Changelog

What arrived, and when. Dates are the day the work landed on the instrument, not the day it was thought of — nothing appears here until it is on the instrument and running.

Entries are written for a player: what you can now do that you could not do before. Fixes appear only where they changed what you would see or hear.

Unreleased — built and tested, not yet played

Everything below this heading is in the repository and passes its tests, and none of it has been through a gate at the instrument. It is here so it is not invisible, and it moves up into a dated entry above once it has been played.

Most of this list came out of one session of somebody playing the instrument and saying that something did not sound or look right — which is how every one of these was found, and why none of them had been.

A tap you played can no longer be swallowed by the machine writing at the same moment, and a pattern rewrite claims the channel properly rather than assuming it is free.
The snapshot tools cannot destroy a snapshot half-way through writing one. Interrupt one now and the file you had is still the file you have.
Reverb and delay sends finally mean what they say. A send number is an amplitude now: 100 is unity, 50 is 6 dB down, 25 is 12 dB down, and 30 is a normal, clearly audible send. It used to be a straight line across the plugin’s decibel range, which put 30 at forty-six decibels down — inaudible — and meant you needed three quarters of the knob before a reverb arrived at all. Every effect on the instrument was quieter than its own number claimed. Sends already saved in a snapshot are not rewritten; they now read honestly, so one that had been sitting at an inaudible setting shows as the 0 or 1 it always sounded like. Read
SOLO tells you when something is still soloed. Tapping out of solo mode gives the F row back to the mutes and deliberately leaves your solo alone — but nothing said so, and you could walk away from a latched solo with seven channels silent and no lit button anywhere to explain it. SOLO now blinks for as long as anything is soloed, in or out of the mode. Read
HOME clears a latched SOLO like every other latch. It was the one modifier the big encoder’s press walked past. Read
The first turn after HOME counts. Pressing HOME and turning used to lose that first detent — on the button you reach for precisely when you have stopped knowing where you are. Read
MOD’s depth multiplier is on the label. The big encoder under MOD scales every modulator at once and had no readout anywhere, so an out-and-back by hand could leave the whole rig moving less than you meant with nothing to show it. It now reads x0.84 beside the rate whenever it is not 1. Read
The MOD pad menu looks inert when it is inert. It is meant to go dim when no modulator is bound — which is the state you are in after loading any snapshot — but “dim” was set bright enough to read as a live menu, so it looked like sixteen working pads that ignored every press. Read
Walking the pages quickly is much cheaper. The screens wait for your hand to stop before redrawing, but the wait was short enough that an ordinary, deliberate turn defeated it and repainted both screens on every click. Measured on the instrument: a fast walk through a ring was putting nine hundred messages a second on the link the buttons come back on. The wait is longer now, which costs a fraction of a second before the page you land on appears.
LENGTH now says which number it is showing. The word means two things — a drum’s pattern length in beats, a voice’s pitch register in bits — and the column showed the same name and a bare number for both. So turning it on a voice moved a number and changed nothing about how long the pattern was, which reads exactly like a broken encoder. A voice’s column reads LEN BITS now. To make a voice’s loop shorter, turn DIVIDE; a voice’s pattern is always as long as its division says, and LENGTH sets how many steps the melody takes to repeat — which is its own kind of drift, and a good one. Read
HITS says when something is thinning the line. Sixteen hits with a rhythm register masking eleven of them lights five pads, and both numbers were right — nothing said they were different quantities. The column now reads HITS- when fewer steps are sounding than HITS asked for and HITS+ when a tap has added some. The pads still carry how many; this says that the number above them is not the whole story. It matters most when the machine is doing it: a drifting channel keeps thinning under you, and turning HITS back is not the cure people assume.
A dead knob says why in the log. A greyed column correctly ignores its encoder — but when one is greyed for a reason you cannot see, “this knob does nothing” was unanswerable without a session at the instrument.
REVERB and DELAY now find whatever effect is loaded. (This one is a change to the instrument rather than to a preset, so unlike the rebuilt packs above it is still waiting to be played.) Both encoders used to look their plugin up by name, and only the two factory effects answered — so on a snapshot carrying any other pair both knobs did nothing, both kinds of modulator sat inert, and REVSIZE, REVTYPE, DLYTIME and DLYFBK were dead, with nothing said anywhere. It was true of forty-one of the seventy-one preset snapshots. The verbs resolve by role now. Three limits are real and the surface shows them rather than faking them: REVTYPE’s list of rooms exists on one reverb only, six of the effects are crossfades with no separate dry, and the musical delay division reaches the delays that speak milliseconds. Read
A step you erase stays erased. Holding ERASE and tapping a pad took the note straight out of the pattern, while an ordinary tap writes to the register the machine reads when it builds the pattern again — two gestures on the same pads writing to two different places. So on a channel the machine is generating, an erased step came back the moment anything made it rewrite: a turn of HITS, ROTATE, DIVIDE, LENGTH or RHYTHM, a reroll, or the channel simply drifting on its own, which needs no hands at all. On a channel you recorded, your notes were always the truth and the erase was always right. Read
