The surface

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

If you know this controller from Maschine software, read Coming from Maschine first — four printed legends carry different jobs here, and everything below assumes you know which four.

This panel has one grammar and it is worth having before anything else. Four modes decide what the eight knobs mean. The channel decides what they act on. Holding ALL asks the same question of all eight channels at once. Every modifier obeys one rule about tapping and holding, every light means one of five things, and one press of the big encoder puts it all back.

Learn those four sentences and the rest of this page is reference rather than reading. What you do with the panel — arming a drop, launching a scene, holding the machine still — is on Performing.

Modes, pages and the lens

Four buttons latch a mode, and exactly one is lit brightly at any time. The other three sit dim — they are still there, they are just not where you are.

AUTO is where the generator lives, which is what the button is printed for. RULE and MODEL choose which generator draws the part; MELODY and RHYTHM are how fast it changes its mind; LANE is how far out it may wander; MOVE is how often it may touch this channel at all; and PHRASE, FILL and EXIT are how the part is built and how it leaves. On a voice a second page, LINE, carries how the line of pitches is built — ROTATE, SPAN, STRIDE, FEED, AMT and RANGE. RANGE moved there when CHORD took its slot on STEP: it answers the same question the rest of that page asks, which is how far the line is spread. SPAN and STRIDE draw dead unless MODEL is on WALK, and that is the picture rather than a fault.

The fifth button, ALL, is not a mode. It is the lens. Hold it and the eight encoders stop being eight verbs of one channel and become one verb across all eight channels — whichever knob your hand last moved. The page indicator says which: ALL CHANCE. Let go and you are back where you were, on the same page, with the same channel selected.

That is the fast way to ask the question you actually ask mid-jam. You are setting the hats' odds, you wonder what the other seven are doing, you hold ALL with your other hand and there they are — eight columns, one per channel, and the knob under your finger still moves the same parameter. You never leave the channel you were looking at.

A channel that does not carry the verb draws dead, exactly as it does anywhere else: hold ALL on CUTOFF and the three voices are live while the five drums show ----, and hold it on LANE and it is the other way round. That is not a fault, it is the picture — it tells you which channels the question even applies to.

Turning a global does not move the lens. There is only one BPM, one ROOT, one MASTER, so there is nothing to lay side by side; the same goes for a kit or a preset name, where eight lists share no index, and for a plugin's own ports, where the eight channels run three different synths and a matching name is not a matching control. Turn one of those and the lens keeps whatever it was last holding. With nothing moved yet it shows LEVEL.

It follows the channel you select. Set the lens to something only a drum has, then select a voice, and it falls back to LEVEL rather than showing you a row of dead columns — a verb the selected channel cannot reach is a page with nothing on it, under a button you are holding down.

The arrows beside the display choose the verb while the lens is open. They have no pages to walk there, so they walk the verbs instead — every one the selected channel carries, in panel order, wrapping at both ends. That is what makes “the knob your hand last moved” safe: it is exactly right for the knob you were just on and arbitrary for the one you want next, and the difference is now one arrow rather than leaving the lens, finding a page that carries the right verb, turning it and coming back.

Tap ALL instead of holding it and it stays. That is the rule for every modifier on this panel — see below — and it is what you want when you are going to work across the eight for a while and need both hands. Pressing any mode button drops it, because a mode press means I am working somewhere else now.

A mode can carry a second page. The arrows beside the display step through that mode's ring and wrap, and the big encoder does the same thing faster. Most rings are one page now, and the arrows go dark when there is nowhere to step — a lit arrow that cannot move is exactly the kind of lie this surface is built not to tell. Each mode remembers its own page separately for drum and voice channels.

The big encoder has two exceptions, one silence and one press. While MOD is on it scales the depth of every live modulator at once rather than walking pages; while the bank grid is up it walks the four pages of banks. Inside the lens it does nothing at all — the arrows are stepping a verb there, not a page, and one control walking a list while a bigger one walks nothing is better than the big one yanking you off the verb your eight fingers are on. It has no light, so this page is the only place that can tell you. And pressing it is HOME.

HOME is one press, from anywhere. It puts you back in the default performance state — STEP, page 1, every latch dropped, the pads showing what the selected channel is playing. Your channel stays selected, and nothing armed is cancelled: HOME is navigation, not a deletion. It is the button to hit when you have stopped knowing where you are, and it is the biggest, most central thing on the panel, which is deliberate — you have to be able to find it without looking.

Pressing the mode you are already in returns you to page 1 of that mode. 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.

One rule for every modifier: tap to keep it, hold to borrow it

A tap latches. A hold is momentary. Every modifier on this panel obeys it, without exception: SHIFT, SELECT, DUPLICATE, MUTE, NAVIGATE, SWING, PAD MODE, SOLO and F1–F8.

You hold what you are about to let go of, and you tap what should stay — and both routes reach the same state, so you never have to decide which you meant before you start. A second tap is always the way out. There is nothing on this surface you can enter with one gesture and need a different one to leave.

