Generating patterns

You do not draw a beat. You set hits, rotation and randomness, and the generator writes the notes. This is the machine's centre — everything else colours what happens here.

What it is

The driver writes real notes into Zynthian's own sequencer. Not a private buffer: because they are real notes in the real sequencer, patterns persist in snapshots and the touchscreen pattern editor mirrors exactly what the pads show.

There are two generators, and every channel runs one of them:

• Euclidean, on the five drum channels. Given a step count and a hit count, hits spread as evenly as the grid allows, then rotate.
• Two Turing machines, on each of the three voices. One shift register is read as pitch, the other as which steps sound. Each is clocked once per pass and mutated by its own knob — MELODY and RHYTHM — so a melody can evolve over a rhythm that stays exactly where you put it.

Which generator a channel runs is not fixed to its engine — see Sound and presets.

Try it

The drums.

1. Press Play, then Group A to select KICK, then STEP.
2. Turn encoder 1 (HITS) to 4. That is four-on-the-floor.
3. Turn encoder 2 (ROTATE). The same four hits slide around the bar without changing how many there are.
4. Turn HITS to 5. Five in sixteen is the clave. Try 3 in 8 for tresillo, or 7 in 16 for the busy one that still swings.

The voices.

5. Press Group F for BASS, then AUTO — a voice’s generators live there.
6. Turn encoder 3 (MELODY) to about 30. The bassline starts fishing: every pass mutates one bit, so the line keeps turning into a neighbouring line.
7. When a phrase goes past that you want, snap MELODY back to 0. The cell reads LOCK and that line is frozen, bit for bit, until you move the knob again.
8. Missed it? Press NOTE REPEAT. It gives the previous line back and sets both knobs to 0 so it holds.
9. Now put MELODY at LOCK and turn encoder 4 (RHYTHM) to about 30. The opposite: the notes hold still while steps appear and disappear underneath them.
10. Both at LOCK, then press STEP and tap pads. Each tap turns a step on or off, and it stays — tap step 1 and step 9, then turn MELODY up, and you have two notes evolving on the beat you chose.

How it works

The drum CONTROL page is KIT, SAMPLE, RANGE, HUMAN, HUMNV, LEVEL, REVERB, DELAY.

The drum STEP page is HITS, ROTATE, DIVIDE, LENGTH, VELO, CHANCE, RATCH, SWING. HITS and ROTATE are the two you play with; the rest set the frame. CHANCE is how often a hit actually fires — drop it and the pattern starts breathing rather than repeating.

The voice STEP page is DIVIDE, LENGTH, GATE, OCTAVE, CHORD, VELO, CHANCE, SWING. LENGTH here is the pitch register’s length in bits, not a bar count — and the column says so: it reads LEN BITS on a voice and plain LENGTH on a drum. GATE is how long each note holds — up to eight steps, so a pad can be a drone. The pitch value is quantised to ROOT and SCALE from VOLUME’s GLOBAL page, then placed by OCTAVE and RANGE — RANGE lives one page over, on LINE.

The two generators are not on STEP. They are on AUTO. STEP is what a channel plays; AUTO is what the machine does to it by itself, and MELODY and RHYTHM are the second question rather than the first. A drum’s RHYTHM is there for the same reason: it is the machine making up the part, not you setting the frame it is made in.

One verb across all eight is a hold, not a page. Put your hand on CHANCE or SWING, hold ALL, and the eight encoders become that one verb on every channel at once — the page indicator reads ALL CHANCE so you know which one you are looking at. It is the fastest way to swing or thin the whole kit without walking the channels one at a time, and the fastest way to see why one channel is not behaving like the other seven.

MELODY is the instrument’s main gesture. Set it to 20–40 and the voice fishes. Snap it to 0 the moment you hear something worth keeping. The cell reads LOCK rather than a number, deliberately: a number could be a coincidence, while LOCK means nothing will rewrite that pattern at all.

Both ends of MELODY are periodic, and only the middle is unpredictable. This surprises everyone once, so it is worth knowing before it happens to you:

At 100 every fed-back bit is flipped rather than sometimes flipped, so one pass gives you the exact inverse of the register and the next gives you the original back — pattern, inverse, pattern, inverse. It sounds like the generator has stopped evolving, and in a sense it has: it is evolving into a cycle of two. If you want it to keep surprising you, keep it below about 60. The same is true of RHYTHM, for the same reason.