Three of the twelve modulation rates are gone, and they were never real. Modulation is written a few times a second, so a cycle has to last several times that to come out as a shape. The three fastest — a quarter of a bar, an eighth, a sixteenth — got one or two writes per cycle, which is not a triangle or a ramp but whatever those writes happened to land on, changing bar to bar. They sat on the pad grid fully lit, promising something the instrument could not do. Nothing you have saved moves: the nine that remain are on exactly the pads they were on, and a set saved on one of the three that went comes back on the fastest one left rather than falling silent. Pads 10, 11 and 12 are dark now, and a dark pad that does nothing is the honest version of a lit one that did nothing useful. Read
Under the lens, LENGTH says which of the two things it is showing. Spread across all eight channels it was laying pattern beats on the drums beside register bits on the voices — two quantities that cannot be compared, in the one view whose whole job is comparison. The title carries the units now: ALL LENGTH BEATS/BITS. The verb was deliberately not taken away from the lens; the lens replaced five pages that did this, so a verb it refuses is a control you lost.
The key stops walking when you have locked every voice. A preset that walks its key was moving it regardless of MOVE, so locking a channel did not lock it against the walker. The limit is worth knowing: the three voices share one key, so locking one of them still cannot hold it — the key moves under it while its neighbours are open. Lock all three and it holds. Read
The top line says when it has been cut. It is forty-two characters wide and the panel drops whatever does not fit without a word, and what is appended last is always the newest thing — the bank you are on, a countdown, whether a part is held. An ellipsis at the end marks it now.
Switching banks on a channel you had switched to the other kind no longer kills the panel. A channel changed between drum and voice with SHIFT + GRID was rebuilt from the wrong kind when you moved banks, and the panel stopped repainting from that moment — every light and both screens frozen, the bank already changed underneath, the music still playing. That is this instrument's worst failure shape and it took one bank press on a channel a lot of people switch.
The set you left behind can no longer play over the set you loaded. Banks you had visited were kept across a snapshot load, so loading one set, visiting bank 3, then loading another and switching to bank 3 gave you the first set's patterns over the second one's sounds. Other banks come back empty now, which is the truth: what a bank holds is not in the snapshot yet.
Every encoder stops jumping once a revolution. All eight small encoders were sending one bogus lurch — a big jump one way followed by a big jump back — four times per turn of the knob, because half of each reading was being paired with the other half of the previous one. It has been doing that for as long as the instrument has existed. Slow turns hid it; a sweep did not.
A drum step you played keeps its colour across a reload, and a tap no longer takes it off a recording. Played steps show amber so you can see what is yours. On a drum, a played note and a generated one are the same note, so nothing could tell them apart on reload and the amber went — and worse, one pad tap during a session was enough to strip it off a take that was still sounding. The steps are remembered by position now, in the snapshot.
Every bank is in the snapshot now, and a set comes back on the bank it was saved on. Banks are scenes — a whole eight-channel arrangement each — and only the one you were playing kept its generator settings; the rest came back with fresh ones. HITS and ROTATE were worse than that: they leaked between banks as you switched, so a rotation set in one bank followed you into the next and was missing from the one you left. Neither can be worked out from the pattern afterwards, so if the instrument does not remember them nothing does. And the sequencer always reloads on bank 1 whatever it was saved on, so a set saved on bank 3 came back as bank 1's patterns underneath bank 3's settings, in silence. A bank you have never visited is still blank, which is the honest answer rather than a gap. Read
The screens stopped redrawing whole. Every repaint used to wipe the display and draw it again, so moving one number cost the same as changing everything. The screen is now three separate pieces — the channel tabs, the page line, and each of the four encoder columns — and only the piece that changed is sent. Turning one encoder costs about a seventh of what it did, and selecting a channel about a fifth. This is the last of four goes at the same problem, and it is the one that lets the previous three pay off: the instrument has been able to send just the changed patch of screen since the start of September, and the wipe at the top of every repaint was cancelling it out. Nothing looks different, which is the point — this controller stops answering when it is talked at too fast, and every one of these makes that harder to reach.
The web editor and the daemon's own sequencer are gone, and with them a socket anything on your network could reach. The daemon carried a browser page for remapping pads and encoder knobs, served over a connection with no password, by a program running as root — so anything on the same Wi-Fi could change what your pads send and save it to disk. It also carried a complete second sixteen-step sequencer that SHIFT + PAD MODE used to drop you into, taking the pads, PLAY, STOP and the Group buttons away from the instrument with nothing on the panel saying so. Neither had ever been used here; the sequencer this instrument plays is Zynthian's. About eight hundred lines of inherited code removed rather than switched off, and one fewer thing listening on your network. The cost, stated plainly: pad notes and encoder CC numbers are now edited in maschine.json and take a restart, instead of being changeable live in a browser. Read
Every encoder stopped lurching four times a revolution — see above; the same round found that the reason written in the code for the guard against it had never been measured.

