Sound and presets

What each channel sounds like, how to change it while the rig plays, and how to make a channel behave as something its engine is not.

What it is

CONTROL is the sound page. On a drum it is KIT and SAMPLE; on a voice it is PRESET, CUTOFF, RESO, ENV and DECAY. Encoders 6, 7 and 8 are LEVEL, REVERB and DELAY on every channel of both kinds — the same three controls in the same place, always.

Every channel keeps its engine for the life of the snapshot. Nothing is created or destroyed while you play, because building a plugin rebuilds the audio graph and that is a hole in the sound.

Try it

  1. Select Group A (KICK) and press CONTROL. Encoder 1 is KIT, encoder 2 is SAMPLE.
  2. Turn SAMPLE. The kick changes to another sound inside the same kit, immediately.
  3. Press the button to the right of the big encoder. Same effect — it steps the selected channel's sound without using an encoder.
  4. Select Group G (LEAD) and press CONTROL. Now encoder 1 is PRESET and encoders 2–5 are CUTOFF, RESO, ENV and DECAY.
  5. Turn CUTOFF. You are driving the synth that is actually loaded, not a fixed idea of one.
  6. Now the interesting one. Select Group E (OHAT) and hold SHIFT while pressing GRID. The channel changes what it behaves as. Do it again to change back.

One channel arrives switched

E · OHAT ships as a voice. It keeps its Simmons kit and its sampler, but the Turing register drives it rather than euclid, so it walks between samples instead of laying down a straight hat.

If your open hat wanders and you did not ask it to, that is the factory state and not a fault. Press SHIFT + GRID on E to hear it as an ordinary euclidean hat. It ships that way so the switch is audible the moment you plug in.

How switching a kind works

SHIFT + GRID switches the selected channel between drum and voice behaviour. The engine is never swapped. A drum kit gets the Turing generator, and a synth gets euclid.

On a sampler the register walks the kit's own note list rather than ROOT and SCALE, because there a note selects a sample and scale-quantising would land most steps on empty keys — silence with nothing to explain it. On a synth, euclid becomes a root pulse: ROOT plus that channel's OCTAVE, on every hit.

Each channel keeps a separate set of parameters per kind, so switching back and forth does not cost you your settings. Pattern length and division deliberately do not move: they are pattern time, not kind, and the groove must not jump under a switch.

The surface says when a channel is not itself. The page indicator reads VOX or DRM, and GRID blinks for as long as the selected channel is on an overridden kind. Switching back clears the override rather than pinning the channel to a kind it merely happens to have today — so a later snapshot putting a different engine on that chain is not overruled by a stale choice nobody remembers making.

What it refuses, and why

A switch rewrites the pattern, so on a channel you have recorded onto it hands the pattern back to the generator and your take is gone. Hand-edited steps do not survive either, for the same reason turning HITS does not — switching rewrites the line from the generator.

A voice switched to drum may arrive silent, because its HITS can read back as 0. The tab draws dashed to say so. That is not a defect: turn HITS up.

A known defect, stated plainly: the two buttons beside the big encoder sometimes step a preset once and then stick. Turning the PRESET encoder works reliably. This is being investigated; it is recorded here rather than left for you to discover and mistrust the rest.

See also