Modulation

Set how a value moves instead of what it is. Quick start gets you playing; this page is the second dimension underneath every knob you already know.

What it is

MOD is the SWING button. Hold it and every encoder stops setting a value and starts setting how that value moves. Tap it instead and it latches, so both hands are free.

The button says which one you did: steady while you hold it, blinking while it is latched. Same blink GRID uses for an overridden kind, so the panel has one vocabulary and not two. It matters because a latched MOD outlives your finger — the encoders keep meaning depth and the refused columns keep their bars off until you tap it again.

It is not a mode. It adds no page, no ring entry, and nothing to memorise: the map of parameters you already know does not change, and MOD gives every one of them a second dimension in the same place. It costs no plugin instances, and nothing is created or destroyed while you play.

Try it

1. Press Play and select a voice — Group G is LEAD.
2. Press CONTROL. Encoder 2 is CUTOFF.
3. Hold SWING — that is MOD — and turn encoder 2. The column's name gains a ~ and its bar grows a dashed span. You are setting how far the cutoff will travel, not where it sits. A small turn gives a narrow sweep; a bigger turn a broader one.
4. Let go of SWING and listen. The filter sweeps on its own.
5. Keep MOD held and tap pad 1, then pad 9. Pads 1–9 are the rates, slowest first: sixteen bars per cycle at one end, half a bar at the other. You should hear the sweep speed up dramatically between the two.
6. Tap pads 13–16 for the four shapes — triangle, ramp, square, and sample-and-hold, which jumps to a new value each cycle and holds it there.
7. Release MOD and turn encoder 2 again. Now you are steering the base — the centre the sweep moves around — and the sweep follows you there.
8. Hold SWING and ERASE together and turn encoder 2. The modulation stops and the value returns to where you set it, not to wherever the sweep happened to stop.

How it works

Depth is bipolar, and centre is off. Turning back to the middle does not leave a dormant modulator behind — it removes it. The fastest way to stop something moving is to put its depth back where it started.

Rates are locked to the bar, so a modulator lines up with the pattern it is colouring rather than drifting against it. Nine rates sit on the first nine pads and the four shapes on the bottom row, which leaves three pads deliberately dark in between — see below for what used to be there.

The value cell always shows the base. Motion lives on the indicator bar: a dashed span across the range the modulator covers, and a small tick travelling inside it. A fast modulator blurs into a static span, and that is honest — the span is the truth, the tick is a courtesy. On 1-bit glass refreshing five times a second, animating the number would just make it unreadable.

Under the lens it is eight at once. Put your hand on LEVEL, tap ALL to latch the lens on it, then tap MOD and turn each encoder in turn, and every channel gets its own modulator on the same control. They do not run in lockstep: each starts its cycle at the moment you bind it, so binding them one after another spreads them around the bar and the row breathes rather than pumps.

An effect modulator is one object, not eight. The reverb and the delay are a single insert pair shared by all eight chains, so a modulator you bind on the REV, DLY or MAIN page belongs to the instrument rather than to the channel you happened to be on when you bound it. Bind it from anywhere and every channel hears it; clear it from anywhere and it is gone for all of them. This is the one place the lens has nothing to spread — there is only ever one.

It is saved. Modulators go into the snapshot with their depth, rate, shape and position, and the value stored is the base you set rather than wherever the sweep happened to be. Load the set tomorrow and they are still running, still spread apart.

What it refuses, and why

While MOD is down, a column that will not take a modulator loses its bar — the name and the value stay, because they are still live controls; they just cannot be modulated. So you never have to remember the list: a bar means you can bind here. But the list is short enough to learn, and knowing it saves you hunting.

It takes the sound. LEVEL, REVERB and DELAY on every channel; CUTOFF, RESO, ENV and DECAY on a voice; every parameter on a generated EXTRA page; and every knob on the REV, DLY and MAIN pages.

And it takes four pattern verbs — HITS, ROTATE, CHANCE and, on a voice, CHORD. Those are drift, and they are the exception the next section is about: they move once a bar rather than continuously, and they refuse outright on a channel you have played or recorded onto.

It takes nothing else. Not the rest of the pattern — DIVIDE, LENGTH, VELO, GATE, OCTAVE, RANGE, RATCHET. Not the generator’s own controls — RULE, LEAN, MODEL, MELODY, RHYTHM, LANE, MOVE, PHRASE, FILL, EXIT. Not the walk — SPAN, STRIDE, FEED, AMT. Not a name column — KIT, SAMPLE, PRESET. And not the globals — ROOT, SCALE, BPM, WALK.

The refusal is the design, not a gap. A modulator writes several times a second. A knob that rewrites the pattern would tear the line up continuously — and on a channel you had recorded onto, it would destroy your take with nothing on the surface explaining why. Nothing MOD can do will touch a recorded take.

Generation moving on its own is a genuinely good idea, and it does ship — but only under its own rules, which is what drift is.

