Quick start

Two minutes from a running rig to something worth listening to. Everything here is reversible and nothing needs saving to keep playing.

Four legends on your panel do not mean what they say — PAD MODE is FREEZE, SELECT is ARM, SWING is MOD, and ALL is the lens. Coming from Maschine is the one-page translation.

Your first two minutes

  1. Press Play. All eight channels start together, and the factory snapshot already holds a dub beat across A–E, a bass on F, and chords held on G and H.
  2. Press Group A to select KICK, then STEP. Encoder 1 is HITS: turn it to 4 and you have four-on-the-floor. Encoder 2 is ROTATE — turn it and the same four hits slide around the bar without changing how many there are.
  3. Tap a dark pad. You get a hit there, and it plays as you place it. Tap it again and it goes. What you tapped is part of what the generator knows, so it survives ROTATE.
  4. Press Group F for BASS, then AUTO — that is where a voice’s generators live. Encoder 3 is MELODY. Turn it to roughly 30 and the bassline starts mutating a note at a time. When a phrase goes past that you want, turn MELODY back to 0: the cell reads LOCK and that line is frozen, bit for bit, until you move the knob again.
  5. Press CONTROL and the same eight encoders become what the channel sounds like instead of what it plays.

That is the whole instrument in miniature: a mode decides what the knobs mean, the channel decides what they act on. There are four modes and they are four questions — CONTROL how does this sound, STEP what does it play, AUTO what does the machine do to it by itself, VOLUME what holds for everything.

The other two minutes

Three gestures that are not modes, and they are what the panel is actually built around.

  1. Turn the LEVEL knob on any channel — second under the right display — then hold ALL. The eight encoders stop being eight parameters of one channel and become that one parameter on all eight channels. Let go and you are back exactly where you were. That is the mixer, and it is the filter, and it is anything else you had your hand on a moment ago.
  2. Tap ALL instead of holding it. It stays, and the button blinks. Every modifier on this panel works that way — tap to keep it, hold to borrow it — so you never have to decide which you meant before you start. A second tap is always the way out.
  3. Press the big encoder. You are home: STEP, page 1, every latch dropped, your channel still selected and anything you armed still counting. It is the button for when you have stopped knowing where you are.

Nothing you have touched is destructive, and nothing needs saving to keep playing. When you do want to keep it, see Saving a set.

Where next

Every feature has a page with a walkthrough like the one above — the full list is on Features. The three worth reading first:

  • Generating patterns — euclid, the Turing register, and what LOCK really means
  • Modulation — making any sound parameter move on its own
  • The surface — every button, both displays, and what to check when a channel goes quiet
  • Performing — landing a change on a bar you choose rather than the moment you press
  • Features — every feature in one list, if you would rather scan than read