Which one you are in is on the button. Held is steady, latched blinks. That distinction matters exactly once, and it is the moment it matters most: a latched modifier survives your finger leaving it, and an unlit one would be a mode you had walked away from without knowing.

Two latched at once, and the one nearer the front wins the pads. Nothing stops you latching SHIFT and MUTE and MOD together, so there is a fixed order and it never changes: SHIFT, then ARM, then BANK, then MUTE, then MOD, then NAVIGATE. The winner owns the sixteen pads; the others keep doing everything they do off the pads — MOD still puts depth on the encoders, ARM still counts down on SELECT — and take the pads back the moment the one above them goes out. SHIFT is at the front because per–step odds is the one you reach for mid–bar with something else already latched. The single exception runs the other way: hold ARM while MOD is on and MOD keeps the pads, because that combination is RISE and it needs a shape pad, not a macro pad.

The bar of the phrase appears on the indicator only when something is waiting to land. Arm a macro and the indicator counts 4/16, 5/16 and so on, so a timed gesture has something to resolve against; with nothing pending the number is not drawn. That is deliberate and it is not only tidiness — a number that changes by itself made the instrument redraw both screens once a bar for as long as the music ran, which is the one kind of traffic this controller does not tolerate. The countdown is on the ARM lamp either way, and a light is free where a screen is not.

A latched overlay also names itself on the display — STEP BANK, STEP MUTE, STEP ODDS. Six of them share the same sixteen pads, and the obvious answer of a colour each does not fit this hardware: the eight channel hues leave only two gaps wide enough to be told apart, and both are already spent. So the pads cannot say whose they are, and while you hold a modifier they do not need to — your hand knows. A latch is the one you can walk away from, and that is the one the indicator names.

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.

On a generated page the tab row carries parameter names instead — the names need the room. On CONTROL that page is the selected channel’s own plugin; on VOLUME it is the reverb, the delay or the master insert, one page each, reaching every remaining port of an effect that is ganged across all eight chains. See Deep parameter control. Everywhere else the tab row is the channels:

A column drawn in lower case with ---- and no bar cannot act, and that is the instrument telling you so rather than failing quietly. A sampler publishes no filter, so CUTOFF draws dead on a drum; a chain with no kits loaded draws KIT dead, because there is nothing for the knob to step through. The encoder above a dead column does nothing, deliberately — the alternative is a knob that looks live and is not.

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.

What the lights mean

Every button on this panel except the eight Group buttons is a single colour. That leaves three brightnesses and two movements, and the whole surface uses only those five.

Two things follow from that and both are worth knowing before you look at the panel. A light that is always on is not a light — so nothing here is lit just to show the instrument is running. And dark means the button is inert, not that it is missing: the display arrows go dark on a ring with one page, and the left STEP arrow is dark because nothing is bound to it yet.

The buttons, one by one

NOTE REPEAT — the register undo. On a voice, it gives back the previous Turing line: it restores the earlier registers — both of them, so the rhythm cannot move out from under a line you just recovered — forces MELODY and RHYTHM to 0 so it 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 is the bank grid — sixteen whole arrangements on the pads. See below.

The big encoder's press is HOME. STEP, page 1, every latch dropped, your channel and everything armed left alone. It is the one press that always means the same thing.

TEMPO — hold it and every encoder turns twice as fast. The knobs are deliberately fine, so that a value can be crept up on rather than jumped over. TEMPO is how you cross a range in a hurry: hold it to get near, let go to land. It changes nothing but speed and it does not latch. It does not set the tempo either — that is BPM, encoder 3 of the VOLUME page, and it is on this panel like everything else.

SHIFT + GRID switches the selected channel's kind — see Sound and presets. A bare GRID press does nothing, deliberately, and the button sits dim rather than lit to say so.

MOD + ERASE + ALL clears every modulator at once, returning each value to the base you set — see Modulation. Three keys, two of them modifiers, because it is destructive and nothing destructive happens on this panel from a single press.

MOD + ERASE + a Group button does the same thing to one channel. It is the scope between the other two: one verb clears with MOD + ERASE and that encoder, all eight clear with ALL, and this clears the channel you name and leaves the other seven moving. Let go of MOD and the same two keys mean something else — ERASE + Group is still the silence, so the order of your fingers decides which one you get.

PATTERN regenerates, and a press is enough — the reroll lands at the wrap, and a second press before then takes it back. The channel you have selected decides which half of the instrument it touches, so there is nothing to choose. ERASE and the same button undoes a reroll that already landed; SHIFT widens it to every channel of that channel's engine type. See Reroll.

BROWSE, SAMPLING and ENTER do nothing either, and never have. They sit dark with the rest of the unbound panel. They are named here so that a dark button is never a question: on this surface dark means nothing would happen, and that is as true of a button with no job as of one whose job is unavailable right now.

SCENE does nothing. It used to be the reroll button for the synths, back when the drums had their own; one button decides from the selected channel now, which is what a bare press always did anyway.

The two buttons beside the big encoder step the selected channel's sound, and which sound depends on the engine: previous or next sample on a drum engine, previous or next preset on a synth engine. Hold SHIFT and they step the kit instead, on a drum engine only.