4 September 2026 — all seventy-one presets rebuilt

These are in the instrument, and they went in without an ear gate — deliberately, and it is worth saying which parts of that are checked and which are a judgement.

What is checked: every one of the seventy-one crosses a new checker that renders the actual notes and refuses two sustained notes closer together than the ear can separate them at that pitch, two channels on the same note, more things starting at once than the style can carry, a bass that never plays the root of its own key, a mixing board where every fader is identical, and a drone with no layer long enough to sustain. All seventy-one pass. All seventy-one of the version before this one fail.

What is a judgement: whether they sound good. Nobody has listened to all of them. The old ones were measurably broken in ways you would have blamed on yourself, so the trade was taken on purpose.

All seventy-one preset snapshots were rebuilt, and the drone and ambient ones were the point. They shared one arrangement between twenty files, every channel attacked the same step, and the chord that came out had no root, a minor second at the bottom of it and two voices in exact unison. They were not even drones: on a one-bar grid the longest note the instrument can hold is half a bar, so each one played half a bar of sound, half a bar of silence, and then all eight re-attacked together. They now run four-bar and two-bar layers whose attacks never coincide, hold continuously, and change key on a slow walk. Read
Every preset has a mix now. All seventy-one shipped with the eight faders at one identical setting, inherited and never touched — which is not a neutral starting point, it is eight things competing at one loudness. Drums sit forward and voices sit under them, per family.
The presets make chords, play grooves you can edit, and swing. None of them made a chord before — chords arrived after the packs were built. Their drum grooves were fixed step lists with nothing behind them, so HITS and ROTATE on the panel showed numbers that had nothing to do with what you were hearing, and the first turn of either wiped the groove; the grooves are euclidean now and the panel agrees with the pattern. Swing and humanisation were zero everywhere and are not.
The twenty effect-demo presets became twenty rooms. Eleven of them were note-for-note copies of another preset with a different effect pair, and fourteen could not supply both a reverb and a delay at all. They are now 061–080 space, each with its own room, its own key and its own chords.
Nineteen different effect pairs, chosen for character. Every preset briefly carried the same two, because that is the only pair where all six effect controls work — and while the knobs looked their plugin up by name it was the only pair that worked at all. Now that they find whatever is loaded, house goes into a small room, deep house into a hall, minimal into the driest plate, dub through a proper dub delay, and the twenty drones each have their own reverb instead of twenty settings of one. Most give up REVTYPE, whose room list exists on the factory reverb alone; on a preset whose reverb already is a particular room, that costs nothing. Read
The foundation of a drone cannot drop out. The bottom two layers have their evolution switched off, so only the upper three drift; and a rhythm that evolves its way to silence comes back within a bar or two rather than staying gone. That was checked because there was no listening pass to catch it.

