Playing and recording

The pads are the instrument. Hold REC while you play them and what you played is captured into the same pattern the generator writes — and from that moment the pattern is yours, not the machine's.

What it is

In CONTROL, ALL, MIXER and FILTER the sixteen pads play the selected channel. On a voice they are notes. On a drum every pad triggers that channel's own sound, because a drum channel is one sound — hearing CLAP while playing KICK would be the silent-channel confusion in a new costume.

In STEP the pads are the step editor instead. A tap toggles that step, and the velocity of the tap becomes the step's velocity, so accents are played in rather than dialled. Step 0 is the top-left pad; the grid reads left to right, top to bottom.

Try it

Press Play, select Group F (BASS) and press CONTROL. Play the pads — that is the instrument.
Hold REC and play a short phrase. Keep holding REC.
Let go of the last pad while REC is still held, then release REC. Your phrase is in the pattern.
Press STEP and look at the pads. The steps you played light amber; the generated notes are still there underneath, dim or bright.
Look at the page indicator. It reads PLAY — you own this pattern now, and the generator has stopped rewriting it.
To give it back: hold ERASE and press Group F. Your take is gone and the generator resumes. That is deliberate and it is destructive.

How it works

Capture happens on release, not on press. A note's length is how long you held the pad, and that is not known until you let go. This has a consequence worth committing to memory: you must still be holding REC when you release the pad. Let go of REC first and the note sounds but is never captured. That is the same rule that lets you release REC without cutting off notes still ringing, so it is a trade rather than an oversight.

Strikes quantise to the nearest step, wrapping at the end of the bar — nearest rather than next, so a strike landing a hair early is not pushed a step late. A note's length is clamped to what is left of the pattern.

Recording adds; it does not overwrite. The generated line freezes where it is and your note goes on top, so a recorded step can hold two notes. An amber pad means your note is there and the generated one still is. A step that sounds but stays dark would be the defect.

The page indicator reads REC while you are capturing, and REC-STOP if the transport is stopped — nothing is being captured then, and the surface says so rather than letting you play into nothing.

Who owns the pattern

The first captured note makes you the owner of that channel's pattern, and the generator stops rewriting it. The indicator reads PLAY for as long as that holds — including after a snapshot reload, because ownership is saved.

Handing the pattern back is deliberate and destructive: your take is gone the moment it happens. There are two routes, and knowing which knobs do it is the difference between keeping a take and losing one.

Route	On a drum	On a voice
Gesture	ERASE + the channel's Group button
Knobs that hand back	HITS, ROTATE, DIVIDE	LENGTH, DIVIDE, RANDOM
Knobs that keep the take	LENGTH, VELO, CHANCE, SWING	GATE, OCTAVE, RANGE, DENSITY, VELO

Two details worth carrying: a drum's LENGTH keeps the take, because shortening a pattern preserves the steps that still fit; and RANDOM only hands back when it moves off LOCK, since a locked voice rewrites nothing and could not undo your recording anyway. A knob has to actually move — brushing one does nothing.

On a drum channel the amber colouring does not survive a snapshot reload, and that is not a lost take. A played drum note carries the same pitch as a generated one, so once the pattern is read back there is nothing left to tell the two apart. The notes are all there and the channel is still yours: the indicator still reads PLAY, and after a reload that indicator, not the pad colour, is the authority. On a voice the amber survives, because the played pitch is its own.

What it refuses, and why

You cannot record in STEP mode — there the pads belong to the step editor — and you cannot record while MOD is active, where they pick a modulator's rate and shape.