Drift — when the pattern itself moves

Everything above modulates the sound. Drift modulates the pattern. Bind it to HITS and the channel gains and loses hits on its own; bind it to ROTATE and the bar turns under itself; bind it to CHANCE and the whole channel thins out and comes back. The arrangement evolves instead of the tone.

Drift on CHORD changes the chord’s shape, once a bar. The modulator swings around the shape you set, half the list each way at full depth — so set CHORD to TRI first and full depth spans the whole list, OFF to 9TH; from OFF, full depth only ever reaches TRI. The shape changes once per loop of the channel, so a slow rate climbs the list a step at a time and the widest shapes sound only when a loop lands near the top of the sweep. Like the other three it refuses a channel you have recorded on, and it does nothing on a drum.

You bind it exactly like any other modulator — hold MOD and turn HITS, ROTATE or CHANCE on the STEP page, or CHORD on a voice’s STEP page. MOD + pad sets its rate and shape as usual, and the pad legend shows them.

It moves once per bar, not continuously. A pattern cannot be redrawn five times a second without tearing the groove apart, so drift waits for the pattern to come round and changes it there. At the slowest rate a full breath in and out takes about half a minute; the fastest rates change something every bar.

Drift refuses to touch a channel you have recorded on, and says so. Its columns lose their bars there, exactly like any other refusal. This is the one rule that makes drift safe to leave running: a pattern rewritten with nobody touching the panel would otherwise erase your take while you played.

If you record onto a channel that is already drifting, the drift stops. It is checked every bar, not only when you bind it, so your take is safe the moment it exists. The drift is not thrown away — hand the channel back with ERASE + Group and it picks up where it left off.

The pads become the menu

While MOD is down the sixteen pads stop showing your pattern and show the modulation menu instead. They were always the menu — a pad hit under MOD has always set a rate or a shape — they just used to keep drawing steps while they did it. Now they say what they are.

Pads 1–9 are the rates, slower on the left, faster to the right and down. The bottom row is the four shapes — triangle, ramp, square, and sample-and-hold. Pads 10, 11 and 12 are dark and do nothing, and that is not an oversight: three faster rates lived there and were removed because they could not produce the shape they named. The shapes stayed on the bottom row rather than sliding up into the gap, so every rate and every shape is still on the pad it was always on.

The pads used to fade, each at its own rate and in its own shape, so you could see what a setting felt like before choosing it. That is gone, for the same reason the tick is — repainting sixteen pads on a timer floods the connection the buttons come back on. The grid is still now, and the rate you have chosen is named on the label. The still grid is evenly lit: it used to be the first frame of that withdrawn fade, which left the four shape pads noticeably brighter than the nine rate pads for no reason you could act on. Every pad you have not selected now sits at one level, so brightness on this grid means one thing only — what is chosen.

The rate and shape you are using are lit full, brighter than the rest, so what is selected reads at a glance. The rest sit far dimmer than they used to, and that is a correction rather than a preference: they had been set between a third and two thirds of full, and on this panel three tenths of full is already indistinguishable from full to the eye. Everything on the grid was therefore reading as bright, including the pad that was supposed to stand out. They now sit in the part of the range this hardware can actually show a difference across.

If every pad is dim and still, nothing is bound yet. MOD + pad only has something to act on once a modulator exists, so rather than dance under a gesture that would do nothing, the pads say so. Bind one — MOD and turn any encoder with a bar — and the menu comes alive.

That is also what you get straight after loading a snapshot, even one full of modulators. The menu edits the modulator you last bound, and loading a set gives you modulators nobody bound this session — they are running, they are in the snapshot, and none of them is the one this menu is pointed at. Turn any encoder with a bar under MOD and the menu is live again on that one.

There is no playhead here: under MOD the pads are not steps, so a sweep would point at nothing. Let MOD go and your pattern comes straight back.

The rates span thirty-two to one — the slowest is over half a minute per cycle, the fastest just under a second. Further right and further down is faster; the label tells you exactly which one you are on.

Three faster rates were removed, and it is worth knowing why they were never real. Modulation is written a few times a second, so a cycle has to last several times that to be a shape rather than a stutter. The three fastest were a quarter of a bar, an eighth and a sixteenth — about half a second, a quarter and an eighth of one — which is one or two writes per cycle. They were on the pad grid, lit like everything else, and what came out was not the triangle or the ramp you asked for; it was whatever those one or two writes happened to land on, and it changed from bar to bar. Anything already saved keeps the rate it had, because the surviving rates never moved off their pads; a set saved on one of the three that went comes back on the fastest one that remains, and says so in the log rather than falling silent.

RISE — a sweep that happens once

A modulator normally cycles for ever. Hold ARM — that is SELECT — and tap a shape pad, and it sweeps once and stays where it ends. That is the riser: the cutoff climbs over eight bars and sits at the top instead of falling back down.

It acts on the modulator you bound most recently, which is the same one MOD + pad has always steered. MOD latches, so there is no chord to catch: tap MOD, then hold ARM and tap pads 13–16. SHIFT still outranks both — a pad under SHIFT is a step's odds, whatever else is latched.