RHYTHM is the same gesture applied to the beat. Same range, same LOCK at zero, same freeze. Which steps sound is its own register, one bit per step, so it is independent of the notes: either can run while the other holds. A pad tap in STEP mode flips one of those bits, which is why a rhythm you tap in by hand survives everything — it is not an edit sitting on top of the generator, it is the generator.

Structure lands on the bar; timbre lands instantly. A change to what the pattern is waits for the channel's own next wrap, so the groove never jumps under your hand. DIVIDE and LENGTH show in angle brackets — >1/8< — while a change is waiting to take.

What it refuses, and why

Pattern length is quantised to whole beats, and always will be. The sequencer stores a pattern as a number of beats, so the reachable step counts are whole beats times the steps in a beat. Turning LENGTH lands on the nearest count that exists rather than refusing to move — so if the number skips past where you aimed, that is the grid and not a fault.

Which step counts you can reach depends on DIVIDE, not on the sequencer. At 1/16 a beat is four steps, so LENGTH moves in fours: 4, 8, 12, 16. At 1/4 a beat is one step, so every count from 1 to 16 is available. An odd number that DIVIDE cannot express is not missing from the instrument — it is on another division.

A silent channel says so. HITS at 0 is a silent channel, not a broken one, and CHANCE at 0 emits nothing at all. Both draw the channel's tab dashed — the instrument's one mechanism for explaining silence. Read the tab row before suspecting the rig.

Lengths that do not agree

A voice’s loop length comes from DIVIDE, not LENGTH

A voice’s pattern is always exactly as long as its division says, because the generator restamps it on every rewrite. So the reachable loops are half a bar, one, two or four — plus the two triplet grids, which are twelve steps rather than sixteen. Turning LENGTH on a voice will never shorten it.

That is not the loss it sounds like, because LENGTH is already a drift control. The register repeats every LENGTH steps while the rhythm repeats every sixteen, so the melody walks against its own pattern: LENGTH 5 comes home every five bars, LENGTH 3 every three. That is the whole idea of a Turing machine and it is what the knob has always done.

For a loop of a genuinely odd length — seven steps against sixteen — use a drum channel at DIVIDE 1/4. There a beat is a step, so LENGTH 7 is seven steps, and it meets a sixteen-step channel again after seven bars. Drum lengths are free; only voices are pinned to their division.

LENGTH is per channel, and nothing makes the eight agree. Give the kick four beats and the hat three, and they start together, drift apart, and meet again twelve beats later. Nothing is generating that — it is two loops of different lengths running side by side, which is the oldest trick in machine music and costs one encoder turn here.

Set it on the STEP page with LENGTH. Every other channel is untouched, because length was never global.

Which lengths each division reaches

A pattern has to fit the sixteen pads, so the finer the division, the fewer beats it holds:

Odd beat counts live at 1/8, 1/8T and 1/4. Three, five and seven beats are all reachable there. At 1/16 and finer they are not — a five-beat pattern at 1/16 would be twenty steps and there are sixteen pads to show it on.

Try it

Leave the kick on group A at four beats. Put a hat on group B, set DIVIDE to 1/8 and turn LENGTH down to three beats. Let it run: the hat walks around the kick and lands back on the one every twelve beats. Take group C to five beats and the three of them do not agree again for sixty.

Shortening keeps the steps that fit and drops the ones past the new end; growing back leaves the new steps empty rather than restoring what a shrink discarded.

A step that sounds sometimes

Hold SHIFT and tap a step to set how often it plays. Each press steps it down — always, three times in four, half the time, one time in four — and the fifth press brings it back to always. A bare tap still turns the step on and off; SHIFT is what changes the odds.

While SHIFT is held the pads show the odds instead of the pattern. Each step takes its own colour, brightest magenta for always, then red, then orange, and a cool pale blue for the rarest — so the one that hardly ever fires is obvious without comparing it to its neighbours. Let go and the step picture comes back. The white playhead keeps sweeping over the top either way.

This is the gentlest way to make a bar stop repeating itself. A hat at three-quarters and a clap at half will not play the same bar twice, but the pattern you wrote is still the pattern — nothing is being regenerated behind your back.