4 September 2026 — the audit’s fixes, played

Everything below had been on the instrument since the audit and had never been played. It has now been, across a session at the rig: the panel came up, the pads kept their colours, the chord that used to steal the instrument did nothing and said so in the log, every modifier still meant what it meant, and it was played for a stretch without the daemon dying. The rollback path was run in both directions on purpose, while nothing was wrong.

SHIFT + PAD MODE no longer takes the instrument away. That chord stepped the daemon into a sixteen-step sequencer of its own, where the pads stopped sending notes, PLAY and STOP drove the daemon's transport instead of yours, and the Group buttons changed its pages rather than the pad octave. Nothing on the panel said so and it took three more presses of the same chord to get out. The chord is still swallowed, so nothing else about the panel changes; the sequencer behind it is off unless internal_sequencer in maschine.json asks for it. Read
The web editor's socket can be closed. It listens on the whole network, has no password, and the daemon runs as root — so anything on your Wi-Fi could remap what the pads send. That is unchanged by default, because closing it would take the editor away from the laptop it is meant to be opened on; what is new is that you can close it in one word, and that the daemon says out loud on every start when it is open. Read
The daemon stops dying on things it should shrug off. Sixty places turned an ordinary MIDI-send error into an ended process; a short or garbled report from the controller could crash it or invent a pad hit that nobody played; and its clock arithmetic used the wall clock on a Pi that has no battery for one — so an NTP correction, which on this machine can be days, ended the daemon mid-set. None of that is anything you could see until it happened, and then it was the whole instrument.
Rolling a driver back is one command. Every deploy already kept the previous three files; nothing could put them back until now — and now it has been done, on the instrument, and undone again.

3 September 2026 — holding a button stopped redrawing the screens

The overlays were the most expensive thing on the panel, and all they change is one line of text. Hold DUPLICATE and the top line names the bank you are on; hold ARM and it counts the bars down; FREEZE puts HELD there, and a channel you have taken over says so. Every one of those redrew both whole screens — once when you pressed, once when you let go. This controller stops answering when it is talked at too fast, and that made a button you hold constantly while playing four times as costly as stepping a page.

Now only the line that changed is redrawn. Measured on the instrument: holding DUPLICATE and pressing a Group fell from 308 messages and a peak of 186 a second to 154 and 108 — and what is left is the Group press itself, which really does change what the screens say. The overlay’s own share went from two full screen rewrites to a single row of pixels, and the panel now sends nothing at all to clear a screen when you open one.

MOD is deliberately unchanged: it hands every encoder a different job, so the whole screen genuinely does say something new. Nothing looks different anywhere — that is the point.

2 September 2026 — the knobs that lied, and a quieter panel

Three knobs took a recorded pattern away without saying so. LEAN, LANE and RHYTHM on a drum each ask the generator for a different pattern, so like HITS and ROTATE they cannot leave a take standing — but where those two hand it back and say so, these three replaced your notes while the channel still called itself yours. They hand back properly now, and the indicator stops reading PLAY the moment they do. Turning one of them down to nothing keeps the take. Read

Two knobs on a voice take were pretending to work. RANGE and VELO are only ever read when the generator writes a line, and it does not write a take — so they moved a number on the screen and changed nothing you could hear. They draw ---- now. GATE and OCTAVE stay live, and it is worth knowing why: GATE is the length of a step you tap in, and OCTAVE decides what a pad plays whoever owns the pattern.

