Skip to content

Using the Sequencer#

Each of your clips contains a pattern of midi data, in the form of up to 128 evenly sized steps, spread across a total of 8 bars. You can either enter notes onto these steps by picking them from a note grid (or using a midi controller) and them tapping the steps to place or remove those notes from the steps, or you can record them into the pattern by live recording them. For each of those notes, you can set a whole bunch of options, some directly on the sequencer, by selecting the "step entries" (which is as you might already have guessed, one of the notes on a step), or by using the Note Settings popup.

Picking and Placing Notes#

The most direct way to add notes to your sequence is to simply press one of the pads on the grid area, which both selects the note and the velocity of it, and plays it (the velocity being decided by how far up the button you press it, the further towards the top, the higher the velocity). You will notice the pad lighting up in a colour to show that it has been selected, and also that the two larger buttons at the bottom of the sidebar show respectively that you have a note selected (it also will attempt to show which chord you have selected, if you have a chord selected), and how long that note should play for, and what the velocity is.

To add the note (or notes) you just selected to a step, simply tap the step you want to add it to. If you tapped on the wrong step, just tap that step again to remove the notes you just added. If you tap a step where at least one of the notes you have selected exists already, you will remove that note from the step (but only that note, it will not remove notes you are not holding). If the step doesn't contain any of the notes, the notes will be added to the step (and similarly to before, leave any other notes already on the step remaining on that step).

To go back to have no notes selected, click the Note button (which has a little Backspace button in the lower right hand corner), or press Back/No (note that unlike most pages, hitting this continuously will not result in you ending up back on the Sketchpad page - while this is inconsistent with the other pages, we feel like it is handy to be able to just poke the button a bunch of times to clear your selection all the way back to nothing if you want to, without having to worry about whether you then have to navigate back to the sequencer page).

After placing down some notes, and then clearing the selection all the way back, you will now notice that the notes you have placed onto a step that's currently visible are lit up on the notes grid. Not only that, you also will be told how many notes are actually placed on steps in the current bar, as visible in the Notes button (the one with the little kebab menu looking three dots in the lower right hand corner).

Picking from the Pattern

If there's a step you would like to copy to a bunch of other steps, all you need to do is have no selection, and then tap that step: You have now picked up whatever was on that step, ready for placing onto any other step!

Do note that this only copies the notes and their velocities, not the other settings (such as the position, probability, ratchet, etc).

Directly Controlling Step Entries#

Knobs and Buttons

  • Big Knob moves through your sequence. When moving, you first select the step, and then you move through the step entries inside that step.

When you have a step entry selected:

  • knob 1 changes the entry's Velocity (how hard the keyboard key the step entry represents is struck)
  • knob 2 changes the entry's Length (for how long the keyboard key the step entry represents is held down)
  • knob 3 changes the entry's Position (its offset from the start of the step)

When you have a step selected, the knobs above will change these for all the step entries (note that the length and position are not visualised when the whole step is selected)

Nudging

When you have some notes picked, you can hold either Mode or the Selected Notes button in the sidebar, and then twisting the Big Knob, which will begin to nudge what matches the notes that you have selected. If you have the Clip Settings panel open, you will nudge across the entire clip, and if you do not, you will be nudging the currently displayed bar (this way you only change what you can actually see). To abort a nudge, if you decide that it just isn't working out, hit the Back/No button before you let go of the Mode or Selected Notes button. To apply the nudge, simply let go of the button.

Bottom Toolbar#

As with basically all the main pages, hitting the Back button on the toolbar will take you back to the Sketchpad.

The second button lets you activate and deactivate the current clip without having to navigate away from the sequencer, or open the Pattern popup. During playback, activating and deactivating clips works in a manner that is quantized to the bar, which helps you ensure that things run in time with each other rather than with some difficult to rely on offset.

Screenshot - the sidebar, with some notes selected probably (sidebar with a bit of context, and aligned on the page, so the text flows around it... think that's possible)

Your sidebar contains a few buttons, most of which contain a few more features than simply accepting being pressed. From the top to the bottom, the buttons are:

The Clip button, which when pressed will show the Pattern popup. This displays the name of the current track, and also the current clip. If the clip is soloed, the track name changes to the text SOLO, and in the bottom right hand corner of the button, the little speaker icon will display normal if the clip is active (meaning that it will play when playback is running), and it will have a little red line crossing it if the clip is disabled.

Under that is the note grid's octave selector buttons: Push the Up button to move the grid up by one octave, and the Down button to move the grid down by one octave.

Next is the Selection button. This button will display which notes are currently selected (it will try to identify the chord and display that whenever possible), if any, and to clear the current selection, you tap this button. You also can completely clear the contents of the current clip by holding the Back/No button and then pressing the Selection button.