It is safe on a take you have recorded. Setting the odds does not rewrite the pattern: no step is moved, added or removed, so unlike turning HITS or ROTATE it cannot hand your take back to the generator. It costs nothing to try mid-jam, and the odds are saved in the snapshot with everything else.

RATCHET — a step that fires more than once

RATCHET is encoder 7 on a drum's STEP page. Turn it up and every step of that channel fires two, three or four times inside its own slot — a roll rather than a hit. It reads OFF at the bottom, because one hit is not a ratchet.

It applies to the whole channel, not one step, which is what makes it a knob rather than an edit: turn it up for a bar of rolls and back down again without touching the pattern you wrote.

SWING, VELO, OCTAVE and RANGE — the four that shape rather than generate

Four encoders on the STEP pages do not decide which steps exist. They decide how the steps that do exist come out, and they are the ones a reader most often walks past.

On a euclidean drum, OCTAVE and RANGE draw dead. A sampled kit has no register to spread and no octave to move it in, and a knob that turned a number without changing a sound is exactly the lie this surface refuses.

HUMAN and HUMNV — the machine stops playing perfectly

HUMAN nudges the timing of every note by a random amount. HUMNV does the same to velocity. Both are per channel, both go from 0 to 100, and both are 0 on every channel until you move them — so nothing you have already made sounds different.

They are the opposite of SWING, and the pair is worth understanding together. SWING is a shape: the same offbeats pushed the same distance late, every bar, forever. HUMAN is a coin toss: each note lands slightly early or slightly late, differently every time round. A pattern with SWING sounds like a groove; a pattern with HUMAN sounds like a person who cannot quite repeat themselves.

Where the numbers came from, and what they mean in milliseconds. The knob sets how far a note may stray, and the amount is a proportion of one step — so the same setting is a smaller nudge at a faster division. Judged by ear on a four–on–the–floor kick at 124 BPM, where a 1/16 step is 121 ms:

The top of the travel is deliberately the loosest anyone would want rather than the largest number the sequencer accepts — the sequencer will happily push a note more than a whole step, and that is not a musical control.

Nothing on the instrument will show you what these do, and that is not a fault. The pattern keeps its exact grid: the pads light on the same steps, the touchscreen pattern editor draws the same steps, and the numbers in the columns do not move. The nudge is applied as each note is played, not written into the pattern. So this is a knob you judge by ear alone — if you are looking for a visual confirmation, there is not one to find.

They live in a different place on a drum than on a voice, and it is worth saying plainly because it looks like a bug when you meet it: on a drum they are encoders 4 and 5 on the CONTROL page; on a voice they are encoders 7 and 8 on AUTO page 2 (LINE). There is no page with two free columns on both kinds — voice CONTROL and drum AUTO are eight live verbs each — and the alternatives were a page carrying six dead columns or moving a verb somebody already reaches for. Switch a channel between drum and voice behaviour and HUMAN moves with it.

HUMAN and SWING add together, because the sequencer applies both to the same offset. A swung hat with HUMAN on top is a swung hat that misses its own shuffle slightly, which is usually the point; at high SWING and high HUMAN it stops being either.

The CHANCE ramp — the kit thins out and re-forms

Hold ARM — that is SELECT — tap pad 2, then tap a length. The gesture is on The surface; this is what it does.

From the landing bar every channel's play chance walks down, one step per bar. Halfway through the length all eight are at one time in four — still playing, but most of it missing — and over the second half they walk back up. An eight-bar ramp is four bars falling apart and four bars coming back.

It lands back on each channel's own value, not on always. A channel sitting at half the time comes back at half the time. Assuming everything wants to be at full is exactly how a channel saved quiet comes back loud, and this does not do it.

A channel already at one time in four or below is left alone. A breakdown that made a quiet channel louder would be the gesture backwards.

It is safe on a take you recorded. Play chance belongs to the pattern rather than to the notes: nothing is regenerated, no step is moved, added or removed, and the ramp writes once per bar rather than continuously. Same reason SHIFT + pad is safe.

Play chance is in the snapshot, so a set saved mid-ramp saves the thinned values. Let it finish before you save.