The big encoder got quieter again. Every page step used to re-park all eight of the small encoders whether or not any had moved. Walking ten pages cost 456 messages to the panel; it costs 192 now, and the busiest moment halved. Nothing about it looks different — that is the point: this controller stops answering when it is talked at too fast, and yesterday’s fix and this one together took the page ring from 674 messages a second to 98.

Also: erasing a step removes a whole chord rather than one note of it, and a part that closes through EXIT can no longer be left half-closed if something goes wrong mid-fade.

2 September 2026 — a take can be edited by hand, and a tap no longer eats one

A pad tap in STEP mode was deleting recorded patterns. On a channel you own, the tap did not edit the pattern — it told the generator to write the whole thing again, which on a take means the take is gone. The factory snapshot’s hand-played chords on G and H vanished into single notes on the first tap, silently, and the CHORD knob was greyed out at the same time on the grounds that the generator never touches a take. It did.

Now the pads edit the pattern, which is what a step grid ought to do. Tap an empty step and a note appears, at the nearest note your take already uses, with your tap’s velocity as its accent; tap a step that sounds and it goes, a chord as a whole chord. Everything else stays exactly where you played it. Read

ERASE + a step now removes the whole chord too. It used to remove one note of three and leave the other two sounding while the pad went dark — a step that read as empty and was not.

2 September 2026 — four fixes, and a knob that stopped shouting

EXIT works. It has been in the instrument since 1 September and it did nothing: set a channel to 2bar, queue its mute, and it snapped off exactly as if you had never set it. The close was reading the channel’s level from the wrong place — a number the driver keeps that stops matching the fader the moment anything else moves it — so the first instant of a close jumped the strip to that stale value, which sounded like the mute it was supposed to replace. Worse, the landing then wrote that stale number back, so an arrangement gesture quietly rewrote your mix. Both halves are fixed: a close and an open are now a straight ramp over the bars you asked for, and the channel comes back at the level it left from. Read

A locked channel says so from every page. MOVE at LOCK stopped the machine touching a channel, and the only place you could see it was the page that set it. Its Group button blinks now, in its own colour — the same blink everything latched on this panel uses. Read

The big encoder stopped redrawing the screens for pages nobody read. Walking the page ring cost a full repaint of both displays for every detent your hand passed through, and on this controller that traffic is what makes the panel stop answering — it did, mid-jam. The screens now draw the page you stop on. Measured on the instrument: twenty detents used to cost twenty repaints and a peak of 674 messages a second; they now cost one repaint and a peak of 99. Nothing is lost — a page you walk past is on the glass for about a seventh of a second.

Also: the play-session log can see the big encoder at last, which matters only when something goes wrong and then matters a great deal.

2 September 2026 — chords, and a quieter instrument

The generator plays chords. CHORD is a new knob on the voice STEP page: seven voicings from a single note up to a five-note ninth, built from scale degrees so every shape stays in the key the three voices share. OFF is note-for-note what the instrument played before, so nothing you already made has changed. It draws dead, and says so, on a channel you have taken over and on a sampler — on the first the generator writes nothing, on the second a note number picks a drum.

RANGE moved to the voice’s second AUTO page to make room. That page is now called LINE, because all six of its live knobs answer one question: how the line of pitches is built.
CHANCE below 100 breaks a chord into pieces, differently every bar. The sequencer rolls the odds once per note and each chord tone is a note. Deliberate use of it is one of the better things here; it is documented so it is not mistaken for a fault.
A long note no longer eats the one after it. With a wide GATE and a busy rhythm, a note reaching the next step that used the same pitch would delete it. It is shortened to fit now instead of vanishing.

