Yep. Phrase (a bar say) has 16 steps by default and you chain them up in chains. There can be an arbitrary amount of chains up to 16 in each block you see on the song view in my photo. So you could have a block with 3 chains in and one with 5 that resolves every 15 bars for example
Although there are 16 steps you can use ‘commands’ on any step to do all sorts of stuff. This is where the real power of trackers is. Those commands can be stuff like affecting fx sends, reversing samples, arps, there are dozens. There’s also one called HOP which you can use to jump to an arbitrary position in the phrase. So if you wanted, say a bar with only 10 steps, you could put a command on 10 to HOP to 0. The tracker doesn’t care about resolving anything it literally just follows things stepwise.
You can also edit the ‘duration’ of each step. By default its synced to the midi clock which use 6 ticks per step. You have a groove table where you can change that. That becomes ludicrously complicated and powerful. You can do simple stuff like swing, or mad stuff like compound times.
thanks for this - it seems really powerful & fun. The initial workflow barrier seems like probably at least a few hours of muddling, but I keep hearing that it gets very efficient very quickly
Yeah. Bit of a curve but it really quickly becomes muscle memory and it’s just like playing a gameboy. In fact, the interface is based on the gameboy layout, it being the spiritual successor to lsdj
i’m assuming the answer is yes, but:
is it possible / easy to program phrases of different lengths and let them play polyrhythmically?
watching some videos on it right now and it looks great, but not seeing this (admittedly) particular question addressed just yet…
thanks for the info on my other question here! https://waveform.social/comment/430556
Yep. Phrase (a bar say) has 16 steps by default and you chain them up in chains. There can be an arbitrary amount of chains up to 16 in each block you see on the song view in my photo. So you could have a block with 3 chains in and one with 5 that resolves every 15 bars for example
Although there are 16 steps you can use ‘commands’ on any step to do all sorts of stuff. This is where the real power of trackers is. Those commands can be stuff like affecting fx sends, reversing samples, arps, there are dozens. There’s also one called HOP which you can use to jump to an arbitrary position in the phrase. So if you wanted, say a bar with only 10 steps, you could put a command on 10 to HOP to 0. The tracker doesn’t care about resolving anything it literally just follows things stepwise.
You can also edit the ‘duration’ of each step. By default its synced to the midi clock which use 6 ticks per step. You have a groove table where you can change that. That becomes ludicrously complicated and powerful. You can do simple stuff like swing, or mad stuff like compound times.
thanks for this - it seems really powerful & fun. The initial workflow barrier seems like probably at least a few hours of muddling, but I keep hearing that it gets very efficient very quickly
Yeah. Bit of a curve but it really quickly becomes muscle memory and it’s just like playing a gameboy. In fact, the interface is based on the gameboy layout, it being the spiritual successor to lsdj