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, AUTO and VOLUME 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.

Hold ERASE and a pad deletes that step rather than toggling it. On a step that is already empty it does nothing at all — the difference matters when you are clearing a run of pads by feel and do not want the empty ones switching on behind your hand.

And it stays deleted. On a channel the machine is generating, an erased step used to come straight back the next time anything made the machine write the pattern again — a turn of HITS, ROTATE, DIVIDE, LENGTH or RHYTHM, a reroll, or just a channel drifting on its own. The erase now goes into the same register a tap writes to, so it survives all of that. On a channel you recorded, your notes were always the truth and it always removed them properly.

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. On a voice they are the only steps lit — your take replaced the generated line. On a drum the generated hits 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.

On a voice, your take replaces the line. On a drum, it goes on top. The first captured note on a voice clears what the Turing generator had written, so what you hear afterwards is your phrase and nothing else — which is what makes a recorded voice sound like a part rather than two parts at once. Nothing is lost that cannot come back: hold ERASE and press that channel's Group button and the generator rebuilds its line from the same register it always had.

A drum keeps both. Its hits are euclidean and a recorded strike on top of them is an accent, so the generated pattern freezes where it is and your note joins it — a recorded step there can hold two notes, and an amber pad means your note is present 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, LEAN, LANE, RHYTHM	LENGTH, DIVIDE, MELODY, RHYTHM
Knobs that keep the take	LENGTH, VELO, CHANCE, SWING	GATE, OCTAVE, CHANCE, SWING

Two of a voice’s knobs go dark on a take instead: RANGE and VELO. Both are read only when the generator writes a line, and it does not write a take — so they used to move a number on the screen and change nothing you could hear. They draw ---- now and their encoders do nothing, which is the honest version of what was already happening. GATE and OCTAVE stay live and are worth knowing why: GATE is the length of a step you tap in by hand, and OCTAVE decides what a pad plays, take or no take.

LEAN, LANE and RHYTHM joined the drum list on 2 September, and they were missing rather than exempt. All three ask the generator for a different pattern, so like HITS and ROTATE they cannot leave a take standing — but they used to take it without saying so: the notes were replaced and the channel still called itself yours. They hand back like the others now, and the indicator stops reading PLAY the moment they do. Turning one of them down to nothing — LANE to RAW, RHYTHM to LOCK, LEAN back to OFF — asks the generator for nothing, so it keeps the take.

Two details worth carrying: a drum's LENGTH keeps the take, because shortening a pattern preserves the steps that still fit; and MELODY and RHYTHM only hand back when they move off LOCK, since a locked generator 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 usually survives, because the played pitch is normally its own. The exception is worth knowing: if the note you play happens to be the very note the generator would have put on that step, the two are indistinguishable once the pattern is read back, and that step returns in the group colour like a drum. The take is intact either way — the PLAY indicator remains the authority.

Editing a take, step by step

On a channel you own, the pads in STEP mode edit the pattern itself. Tap an empty step and a note appears there; tap a step that sounds and it goes. Nothing else in the pattern moves — the note you recorded four steps earlier is exactly where you left it.

That is not what a tap does on a channel the machine owns, and the difference is the whole idea. There, a tap is a message to the generator: it marks the step as one you want used, and the line is rewritten around it. On a take there is no generator to send a message to, so the tap does the obvious thing instead.

You tap	What happens
an empty step	a note is added, at the nearest note your take already uses — so it stays in the material you played rather than borrowing a pitch from the generator
a step that sounds	it is removed. A chord goes as a chord, all of its notes at once
ERASE + a step	the same removal, and the same whole-chord rule

Your tap’s velocity is the note’s accent, so a hard tap is a loud step. And an added note is shortened if it would otherwise run into the next step that sounds, which is the same rule the generator writes under.

One thing to expect: a step you tap in draws in the channel’s colour rather than amber when the note you added happens to be the note the generator would have put there. That is the same limit described above — nothing in the pattern records who wrote a note — and the PLAY indicator remains the authority on whose channel it is.

Capturing the jam to a file

SHIFT + REC starts and stops an audio recording. It captures the master — all eight channels, the effects, and anything a macro does to them — to a WAV on the Pi, alongside the other captures.

It cannot collide with overdub, which is bare REC held. That is also why it is a chord rather than a long press: a long press of REC already is the overdub hold.

REC’s light tells you which one you are in. Dim when a take is possible, full while you hold it for an overdub, and red while a recording is being written — including when you have moved to a page where overdub is not possible, so a running capture can never be invisible.

The pad colours, in full

Nothing on the pads is decorative. Without a modifier held they are the pattern of the selected channel, in that channel’s own colour — warm for the drums, cool for the voices, the same colour as its Group button.

What you see	What it is
the channel’s colour, full	a step that fires
the channel’s colour, barely lit	a step that is empty
dark	past the end of the pattern — this is how you read LENGTH off the grid
white, moving	the playhead
amber	a step you played in yourself — on a voice, after a take, every lit step is one of yours

Every modifier that claims the pads replaces this picture for as long as it is held or latched, and hands it straight back: SHIFT shows each step’s odds, MOD the rates and shapes, ARM the macros and the countdown, MUTE the eight channels, DUPLICATE the sixteen banks, NAVIGATE the phrase — and under NAVIGATE alone a pad press does nothing at all, because a bar of the phrase is not a step. Each is written up where that gesture is.

What it refuses, and why

You cannot record in STEP mode — there the pads belong to the step editor, which on a channel you own edits your take directly — and you cannot record while MOD is active, where they pick a modulator's rate and shape.

In both cases the REC button is unlit — unless an audio capture is running, which outranks everything and keeps it red. A lit REC would otherwise be promising a take it cannot make, so it goes dark rather than letting you play a phrase into nothing and wonder why it vanished.

Pressing harder — the pads are pressure-sensitive

The pads have measured how hard you are pressing since 2015, continuously, the whole time a pad is held. The instrument now listens.

Hold a pad on a voice channel and squeeze: the filter opens, proportionally, for as long as you press. Let go and it eases back to wherever your CUTOFF knob is set. The knob keeps working while a squeeze is live — the squeeze is an offset over your setting, not a replacement for it.

Two deliberate limits. It acts on voice channels only; on a drum it does nothing, because the drum chains have no filter to open. And the number on the screen does not move while you press: it shows where your knob is, which is where the sound returns to. A value that chased your finger would be an animation, and animating a number on these screens is how you overload the connection to the controller.

The range was measured across all sixteen pads rather than assumed: a firm press reaches about four fifths of what the hardware nominally reports, so the scaling is set to that rather than to the theoretical maximum. A hard squeeze reaches the top of the filter. Note velocity is untouched by this — how hard a pad sounds when you hit it works exactly as it did.