The instrument stopped redrawing its own screens once a bar. The page indicator carried the bar of the phrase, and a number that changes by itself made the whole display change with it — every bar, for as long as the music ran. On this controller that traffic is the thing that makes the panel stop answering. The count now appears only while something is actually waiting to land, which is the only time it means anything; the countdown was always on the ARM lamp as well. Measured with nobody touching the controller: the display now sends nothing at all between changes.

1 September 2026 — the surface, redesigned

Played through at the rig, and the gate found five defects. All five are fixed and in what follows: the light alphabet was unreadable because dim had been chosen on paper and is ten times too bright on real LEDs; the right-hand display froze on a segmented bar given the wrong kind of number; RANGE was a knob that showed a value it could not move; and a kind switch quietly reset the channel’s own play chance, so the screen read 100 while the channel played thinner.

The panel was rebuilt around four rules: four modes and a lens, one duration rule for every modifier, one alphabet for every light, and a home to come back to.

Four modes instead of five. CONTROL, STEP, AUTO, VOLUME — how it sounds, what it plays, what the machine does by itself, what holds for everything. The generator has a button of its own. Read
The lens — hold ALL and the eight encoders become whichever verb your hand last moved, on all eight channels. It replaces every page that existed for one verb. Read
HOME — press the big encoder and you are back at STEP, page 1, latches dropped. Nothing armed is lost. Read
One duration rule for every modifier — a tap latches, a hold is momentary, so you never have to decide which you meant first. Read
Every modifier lights, all saying the same five things: dark, dim, bright, a blink for latched, a pulse for counting down. FREEZE’s two depths are visible for the first time. Read
F1–F8 are mutes in every mode, CONTROL included. A plugin switch steps on its own column’s encoder. Read
One button regenerates — PATTERN, both kinds, and the selected channel decides which half. A press fires it, a second press before the bar takes it back, and it goes dark when it would do nothing. Read
ERASE + SELECT cancels everything armed, now that a tap on SELECT latches the macro pads. Read
RANGE reaches the drum CONTROL page — the kit walk’s window has a knob at last. Read

1 September 2026 — the silent-refusal sweep

After the gate, every gesture the instrument can decline was checked against what it tells you. The rule it was measured by: a refused gesture that says nothing is the same fault as a channel going quiet without explaining itself. Six were fixed, and three of them were worse than silent — they answered.

A drum pad tap adds a hit, not only removes one. The same gesture used to mean two different things on the two kinds: on a voice a tap adds a step, on a drum it did nothing wherever the generator had not already placed one. It was hidden because the tap played the drum either way — a sound that said it had worked. Read
A knob that cannot act says so, on every page. Five controls were drawing live on channels that have no such control, and three of them moved a number on screen while changing no sound. Read
NOTE REPEAT lights only when it has something to give back. A voice that has never mutated has nothing to undo, and the button now says so instead of sitting lit. Read
PATTERN goes dark when a press would do nothing — a reroll refuses on a channel you have recorded onto, and that refusal used to be invisible. Read
REC stops promising a take it cannot make while a latched overlay owns the pads.
A column with nothing to step through draws dead. A chain with no kits loaded used to show a kit name in normal type with a bar under it, and a knob that did nothing.

1 September 2026 — twelve more things it can do

Built and on the instrument the same day. Several were played through during that day’s run at the rig — the AUTO verbs, the bank grid, the phrase page — and the rest are running but have not yet been taken end to end by hand, which is the next thing this project does rather than something the reader has to worry about. New capabilities rather than changes to how the panel works.