Then comes the Notes button. Tapping this button will show the Note Settings popup, for whatever is currently selected. If you have no notes selected, this will show how many notes are in the current bar. If you have selected notes by using the notes grid, or an external device, this displays the length of what will be put on the sequencer if you place the selection onto a step, and the velocity of the first note in the selection. If you instead have a step selected, then it will display the text Step, and the number of the step underneath that.

Finally is the Settings button, which toggles the Clip Settings panel.

Pattern Popup#

Tapping the first button in the sidebar displays the Pattern Popup, which lets you select a number of settings for the current clips for each of the tracks.

Screenshot - track T3 selected

Note Settings#

Each step entry has more potential things you can do with them than what is accessible directly on the steps as described above. To control these, the second from the bottom button in the sidebar opens the Note Settings popup (or just hit the F4 button again). The popup also lets you control some of the per-clip settings which relate directly to the steps and their entries, in particular the key snd scale, and the default length of step entries.

Screenshot - a pattern, perhaps a drum loop, general tab

Screenshot - a slice of the top section, probability tab

Screenshot - a slice of the top section, ratchet tab

Clip Settings#

(important to note that when this is open, the knobs will change the values in here rather than the selected steps)

Live Recording#

Recording live into your pattern can be done with or without opening the Recording popup. When performing live recording, you can think of the idea that you kind of toggle recording on and off during playback. What that means, also, is that you can't live record into a clip that is not being played back, and so if you attempt to start recording when playback is stopped, playback will be started for you.

Knobs and Buttons

  • toggles playback
  • while recording will stop the recording, but leave playback running
  • during playback will stop playback
  • while playback is not running will cause the system to send out an "All Notes Off" midi message on all tracks (which will stop any ongoing note, for example if you have a sound with an extremely long release and just want the sound to stop)
  • will display the Recording Popup if it is not open
  • while the popup is open will start recording with the displayed settings if the recording is not running, and if the recording is ongoing, it will stop the recording
  • Alt+ will start recording immediately with the current settings
  • Metronome+ will start recording with a one bar count-in
  • Back/No will close the Recording popup

Screenshot - probably show a recording popup with a number of not quite default settings, with some notes in the pattern and playback running

The popup lets you set up the settings for recording midi notes into the clip, such as the step length, pattern length, and quantizing options, as well as control the recording state.

No Popup Needed

You don't need to use the recording popup at all if you don't want to: You can toggle recording on during playback by hitting Alt+, and stop recording by hitting . If you want to change the quantizing settings, for example, you can still open the popup and change them there, even while recording is running, by hitting .

The largest element that you'll notice is on the right hand side, where a very big button lets you start the recording (or stop it if the recording is running). Underneath that is a little button which lets you pop up the mini-grid, which lets you play the track's sound without having to plug in an external keyboard.

At the top of the popup, you will see a few things you might recognise from the Global Popup, like the Metronome toggle, master volume, and the sketchpad BPM setting. Additionally, you will see an option to select how many bars you want for your count-in. The default value for this is 1 bar (meaning four beats), and unless you explicitly hit Alt+ as described in Knobs and Buttons above, you will get a visual and audible count-in when you start recording.

Underneath this is the Midi Source selector. The default value, "Current Track", will record the midi information sent to the current track by any source. In other words, using any of the pads you see on the system (like the pads in the sequencer, or the mini keyboard, which you can pop up using the button underneath the large record button and to the right of the pattern preview). You can also pick some other track to take the midi information from (though it would be easier in most cases to just copy a pattern from there, you might have a midi controller set up to send data to there). Finally, you can pick a specific connected midi controller to record, or the 5-pin midi port, if your box has one of those.

Following that is the Step Length, which will show you how long each step of your pattern is in quarter notes. You can also set the length of the pattern here, either in increments of a bar (by using the minus and plus buttons), or by sliding sideways on the field (where you can set increments of a single step, with one bar being 16 steps). The default values of step lengh 1/4 and 1 bar, means that your pattern's 16 steps will fit exactly inside one bar of the global timer's 4/4 structure.

The last option you can chose is the quantizing amount. By default, your input will be forced to fit the current step, and from that, your options go from 1/96th (that is, no quantizing), all the way to 4 full notes (an entire bar).

The bottom of the dialog, just above the Close button, is an overview of the current clip. While playing, as anywhere else, the little blue line shows you what the current step is, and the white dots are the notes on each of the steps. You can clear the pattern by tapping the Backspace key beside that preview and selecting the Clear Pattern option in the popup. The little text readout in the top right hand corner of the gray area is the number of seconds that your clip's pattern will take to play through given the current settings.