and settings, sounds, mutes, morphs and scale, the MIDI channels and mixer levels, plugins with their state, and the samples and wavetables it plays, which are copied into the new project's pool and re-pointed (a file the pool already holds is reused). Audio and MIDI routing stay the destination project's own.

The SCALE row sets a root and scale for the pattern. The live keyboard and the piano roll then light a green LED on the notes that are in the scale and a red one on the notes that aren't, and QUANTIZE TRIGS folds any notes you've already written into the scale.

Song mode

A song is a list of rows, each one a pattern and a repeat count from 1 to 32, up to 99 rows long. A row can also recall a morph as it comes in. Turn SONG MODE on and press play and the list runs from the top, looping if LOOP is on, otherwise sitting on the last pattern when it gets there. Reorder rows with the drag handles. Picking a pattern by hand drops you out of song mode.

A project can hold 16 songs. The strip above the rows picks the active one: tap a chip to switch (mid-playback the new song's first row comes in at the next pattern boundary), tap + for a new song, hold a chip to rename, duplicate or delete it. Each song has its own rows and its own LOOP setting and everything saves with the project. EXPORT in the same toolbar bounces the song to a WAV; see Exporting a song.

Arrangement

The ARRANGE button in the header opens a left-to-right layout of the song: one row per track over a bar ruler, like a DAW's arrangement view. Each block is a clip: this track plays its part of a pattern, looping, from here for this long. Clips point at patterns, so editing a pattern changes every clip that uses it. A track with no clip under the playhead stays silent, tails and all.

It works like the piano roll. Play sits top left and runs the arrangement from the playhead (turning arrangement mode on if it was off); UNDO, REDO and the close button sit top right. Drag empty space to pan, pinch to zoom, tap the ruler to move the playhead, or drag it along the ruler (snapped, saved with the project; while rolling it relocates on the next bar). Tap play twice to play from the top; with a clip selected, play starts from that clip. The loop works like the roll's: drag along the ruler to brace a span (it loops at once), drag a brace end to resize it or its middle to slide it, and LOOP, the repeat button in the corner where the ruler meets the gutter, turns the braced span on and off. With clips selected, LOOP loops their span instead. With no brace at all, LOOP cycles the whole arrangement. Tap an empty bar on a track and a cursor appears there; tap it again and the chosen pattern's clip lands on that track alone. Tap a clip to select it, tap it twice to delete it (along with anything else selected), and EDIT opens the selected clip's notes in the piano roll (the roll edits the pattern, so every clip on that pattern changes with it). Each clip shows its notes as the roll holds them (not the arp's or retrig's expansion) as black bars, conditional ones outlined, pitched by height on a scale shared along the track, with a line wherever the loop starts over, so notes line up with the grid by eye. Pinch in the track-name gutter to make the rows taller or shorter. Press and hold on empty space then sweep to select every clip the box touches; with clips selected, press and hold another clip to add it to the selection. Once selected, drag a clip to move it (the whole selection comes along), drag its right edge to stretch it, drag its left edge to trim its start (the end stays put and the music underneath stays where it was). A drag on an unselected clip just pans the view, like a drag on empty space. Each track's name in the gutter carries the mixer's solo button.

• The PATTERN cell chooses what a cursor tap places; with clips selected the PATTERN and MORPH cells change them instead. FROM SONG lays a song's rows out as whole-board stamps.
• The bottom row's right end holds the trash (deletes the selected clips), EDIT, DUPE (copies the selection to right after itself) and AUTO.
• Everything snaps to the beat; pinch to zoom. Beside play, ARRANGE switches arrangement mode, whether the main screen's play runs the arrangement after you close the view (amber while on), and FOLLOW (off by default) pages the view along with the playhead. Arrangement mode is exclusive with song mode and stops the transport when switched. FROM SONG appears on an empty arrangement and lays the song's rows out as clips.

Automation is clips too. AUTO, at the bottom right beside DUPE, opens a lane under every track, a row of its own that zooms with the tracks (pinch in the gutter). The lane's gutter holds a chip with the parameter it is set to; tap it for a menu of everything the track can automate (the ones already automated come first, marked). The + chip under it adds another lane for the same track, so several parameters sit side by side; the other lanes carry a − chip there instead, which takes that lane away. Each lane shows its parameter's clips, with the parameter's name in the header and the curve in the body; squeeze the rows down and the clips keep their headers.

Tap an empty bar of a lane and a cursor appears there; tap it again and an empty automation clip lands there, as long as the pattern playing under it (one bar where there is none), and opens in the drawer ready to paint. Automation clips select, move, trim, stretch, dupe and delete exactly like music clips, in the same selection, and a trim keeps the curve where it was. An unpainted clip is an outlined placeholder: it owns nothing until it has a point.