HALF and DOUBLE — the same rhythm, at another speed

Arm HALF or DOUBLE and every generated channel changes speed on the bar, then changes back. The pattern is not redrawn coarser or finer: the step count is kept and the beat count moves with the division, so what you hear is the rhythm you already had, played at half or twice the speed.

Some channels cannot make the move, and the display says how many did. HALF 5/8 means five of the eight went. A division needs somewhere to go: 1/8 triplet has no half-speed partner, 1/4 has none either, and 1/32 and 1/16 triplet cannot double. Double-time also needs an even number of beats to halve. A channel that cannot move is left exactly as it was rather than approximated.

Straight stays straight and triplet stays triplet. A speed change that turned a straight channel into a triplet one would be a second, unasked-for change riding along with the first.

It comes back to what was captured, not to a calculated opposite — drift, reroll and the encoders can all move a channel while the macro is out, and only the snapshot taken at the moment it fired is reliable.

Channels you have recorded onto are left alone. The move regenerates from the generator settings, and a take has none to regenerate from.

Under polymeter it can arrive up to a bar late on the odd channels. The macro fires on the phrase bar, but a structure change is taken at each channel’s own wrap — the same rule that stops a division change tripping the groove mid-bar. On a rig where every channel is four beats the question never comes up.

The ratchet ramp — the roll into the drop

Arm the ratchet ramp and every drum note subdivides further each bar, arriving at x4 exactly on the last bar of the length you chose. A four-bar arm walks 1–2–3–4; a two-bar arm goes 1 then 4. It always arrives — a build that stopped at x3 because you armed three bars would be a build that never lands.

Each channel goes back to its own RATCHET setting afterwards, so a channel you had already left ratcheting comes back ratcheting.

Voices are skipped, and so are recorded channels. RATCHET is a drum verb — it is written into the notes as sequencer stutter, and a voice’s pattern comes from a different generator entirely, so taking the voices too simply overwrote their melodies. Recorded channels are left out for the same reason as everywhere else: the ramp rewrites the pattern from the generator settings each bar.

The page indicator says how many channels it took — ROLL 3/8 means three of the eight are rolling and five are not. Three drums and five voices is a normal reading, not a fault; so is a lower number when you have recorded onto a drum.

Reroll — one button that asks for a different bar

Press PATTERN to reroll the channel you are on. A drum channel gets a new hit count and rotation; a channel played by the Turing register gets a new rhythm and a new play chance, and its MELODY is left at LOCK so you hear the new line held rather than already drifting.

Hold SHIFT to reroll a whole family at once — every channel of the same kind as the one you have selected. On a drum that is every sampler; on a voice, every synth. The split follows the engine rather than how a channel is being played, so a drum sampler switched to Turing is still a sampler, and asking for new synth lines never hands you a new drum pattern as well. To reroll all the drums while looking at a voice, select a drum first.

The button goes dark when a press would do nothing. A reroll refuses on a channel you have recorded onto — it would throw your take away — and a refusal you cannot see is the same fault as a channel going quiet without saying why. Hold SHIFT and it lights again, because the wider scope has other channels to work on.

It lands on the bar, and the wait is the point. The press arms it: the display reads REROLL> straight away and the tabs of the channels it will hit are drawn dotted, so you see what is about to change before it does. Press the same button again before it lands and it is cancelled.

It never touches a channel you have recorded on. Those channels are simply left out, and their tabs stay undotted — the drums have no undo, so a reroll that included them would be a data-loss button. If you want a recorded channel rerolled, hand it back first with ERASE + Group.

It cannot leave a channel silent. A drum always keeps at least one hit, a voice always keeps some steps and a play chance above a floor. Silence with nothing to explain it is the one thing this instrument refuses to produce, and a reroll that muted a channel by accident would be exactly that.

ERASE and the same button puts it back — one deep. ERASE is the take-it-back gesture everywhere on this instrument, and SHIFT is spoken for here.

The voice AUTO page — how a voice invents its line

Press AUTO on a voice and you get everything the machine does to it without being asked: the two generators, and the controls that change how it makes up a melody rather than what that melody currently is. Page on once and you reach WALK, which holds the line rotation and the walk’s own settings.

ROTATE, on the WALK page, turns the whole line around the bar, the way it always has on the drums. The notes keep their order and their shape; they simply start somewhere else. Like every other parameter knob it stops at each end rather than wrapping round — only the big encoder cycles.