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.

There is no exception any more. CONTROL used to take the row for a plugin's switches, which needed SHIFT + Fn to get mute back and a third rule for what MOD did to it — three meanings on the eight buttons you hit without looking. A switch column's own encoder already steps that switch through its positions and draws the plugin's own word for each, so the button was a second route to the same thing, paid for with the row's only meaning. See Switches.

SOLO works the same two ways, and the latched one changes what the F row is. Hold SOLO and tap an F button and that channel is soloed for as long as you hold — additive, so several at once. Tap SOLO and it latches: the whole F row stops being mutes and becomes solos until you tap it again. SOLO blinks while that latch is on — the panel's word for latched, here as everywhere — which is the one thing telling you what the eight buttons under your hand currently mean, and while the row means solo it lights the soloed channels rather than the muted ones.

Leaving solo mode does not un-solo anything, and SOLO keeps blinking to say so. Tapping SOLO again gives the F row back to the mutes; it does not touch the mixer, because a solo you set on purpose is not something a change of view should throw away. So a channel can still be soloed with the row showing mutes — and in that state SOLO goes on blinking, which is the panel telling you a decision of yours is still standing. The Group buttons say it too: every non-soloed channel is dark. To clear it, tap SOLO to get the row back, un-press the soloed channel, and tap out again.

ERASE + a Group button silences that channel — or, on a channel you have recorded onto, hands the pattern back to the generator. Both are taking something away, which is why they share the one modifier that means that.

Hold ERASE before you press anything and the Group row tells you what is at stake. A channel holding a take you played goes amber and full; every other channel drops to the floor, because there the gesture only silences and you can turn HITS or CHANCE straight back up. Handing a take back is the one thing on this instrument you cannot undo, and it used to be invisible — a take on a channel you were not looking at looked exactly like one that had none.

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.

Where you come back to

The instrument has one place it calls home, and it is where it starts: STEP, page 1, channel A, nothing latched, the F row are mutes. The pads show what the selected channel is playing with the playhead sweeping over them, which is the one picture that is always true.

Press the big encoder and you are there. From any mode, any page, with any number of things latched. Your channel stays selected and anything you have armed keeps counting — HOME moves you, it does not undo you. Every latch is dropped, SOLO included, because every one of them can hide the step picture and the step picture is what this button is for. A finger still on a button is left alone: that hold ends when the finger does.

And the first turn after HOME counts. Press it, then turn — the page moves on that first detent, not the second. Worth saying because it is the gesture you make when you have stopped knowing where you are, and a knob that eats your first move is exactly the wrong answer to that.

That press does one more thing you will never notice until you would have. The big encoder reports an absolute position rather than a movement, and it wraps once per revolution, so a long spin can make the next click jump. HOME takes the reading it finds as the new zero, which means the fix for that is the same button as the fix for everything else.

When it goes quiet

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

If the machine itself has stopped, the page indicator says so. Instead of the usual page name you will see GEN STOPPED and a count of seconds. That means generation has stopped moving — not that a channel is muted, and not that the pattern is empty. The pads keep playing while it says that: the instrument drops to what it can still do rather than going quietly dead, so you can carry on hitting drums while the generator is stuck. It clears itself the moment things move again.

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.

When the panel goes dark on its own

Leave the instrument alone for an hour and the whole panel goes dark — every pad, every button light, both screens. That is Zynthian's power saving, not a fault, and the music does not stop: the patterns keep running, the generators keep writing, a modulator bound to a filter keeps sweeping it. Only the lights go.

Any press brings it back, and the whole surface repaints itself — pads, lights, both screens, exactly what they were showing. You do not have to find a particular button; the first thing you touch is enough.

Playing keeps it awake. The hour is an hour of nothing happening, not an hour since you started, so a set does not go dark under your hands. The timeout lives in webconf, under the interface settings, and can be lengthened or switched off entirely.

This is the one thing that looks like the fault below, so here is how to tell them apart. Press a pad. If the panel lights up and everything comes back, it was asleep. If nothing at all happens — no light, no sound from the pad — read on.

When the surface goes dead

Different fault, opposite symptom: the music keeps playing and the controller stops answering. Pads do nothing, no light changes, the screens are frozen or blank. Nothing is wrong with the instrument — the patterns are still running and still being written; it is the USB connection to the controller that has stopped carrying anything.

Unplug the Maschine and plug it back in. That is the fix, and it is the only one that reliably works — the controller comes back within a couple of seconds and the whole surface repaints itself: pads, button lights, the two screens, all of it, back to exactly what it was showing. You do not have to touch a knob to wake it up, and you do not have to restart anything. Your patterns never stopped.

Do not go looking for the cause on the touchscreen or in a menu first. If the sound is still there, it is the cable.

See also

• Performing — the phrase clock, ARM and the macros, the mute and bank grids, FREEZE and beat repeat
• Generating patterns — what HITS, CHANCE, MELODY and RHYTHM actually do
• Playing and recording — the pad colours in full
• Modulation — what the ~ and the dashed bar mean