Where it holds depends on the shape you tap, because holding at the end of one sweep is not the same place for all four:

Under a one-shot the rate pads mean length. Pads 1–9 are the same nine numbers, sixteen bars down to half a bar, read as how long the whole sweep takes rather than how long one cycle takes. Tapping one restarts the sweep from that moment at the new length — which is also how you fire the same riser again.

The sweep starts when you tap, not on the next downbeat. It runs for the length you chose from that instant and then holds, so aim the tap, or arm a long one and let it arrive.

Nothing on the panel marks a modulator as one-shot. The column keeps its ~ and its dashed span and the pads keep their menu. You hear it rather than see it: the sweep arrives and stays there instead of coming back.

It refuses exactly what MOD refuses. Running once is a shape, not a new permission: the pattern-rewriting columns still have no bar, and drift still refuses a channel you have recorded on.

A one-shot is not saved as one. Reload the set and that modulator is cycling again — hold ARM and tap its shape pad to make it one-shot once more. To turn one back into a cycle without reloading, clear it with MOD + ERASE and that encoder, then bind it again.

Clearing everything at once

Hold MOD and ERASE and press ALL. Every modulator goes, and every value lands back where you put it.

The markers vanish the instant you press it; the values themselves settle a moment later. That gap is deliberate — the instrument will not write twenty parameters inside a single button press, because doing that on the button thread once froze the whole machine.

One channel at a time: hold MOD and ERASE and press that channel’s Group button. Only that channel’s modulators go, and only its values land back on their bases; the other seven keep moving. This is the scope between the other two — one verb with an encoder, one channel with a Group button, everything with ALL — and it settles a moment later for exactly the same reason.

The reverb and delay keep theirs. Those live on one insert shared by all eight channels, so a modulator on them does not belong to the channel you named and is left alone. Clearing them is what ALL is for.

Let go of MOD and those two keys mean something else. ERASE + Group on its own still silences the channel, and on a channel you have recorded on it still hands the take back. MOD is what turns the gesture into a clear.

The big encoder — how much everything moves

While MOD is latched, the big encoder scales every live modulator at once, from nothing up to about twice their set depth. One hand takes a static rig to a churning one and back.

Every modulated column’s dashed span widens and narrows together as you turn, which is the most literal picture of what is happening. Turn it down to zero and everything parks; turn it back and every modulator returns to exactly the depth you gave it — the multiplier is kept separately rather than multiplied into the depths, so nothing is stranded at zero with no way back.

This is the one exception to the big encoder being the page ring. While MOD is latched it is the depth knob instead. MOD’s own label on the page indicator is what tells you which of the two you are holding.

The label carries the multiplier too, as soon as it is not 1. MOD 4 BARS x0.84 means every modulator is running at 84 per cent of the depth you gave it. At 1 nothing is shown, because 1 is the absence of a setting rather than a setting. It matters because this is a knob with no end stops in the middle: turning out and back by hand does not return you to exactly where you were, and without a number nothing would ever tell you that everything on the rig is moving less than you think it is.

Sweeps start with the phrase

Every modulator counts from the phrase, not from when the instrument was switched on. An eight-bar sweep is the eight bars rather than an eight-bar sweep at some arbitrary offset, and starting the transport or pressing RESTART re-zeros the whole modulation system along with the bar count.

The relative spread between modulators is kept, so eight LFOs that were chasing each other go on chasing each other.

The pump — MOD + RESTART

The bar-synced gain movement that glues a techno mix is not a separate feature here. It is a modulator on LEVEL with a negative depth: bind one on each channel and every strip ducks and recovers in time.

The problem was never the sound, it was the phase. Binding eight of them one after another gives you eight modulators each starting from the moment you bound it, so they duck at eight different times and the mix sounds smeared rather than pumped.

Hold MOD and press RESTART. Every modulator jumps to the start of its cycle together, and from then on they move as one.

Bare RESTART deliberately does not do this. It restarts the patterns and re-zeros the bar count, and it leaves your sweeps running. A sixteen-bar filter sweep should not snap back because you restarted a loop — when you reach for RESTART you are asking about the pattern. Hold MOD and you are asking about modulation, and that is exactly when the answer changes.

The shape, on the screen

The pads tell you how fast a modulator moves — that is what you pick from when you bind one. Nothing told you what shape it was, so a column with a tilde beside its name could have been a triangle or a square and you had to remember which pad you pressed.

A bound column now draws a small picture of its wave in the name row, beside the tilde: the rise of a ramp, the peak of a triangle, the two levels of a square, the steps of sample-and-hold. It is a silhouette rather than a plot — enough to tell them apart at a glance, which is the whole question.

It does not move. It is redrawn when you change the shape and at no other time. A picture that animated the wave would repaint both screens many times a second, and that is exactly what once took this controller off the USB bus mid-jam.

See also

• Features — everything the instrument does, in one list
• Quick start — your first two minutes
• The surface — ARM, the phrase clock, and what SELECT is telling you