MODEL, on the AUTO page beside MELODY, chooses which generator the voice uses. Turn it right for a wandering voice and left for the shift register it has always had. The register flips bits at random, so its line jumps about; the walk moves by steps, so its line strolls. They sound like different instruments rather than different settings. SPAN is how far the walk may stray from where it started, and STRIDE is how big each step is; both are on the WALK page, and both draw dead until MODEL is on the walk, because until then there is no walk for them to shape.

FEED and AMT, also on the WALK page, make one voice listen to another. Point FEED at a different voice and raise AMOUNT, and this voice’s register drifts toward that one’s over the following bars — related, never identical. It is a slow effect and it only acts at the bar. Two things to know: it rides the register’s own mutation, so MELODY has to be off LOCK or nothing happens at all; and a voice cannot be fed to itself. The wheel steps over its own channel, because a control that appears to do nothing is worse than one that refuses.

All of them are held by FREEZE and refused on a channel you have taken over by playing it, exactly like everything else that rewrites a pattern.

The drum rhythm register — the soft randomiser

The voices have always had a generator that evolves. The drums have the same one. On a drum’s AUTO page, encoder 3 is RHYTHM, and turning it up lets steps appear and disappear from bar to bar instead of the euclid line repeating exactly.

Watch what it does and does not do: steps come and go, and the pattern never slides sideways. Sliding is rotation, that is a separate control, and this one must not quietly consume it.

At zero it reads LOCK, the same word MELODY uses, and holds the line still.

Tapping a step goes into the same register. Tap a lit pad and that hit stops sounding; tap it again and it comes back. Tap a dark pad and you get a hit there — one the generator never placed. What you tapped is part of what the generator knows, not an edit sitting on top of it, so it survives ROTATE and RHYTHM and is saved with the snapshot for nothing. Turning the line round carries your edits with it: you took out, or put in, a hit rather than a position on the grid, and it stays wherever the line is turned to.

The pad makes a sound only when the tap adds something. Putting a hit in plays it so you hear what you just placed; taking one out is silent, because the pad going dark has already told you and playing a step you just removed would say the opposite.

HITS, DIVIDE and LENGTH are the start-again knobs. Move any of them and every step goes back into the register, so the plain euclid line returns. That is the way back — without it, a pattern you had tapped holes in could only be restored by tapping every hole shut again. The three of them go together because they all decide how many steps exist, and a hole in step 15 means something else the moment the pattern is twelve steps long.

HITS stops being the number of hits you hear, and that is the trade. It is what the generator draws; what you hear is that, minus what you tapped out, plus what you tapped in. Every generator control here works that way already — MELODY does not tell you how many notes a voice plays either — and the pads are the truth about what sounds.

A tap is always honoured, including on a channel you have taken over by playing it. The generator still stands off such a channel — that is what taking it over means — but your own hand is not refused on the grounds that your hand was there first.

CHORD — the generator plays more than one note at a time

A voice has always played one note per step. CHORD, on the voice STEP page, stacks notes on top of that one — the line it was already playing keeps its shape and its root, and gains a voicing.

Seven settings: OFF, OCT the same note an octave up, 5TH root and fifth, TRI a full triad, SUS the third replaced by a fourth, 7TH the flat seventh on top, and 9TH, five notes and the widest it goes. OFF sounds exactly like the instrument did before chords existed, note for note, so nothing you already made has changed.

They are stacks of scale degrees, not semitones. The three voices share ROOT and SCALE, so a chord built from fixed intervals would walk straight out of the key you set; built from degrees, every shape stays diatonic and a triad on one degree comes out minor while the same setting on another comes out major. That is the scale doing its job, not the knob being inconsistent.

An octave is however many degrees the scale has — seven in most of the fifteen, five in PENT and as few as four in DIM7 — so OCT is still an octave whichever scale you are in, and the wider shapes are correspondingly tighter on a sparse one. The full scale list says which is which.

CHORD draws dead on two kinds of channel, and says so. On a channel you have taken over by playing it, the generator does not write the pattern at all, so a chord setting would move a number and change no sound. On a sampler, a note number picks a drum rather than a pitch, so a stack of degrees would add unrelated hits. In both cases the column is grey, reads ----, and the knob does nothing — which is the surface telling you the truth rather than pretending.

