The twenty keys are twenty versions of the song you have
The row of marks under the transport used to be twenty empty pattern slots.
They are twenty ways of remaking the roll. Key one is the roll itself and
nothing ever writes over it; each of the next fourteen copies it and runs one named
transform over the copy — half-time, four on the floor, ghost notes,
stripped, the drop, reversed, an octave lift. Press one to engage it, press it
again to come back to the roll. Hover any key and it tells you what it does.
That is also what makes the song chain worth writing now:
1 8 1 10 is a verse, a breakdown, the verse again and the drop —
an arrangement of one song rather than an order for four bars nobody wrote.
The last five keys touch the sound, not the song
Tape stop, brake, scratch, speed up and pitch dip. They are drawn with a dashed
edge because they are a different kind of control: they change nothing
about the song, and the studio is where you left it the moment they end. Save while
one is running and you save the song, not the effect.
Four of them are held — they run for exactly as long as your finger
is down, because a tape stop is a second, a scratch is a wrist and a speed-up is a
bar. The brake latches: click it on, click it again off. Half speed with the
top rolled off is somewhere a passage goes and stays, for eight bars or
sixteen, and holding a button down for a minute is not a musical act — it also
pins the one finger you wanted on something else. Stop lifts it.
They work by the only means a live sequencer has. There is no buffer to slow
down here — 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, so growing the delay by half a
second per second takes the whole mix down an octave, drums included. Speed up and
pitch dip are the two that do not use it, because a delay can sound like rushing
and cannot make the next bar arrive sooner.
The grid has five paint modes
The row of buttons above the grid changes what a square is. In
Steps a square is a switch: tap it, or drag across a run of them. In the other
four, a square is a value you set by dragging up and down on it — velocity,
note, chance and ratchet. The number you are editing is printed in the square, so
there is never a legend to read and never a second place a step lives.
Notes are degrees, not pitches
A step stores its place in the scale, not a frequency. Change the key from C to
F♯, or the scale from minor to Phrygian dominant, and every track, every
pattern and every random draw follows it — in tune, immediately. It is also
why the dice are usable: a random pitch is noise, a random degree is a melody.
Every row has its own length
Under the channel panel. Sixteen against fifteen phases for fifteen bars before
it repeats; five against eight is a groove that never sits still. Nothing else in
the studio costs so little and changes so much.
The rack is an order, not a set
Eighteen effects, and the arrows on each one move it up or down the chain while
it plays. A bitcrusher before a reverb is a broken sampler in a room; the same two
the other way round is a room recorded onto a broken sampler. Both are useful and
they are not the same sound.
The deck takes what you give it
Any file the browser can decode, dropped anywhere on the deck 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 sequencer row becomes a
slice player. Then use the Note paint mode on that row: each step chooses a
slice. This is 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. An offline render would be faster and
would also be a different performance — no scratching, no knob you moved while
it played. So the tape rolls at the speed of the music, and what it catches is the
take you actually did.
Chords are stacked degrees, which is why they are always in key
Set Harmony on any melodic track and a step becomes a chord — built
by stacking scale degrees, not semitones. A triad is degrees 0, 2 and 4 of
whatever scale is loaded, so it is diatonic by construction. Change the scale from
minor to Phrygian dominant and the same step is still the tonic chord and still in
key; it has just become a different colour.
Set the arp rate faster than the grid
The arpeggiator turns the chord into a figure across however many steps you give
it. Its rate is a tempo division like everything else — which means an arp set
to 1/16 against a 1/16 grid plays one note per step and looks broken. It is not:
give it 1/32 and it will do what you expected.
Fifteen engines, and only one of them is a filter sweep
What reads as futuristic is inharmonic — partials that do not sit
on the harmonic series. FM at a ratio of 3.5, additive glass with its partials pushed
off true, a wavetable moving under a held note. The subtractive voice is in there as
Analog, and the fastest way to hear the difference is to put it next to
Glass on the same part.
The lead guitar, and what makes it sound loud
The Lead guitar engine is the only voice here built around
distortion — two saws and a pick, through a cabinet, with a great deal of
gain. Its character is not in the oscillators. Bloom is a harmonic whose
level rises across the note, which is what sustain actually is on a loud
amp: the note is not decaying, it is being fed back into the string.
Dive is the whammy bar, and it fires at a fraction of the note rather than
at a fixed time, so it lands in the same place at any tempo. Pinch is the
squeal, and Palm mute shortens and darkens together, because on a real
instrument that is one hand doing both.
Tapping is a note order, not a guitar trick
Set Arpeggio to Tapped and the figure becomes two notes of the
chord and a third far above it, in triplets, walking up — which is what
two-hand tapping is. Tap reach sets how far above the chord the tapping hand
lands, and that gap is the whole sound of it. Because it lives in the arpeggiator
rather than in the guitar, it also works on the bells and the pad, where it plays
something no guitar could.
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.