EDIT with an automation clip selected opens the drawer under the timeline, never more than half the screen, zoomed to the clip with absolute bar numbers and the playhead. The parameter name in its header is a menu of everything the track can automate: pick another and the drawer switches to that parameter's clip over the same span, making an empty one if there is none (the lane follows). Tap to add a point, tap a point to pick it, tap it twice to remove it, drag a point to move it, drag the line between two points up or down to bend it into a curve, drag empty space to scroll, pinch to zoom, FIT to zoom back to the clip, and the trash empties the clip. DRAW turns the drag into a pen: when you lift, the stroke boils down to the few points that shape it, each segment bent to the curve you drew. Every stroke is one undo step. The dashed line is the music clip's own stored value. While a clip owns a parameter the pattern's recorded lane, its LFO and (on MIDI tracks) its p-lock CCs stay quiet; where one clip ends and the next begins the value hands over directly, and after a clip the music clip's own value returns. A knob you move by hand holds until the track's music clip changes, as a recorded lane would.

What the perform screen edits while the arrangement plays is still the pattern picked in the pattern grid, not necessarily the one a track is sounding from, and the mixer's pattern mutes do not apply inside an arrangement (a track the pattern mutes gets no clip). Global mutes and solos work as always.

Mutes, pads and live modes

The sixteen pads at the bottom are the tracks. They flash with every note, and tapping one selects its track the moment your finger lands. The row above changes what a pad does:

The live keyboard

• The whole 128-note range, with a scroll strip above it. The strip is the full range and the lit part is what's on screen. Each track remembers where you left it.
• Proper multi-touch: one finger per note. Slide a finger across keys for a glissando while the others hold a chord.
• Velocity comes from where you land on the key: soft near the top, 127 at the bottom.
• With a scale set, a small LED near the top of each key says whether it's in the scale (green) or not (red). Every key still plays. Keys light up in the track colour when you press them, when the sequencer plays them, or when MIDI from outside holds them.
• The PITCH wheel springs back to centre. On a MIDI track it's real pitch bend; on an internal device it bends ±2 semitones. The MOD wheel stays where you leave it, sends CC 1 on MIDI tracks and moves the filter cutoff on internal devices, and it records.

Track setup

Tap the track name above the knob pages to open the track sheet. It's split into cards, and the split tells you how far a setting reaches:

• Track Setup (Pattern P01) is per pattern, so everything on it can be different in another pattern: name, device, colour, sampler Voices (1 to 8, where 1 chokes each hit with the next and more lets them ring), the track's own quantize, length, speed, swing, Clear Recorded CC Automation, and Send MIDI to track. The knob names and the track defaults are per pattern too.
• Presets is where you browse the preset library or save the track's sound as a new preset.
• MIDI In is project-wide: the Input Channel this track answers on (Off unless you set one) and, if you like, the one Input Device it listens to. See getting MIDI in.
• MIDI Out shows on MIDI tracks: the output this pattern's notes go to (per pattern), the channel they go out on (project-wide) and, with a device chosen, its Latency: the millisecond lead that device's MIDI gets so it lands with the app's audio (the same value as MIDI Setup's Latency Compensation, saved with the project).
• Audio In also shows on MIDI tracks: the interface input your synth's audio comes back on. See the audio return.
• Audio Out is project-wide wiring that stays put across patterns: Stream to Link, which gives the track its own Link audio channel, and the audio output, either the master, a pair or single channel on your interface, or Off, which keeps the track silent (its meter still moves). It's there for internal devices and for MIDI tracks with an audio return.

Reordering tracks

REORDER, the arrows button beside the hand on the pad row (it steps aside while a mute board is up), turns the pads into a drag-and-drop grid: pick a pad up, carry it to a new slot and let go, and the track moves there. Press and hold REORDER to choose the scope: this pattern only (the default), where the move rearranges the active pattern and the rest stay as they were, or all patterns, where the track moves in every pattern and everything travels with it: colour, sound, trigs, p-locks, mutes in both scopes, morph captures, MIDI sends, the sidechain key, and any controller bindings pinned to it. The only thing that stays behind is an untouched default name like "Track 5". The choice is remembered. Tap REORDER again to go back to normal pads.

A move is one undo step. One thing to keep in mind: NEI conditions watch the track directly above, so moving tracks changes what they listen to.

Sending a track to another track

Send MIDI to track picks a second destination. Everything this track plays, sequenced or live, also plays that track's device on its channel at the same moment. A track that receives a send can pass it on, so A → B → C stacks three devices on one sequence, and a chain that would loop back on itself is cut. The receiving track records the forwarded notes if REC is armed.