CHANCE below 100 breaks a chord into pieces, and you may want that. The sequencer rolls the odds once per note, and every tone of a chord is its own note, so a triad at 70 becomes a different subset of itself bar by bar — a stab that flickers between two and three voices. It is not a setting anyone chose; it falls out of how the sequencer works and it cannot be turned off from here. Used deliberately it is one of the better things on the instrument; used by accident it sounds like the chords are broken.

CHORD can also drift. Bind MOD to it and the shape moves once a bar, around the one you set.

Measured on the rig: with CHORD off, the bass channel sent one note per step. With TRI, exactly three times as many notes in the same window, the root of every chord unchanged, and all four chords diatonic.

The chord walker — three voices, one progression

This is not CHORD, and the names are close enough to be worth separating. CHORD stacks notes at one moment. The walker moves the key underneath everything over bars — a progression rather than a voicing. They are good together and they are different controls.

ROOT and SCALE are shared: all three voices pick their notes from the same key, and a key change lands on the bar. The walker moves that root for you.

SCALE has fifteen positions. The first six are the ones a techno record actually uses: MIN natural minor, MAJ major, DOR dorian, PHR phrygian, HMIN harmonic minor and PENT minor pentatonic. They run roughly from most familiar to most opinionated — DOR is minor with a lift in it, PHR is the flat second that makes a bassline sound menacing, HMIN is the one that will sound like a soundtrack if you leave it on, and PENT has no semitones at all, so nothing a voice invents inside it can clash. If a generated line sounds wrong rather than surprising, PENT is the place to go and find out whether it is the notes or the rhythm.

Nine more sit after those six, and they are there because a generator inventing lines inside an unusual scale is one of the few ways to get a phrase you would not have written yourself.

The sparse ones change what RANGE and CHORD do, and that is worth knowing before you blame the knob. An octave is however many degrees the scale has, so on a four- or five-note scale the same RANGE covers the same pitch distance with fewer notes to land on — a line jumps octaves sooner. A CHORD stack is built from degrees too, so a triad on DIM7 spans more than an octave. Measured at RANGE 2: MIN offers fourteen notes across twenty-two semitones, JAPAN ten across twenty, DIM7 eight across twenty-one.

SCALE is one knob and it now has fifteen stops, so the far end takes real turning. That is the whole cost of the nine, and it is the reason there are nine rather than the sixty the platform ships.

Press VOLUME for the GLOBAL page. WALK is how often the root moves, in bars, and SPAN is how far it may wander. At zero WALK reads LOCK and the key stands still.

Every WALK bars the root steps to a new degree of the scale you are already in — never chromatically, because three voices sharing a scale should not be walked out of it. It reflects at the edge of its span rather than parking against it, and a walk that returns to zero returns to exactly the key you dialled in, not near it.

Measured on the instrument: at four bars and 121 BPM the root moved every 7.9 seconds, which is four bars to within a twentieth of a second, and every root it visited belonged to the same minor key.

RULE — a second way a register evolves

Everything that evolves on this instrument has done it the same way: a bit flips at random, and MELODY or RHYTHM is how often. RULE offers the other kind of change. Instead of rolling dice per step, it looks at each step’s neighbours and applies a rule — so a shape can travel along the bar, collide with another, and come out the far side.

One sentence for the difference: RAND reshuffles, the R-rules move things. Under RAND a hit can vanish here and appear anywhere; under a rule it steps to the next position, grows a neighbour, and dies where two of them meet. To hear which you have, make the pattern sparse — three hits, RHYTHM around the middle — and watch the pads for a few bars. With sixteen hits every rule looks like noise.

It is encoder 1 of the AUTO page, on both kinds. Four settings, and the first is what you already have.

• RAND — the shift register, unchanged. This is where every channel starts.
• R30 — scatters. Busy and rarely repeating.
• R90 — diagonals. Shapes drift across the bar and cancel where they meet.
• R110 — the interesting one. Structures form, survive for bars, and are disturbed by whatever passes.

MELODY and RHYTHM still mean the same thing. On the shift register they are how likely the fed-back bit is to flip; on a rule they are how likely the rule is to be applied to each step, with the rest held. So LOCK is still exactly LOCK on either, and a channel at the top of the knob is the pure automaton.

