Features

An eight-channel generative groovebox, played entirely from a Native Instruments Maschine MK2 — pads, encoders, both displays, LEDs. It runs on Zynthian, a Linux synth platform for the Raspberry Pi that supplies the engines, the sequencer and the snapshots underneath — what that means if you only know Maschine. Five euclidean drum channels and three Turing-machine voices, all eight always alive; nothing is created or torn down while playing.

The generator owns the pattern. You do not draw a beat. You set hits, rotation and randomness, and the driver writes real notes into Zynthian's own sequencer — so patterns persist in snapshots and the touchscreen pattern editor mirrors exactly what the pads show.

How to play it starts at Quick start; how it is built is Internals.

The eight channels

Drums are warm colours and voices cool, so the seam between the halves is visible on the panel without reading anything. All eight are always alive — nothing is created or torn down while playing.

The factory snapshot ships one channel against that grain. E · OHAT keeps its Simmons kit and its sampler, but arrives switched to voice behaviour: the Turing register walks the kit's own samples rather than euclid placing them. It is there so the switch below is audible the moment you plug in. Its tab reads VOX, and GRID blinks while it is selected.

What it does

Each of these has a page with a walkthrough on the real instrument.

Generating patterns

Euclidean drums and Turing-machine voices — or a bounded walk, or one voice fed by another, with a slow walker moving the key they share. You set hits, rotation and randomness; the generator writes the notes and you steer it. A tapped pad joins that state rather than sitting on top of it.

Playing and recording

The pads are the instrument, and they are pressure-sensitive — squeeze a held pad on a voice and the filter opens. Hold REC and what you play is captured into the same pattern the generator writes, and the pattern becomes yours.

Modulation

Hold MOD and every encoder stops setting a value and starts setting how that value moves. Saved with the set, still running tomorrow.

Sound and presets

Kits, samples and engine presets, changed while the rig plays — and switching what a channel behaves as without swapping its engine.

Deep parameter control

Eight knobs reaching a synth's fortieth parameter, on pages built from whatever the plugin publishes. A port with named positions steps between the plugin's own words on its own encoder, never landing between two.

Mixing and effects

Hold ALL and whichever knob your hand last moved lays itself out across all eight channels. Two post-fader inserts on every one, and the globals that belong to the machine.

The surface

Four modes and the lens, one rule for every modifier, one alphabet for every light, both displays, and the list to work down when a channel goes quiet.

Performing

The bar count the whole instrument shares, the macros you arm against it, the two grids that rearrange the set, and the two ways of holding the machine still. Almost nothing here happens the moment you press it — it waits for a boundary and gives you a countdown you can read.

Saving your work

What a snapshot carries, what it cannot, and the one control in the web interface that looks like a save button and is not.

Performing it

These act on the whole machine rather than on one channel, and they are written up on Performing.

Landing a change on a bar

ARM picks a macro and a length, and the pads count the bars down. DROP and BREAK take the mix out and bring it back; HALF and DOUBLE move the time; the CHANCE and ratchet ramps thin or subdivide a bar at a time. PENDING lists what is armed and kills one.

Holding it still, and squeezing it

FREEZE stops the machine evolving without stopping the music; the mute grid mutes eight channels now or on the wrap; beat repeat squeezes every generated channel to one beat while you hold it.

What it is not

No song mode, no pattern chaining, no sampling. Eight channels, always alive. It is an instrument for playing a single evolving pattern, not a workstation for arranging one — but the jam itself can be captured: SHIFT + REC writes the master to a WAV on the Pi.