The surface

What every button does, how to read the two displays, and the list to work down when a channel goes quiet.

Modes and pages

Five buttons latch a mode, and exactly one is lit at any time.

Button on the panel	Mode	The eight encoders become
CONTROL	CONTROL	what the selected channel sounds like
STEP	STEP	what the selected channel plays
ALL	ALL	the machine's globals
VOLUME	MIXER	one level across all eight channels
AUTO	FILTER	one filter control across all eight channels

A mode can carry more than one page. The arrows beside the display step through that mode's ring and wrap; the page name sits in the middle of the display. Each mode remembers its own page separately for drum and voice channels, so changing channel does not throw you onto a page you were not on.

Pressing the mode you are already in returns you to page 1 of that mode. It does not switch you anywhere — every mode button means the same thing twice over: this mode, from the top.

Group A–H selects the channel. Pads, tabs and all eight encoders follow immediately, and the inverted tab on the display — never a Group LED — is the authority on which channel is selected.

Reading the displays

Both displays carry a tab row across the top — A–D on the left, E–H on the right — with four encoder columns under each.

The inverted tab is the selected channel. A dashed tab means that channel is not sounding, whether it is muted at the mixer or silenced by its own generator. It is the one mechanism this instrument has for explaining silence, so read the tab row before assuming a fault.

A KICKB SNARC CLAPD CHAT

KIT

SP12

SAMPLE

0003

cutoff

----

reso

----

A drum channel on CONTROL. CUTOFF and RESO draw dead in lower case with ----: a sampler has no filter to reach, and the encoder does nothing rather than pretending.

What the lights mean

Surface	What it says
Group A–H	hue is the channel, brightness is its level, dark means it is not sounding
Mode buttons	exactly one lit, always — it cannot disagree with the display
F1–F8	lit while that channel is muted
PLAY	lit while anything is running
REC	lit only when a take is actually possible — dark in STEP mode and while MOD is active
GRID	lit always, and blinking while the selected channel is on an overridden kind
NOTE REPEAT	lit only while the selected channel behaves as a voice
SWING	lit while MOD is held or latched
Arrows, ERASE, SHIFT	lit whenever the instrument is running — they always do the same thing

The buttons, one by one

NOTE REPEAT — the register undo. On a voice, it gives back the previous Turing line: it restores the earlier register, forces RANDOM to 0 so the recovered line holds, and rewrites immediately. It walks back up to four registers, which is roughly two wraps of human reaction time — the window in which a mutation steals a phrase before your hand arrives. It does nothing on a euclidean channel, which is why it is unlit there.

DUPLICATE does nothing. The register undo used to live here and moved to NOTE REPEAT, beside the big encoder with the other master controls.

SHIFT + GRID switches the selected channel's kind — see Sound and presets. A bare GRID press does nothing, deliberately.

MOD + ERASE + ALL clears every modulator at once, returning each value to the base you set — see Modulation.

The two buttons beside the big encoder step the selected channel's sound: previous or next sample on a drum, previous or next engine preset on a voice.

Mute, solo and erase

F1–F8 mute channels A–H, regardless of which channel is selected — F3 always mutes CLAP. Tap and it latches; hold past a quarter of a second and it is momentary, back on release. Same button, both gestures: momentary is how you play a gesture, latched is how you make a decision.

The mute is on the mixer strip rather than the sequencer track, which is why it survives a snapshot, shows on the touchscreen mixer, and takes the channel's reverb and delay tail with it.

SOLO works the same two ways. ERASE + a Group button silences that channel — or, on a channel you have recorded onto, hands the pattern back to the generator.

Transport

Play starts or stops all eight channels together. The decision is taken once and applied to all eight, so they cannot drift into opposite states. Restart jumps every playhead to step 0 without stopping — for pulling channels back onto the one after a length change has phased them apart.

Press Play once after loading a snapshot: loop mode is re-asserted on every transport start, and a fresh load is the one moment it may need it.

When it goes quiet

Work down this list before suspecting the rig. Most of it is things you did.

Check	What it looks like
Is the tab dashed?	the channel is muted, or its generator is silent
HITS on a drum	0 hits is a silent channel, not a broken one
CHANCE on a drum, DENSITY on a voice	at 0, nothing fires
Is something soloed?	every non-soloed Group button goes dark
MASTER on the ALL page	the global level, easy to leave down
GATE at its floor on a voice	a slow-attack patch never gets far enough to sound

A voice that is locked is not silent — LOCK freezes the pattern, it does not mute it. If a whole channel is dead while its tab looks healthy, the fault is below the instrument: see Internals for how the chain is wired, and Manual installation for the checks that catch a stale MIDI route.