These rules are deterministic: the same bar leads to the same next bar. That is what makes a shape survive long enough to be heard rather than dissolving into noise. One consequence is worth knowing — if the pattern ever empties completely, a single step is put back. Every rule of this kind maps an empty bar to an empty bar, so without that the channel would go silent for good with the knob still reading a number.

LEAN — a generator that leans

Euclid spaces hits evenly. That is its virtue and its limit: it cannot write a hat line that leans on the eighths, or a percussion part that lives on the offbeat, because it has no opinion about where the beat is.

LEAN is a second placement generator, on encoder 2 of the drum AUTO page. It weighs the positions by what the part is for.

• EUCL — euclid, exactly as before. Every existing channel is here.
• BEAT — the floor. Hits land on the quarters, and extras flam just after them.
• 8TH — hats. The eighths first, then the sixteenths between.
• OFFB — syncopation. The “and” of each beat, and the downbeat last of all.

Ask for more hits than the grid has room for and they spread: eight on BEAT is a flam on each beat, not four hits crowded onto beat one. The late one comes before the early one, because that is what these parts do.

ROTATE still rotates a leaning channel, and that is deliberate. Turning the line moves its accents off the grid they were built against, which is a real musical consequence — but the alternative was to make ROTATE do nothing here, and a knob that quietly does nothing is the worst thing this surface could offer. The pads show you where the hits went.

LANE — how far the generators may stray

LANE is encoder 4 of the drum AUTO page. One number per drum channel: how narrow the danceable lane is.

At RAW you get the raw field — whatever the generators wrote, which is what the instrument has always played. Turn it up and each bar is measured before it is allowed out: the hits furthest from the beat are removed until what is left holds together. At the top only what lands on the beat survives.

It replaces fiddling with six controls at once when a channel gets away from you. It only ever removes — it will not invent a hit, so HITS goes on meaning the number of hits the generator was asked for — and it will never empty a channel: the last hit survives whatever the knob says.

The three voices have no LANE at all — hold ALL with your hand on it and their three columns draw dead. That is not an oversight. A voice’s placement is its rhythm register, and a tap on a voice pad writes into that same register — so a lane on a voice would quietly undo steps you put in by hand.

MOVE — how much the machine may move a channel

MOVE is encoder 5 of the AUTO page, on both kinds. One number per channel, and it answers the question LANE does not: not how far the machine may go, but how often it may touch this channel at all.

At LOCK the channel holds its pattern bar to bar and every automatic gesture leaves it alone — the tops can move while the kick stays exactly where you put it. At 100, which is where every channel starts, everything behaves as it always has.

In between it is a probability, not a switch. At 50 the machine touches the channel about half the time it would have, which is a different instrument from a channel that is simply frozen: it still surprises you, just less often. If you want the hard version, FREEZE is the button for it.

It gates the bar-rate gestures too — the ratchet and chance ramps, HALF and DOUBLE, the drop. Those used to walk every channel whether or not you had an opinion about that one.

A locked channel says so from every page. Its Group button blinks, in its own colour, once a second — the same blink every latched thing on this panel uses, because that is what LOCK is: a decision you made and walked away from. It stops the moment MOVE leaves 0. A muted channel stays dark instead: dark on that row means “not sounding”, and the machine being kept off something you cannot hear is not the thing you need told.

PHRASE and FILL — the fourth bar answers the first

Encoders 6 and 7 of the AUTO page. PHRASE is how long a channel’s phrase is — BAR, 2bar, 3bar or 4bar, and the odd one is there on purpose: a channel on 3bar against the rest on 4bar takes twelve bars to come back round — and FILL is how full its last bar gets.

Set a channel to 4bar and raise its FILL, and every fourth bar comes back busier before the plain pattern returns. The added steps go to the offbeats first, because a fill that added hits on the beats would just be a louder version of the bar it is supposed to answer.

A fill only ever adds. Taking hits away is a breakdown, and there are knobs for that.

At BAR and OFF, which is where everything starts, no bar is ever a fill.

See also

• Modulation — how to make these values move on their own, and why the generator's own knobs refuse it
• Playing and recording — playing over the generator, and taking a pattern from it
• The surface — reading the tabs, and what to check when it goes quiet