The twenty keys are twenty versions of the song you have
The marks under the transport are twenty ways of remaking the roll. Key one
is the roll itself and nothing writes over it; the next fourteen each run one
named transform over a copy — half-time, four on the floor, ghost notes, the
drop. Press one to engage it, press again to come back; hover any key and it says
what it does. The song chain reads the same way: 1 8 1 10 is
verse, breakdown, verse, drop — an arrangement of one song.
The last five keys touch the sound, not the song
Tape stop, brake, scratch, speed up and pitch dip — dashed, because they
change nothing about the song: the studio is where you left it the moment
they end. Four are held, running only while your finger is down;
the brake latches until you click it off or press Stop.
There is no buffer to slow down — every voice is synthesised into the
future — so the bend is done the way hardware does it, with a delay line
whose time is moving: the pitch ratio is one minus the rate of change,
and the whole mix goes down together, drums included.
The grid has five paint modes
The row above the grid changes what a square is. In Steps a
square is a switch; in the other four it is a value you drag up and down —
velocity, note, chance, ratchet — printed in the square itself, so a step
never lives in a second place.
Notes are degrees, not pitches
A step stores its place in the scale, not a frequency. Change the key or the
scale and every track and every random draw follows — in tune, immediately.
It is why the dice are usable: a random pitch is noise, a random degree is a
melody.
Every row has its own length
Set under the channel panel. Sixteen against fifteen phases for fifteen bars;
five against eight never sits still. Nothing else costs so little and changes so
much.
The rack is an order, not a set
Eighteen effects, reordered live with the arrows. A bitcrusher before a reverb
is a broken sampler in a room; the other way round, a room recorded onto a broken
sampler. Not the same sound.
The deck takes what you give it
Any file the browser can decode, dropped on the panel. Drag the platter to
scratch it; the six named moves are the classical ones, performed for you.
Pull the record to the song matches its tempo to yours;
pull the song to the record does the opposite.
The slicer makes an instrument out of it
Cut on the transients, send it to track 8, and the row becomes a slice
player — in Note mode each step chooses a slice. The shortest path
from somebody else's four bars to something that is not theirs any more.
The tape records what you hear
In real time, into a real .wav — scratches, knob moves and
all. An offline render would be faster and a different performance; the tape
catches the take you actually did.
Chords are stacked degrees, which is why they are always in key
Harmony builds chords by stacking scale degrees, not semitones
— a triad is degrees 0, 2 and 4 of whatever scale is loaded, diatonic by
construction. Change the scale and the same step is still the tonic chord, in a
different colour.
Set the arp rate faster than the grid
The arpeggiator's rate is a tempo division, so 1/16 against a 1/16 grid plays
one note per step and looks broken. It is not: give it 1/32 and it does what you
expected.
Fifteen engines, and only one of them is a filter sweep
What reads as futuristic is inharmonic: FM at a ratio of 3.5, additive
glass pushed off true, a wavetable moving under a held note. The subtractive voice
is Analog — hear the difference by putting it next to Glass on
the same part.
The lead guitar, and what makes it sound loud
The one voice built around distortion: two saws and a pick, through a cabinet,
with a great deal of gain. Bloom is a harmonic that rises across
the note — what sustain is on a loud amp. Dive is the whammy bar,
timed to the note so it lands the same at any tempo; Pinch is the squeal;
Palm mute shortens and darkens together, one hand doing both.
Tapping is a note order, not a guitar trick
Arpeggio set to Tapped plays two chord notes and a third far
above, in triplets, walking up — which is what two-hand tapping is.
Tap reach sets the gap, and the gap is the sound. It lives in the
arpeggiator, so it works on the bells and the pad too.
The keyboard
Space plays and stops. R rolls a whole new song.
Shift and 1–8 select a track. The
z–m and q–p rows play the
selected track like a keyboard — in the current key, because they are degrees
too.