RULE — a cellular automaton as a second way a register evolves, on both kinds. Read
LEAN — a third placement generator beside euclid, weighting hits toward the beat, the eighths or the offbeat. Read
LANE — how far the generators may stray, pruning the strays until a bar holds together. Read
MOVE — how often the machine may touch a channel at all, as a probability rather than a switch. Read
PHRASE and FILL — the fourth bar answers the first. Read
EXIT — a part leaves through its filter over a bar or four instead of stopping dead. Read
The bank grid — hold DUPLICATE and sixteen pads are sixteen whole arrangements. Read
A modulator’s shape, on the screen — a bound column draws a small picture of its wave. Read
It says when it has stopped — if generation stops, the indicator says so and the pads keep playing. Read
Per-screen brightness and contrast — two settings the daemon applies at start-up. Absent, nothing is read and nothing is written.
Half the display traffic — the two screens became independent, so a change on one no longer repaints the other.
A style as odds — an offline tool that expresses a snapshot pack as distributions and hard rules, and blends two styles without inventing values for the fields that cannot be averaged.

31 August 2026 — eight features, gated the same day

The GEN page for the three voices: ROTATE a melody, MODEL between the shift register and a bounded walk with SPAN and STRIDE, and FEED/AMOUNT so one voice drifts toward another.
The drum rhythm register — steps appear and disappear without the line sliding. SWING moved one page along to its spread, where it reaches all eight.
A pad tap now flips a bit in the rhythm register on both kinds, so a hand-chosen step survives ROTATE and RHYTHM. HITS, DIVIDE and LENGTH are the way back.
The chord walker: the shared root steps along the scale every few bars.
The pump — MOD + RESTART snaps every modulator into the same phase.
Gate collapse on ARM: every note shortens into the landing and returns.
Pad pressure reaches the voices: squeeze a held pad and the filter opens.
MIDI export: a tool writes a snapshot’s eight patterns as a standard MIDI file.
Seven defects were found during the gate and six fixed the same day — among them ROTATE on a voice, which counted correctly on the display and never changed the sound.

30 August 2026

The surface repaints itself after a replug. Before this, everything but the pads came back dark.
The pads stopped sticking, and a slow press sounds.

22 August 2026

A new factory snapshot, with the previous one kept beside it as the way back.
A dropped pad light no longer stays wrong forever.

21 August 2026

The factory snapshot ships at 125 BPM, which the sequencer can keep exactly — 124 drifts by a bar every eight minutes.
The phrase clock corrects itself against the sequencer, which took its drift from 3,896 parts per million to seven.
A held countdown says HELD, and a DROP with nobody nominated refuses out loud instead of muting all eight.
A drone and ambient snapshot pack.

20 August 2026 — the performance package

The phrase clock and ARM: one bar count for the whole instrument, and gestures that land on a boundary.
DROP, BREAK, HALF and DOUBLE, the CHANCE ramp and the ratchet ramp.
The mute grid on MUTE, and beat repeat on the transport arrow.
The PENDING page, which says what is armed and how long it has left.
A master insert — one filter across the whole mix.
The moving sweep marker was removed: redrawing it was rebuilding both screens six times a second and taking the controller off the USB bus. What it said — how fast this is moving — became a word on the label instead.

19 August 2026

Drift — the pattern itself moves at the wrap, and refuses on any channel you have taken over.
The big encoder became the page ring, so every mode can hold more than one page.
RATCHET, REROLL and the kit window.
A plugin’s switches reached the F row.
HITS and ROTATE were being stored and displayed without reaching the pattern. Fixed at the single write path rather than at the callers.

18 August 2026

The genre pack: fifty ready-made arrangements.
A failing wrap was isolated to its own channel, so one bad channel can no longer take the instrument silent.

16 August 2026

The voice generator split in two: MELODY and RHYTHM, so a line’s notes and its rests evolve separately.
Played steps on a voice draw amber, so you can see what is yours.
Encoder sensitivity halved, with TEMPO held restoring the old speed.

15 August 2026

Navigation buttons stay lit, and the mode buttons go home.
REC lights only where recording is possible.

14 August 2026

Modulation: hold MOD and an encoder sets how a value moves rather than what it is. Rates, shapes, depth, and MOD + ERASE to clear.

13 August 2026 — the instrument becomes its own project

The driver, the daemon, the installer and the guide moved into one repository, self-contained, with the eight-channel instrument already playing: five euclidean drum channels and three Turing-machine voices.