Phrases

The notes you write, and the rules that make them different every time.

A phrase is a lane's material, drawn on a piano roll. Every note carries five generative fields: start, length, velocity, slice (a ratchet that splits the note into a rhythm) and bend. Each is fixed, drawn from a range on every play, or stepped through a list, so a phrase can be written once and never play the same way twice, within limits you set precisely.

The Pattern editor: a piano roll, the harmony sequence above it, and a note's generative fields in the side column — The Pattern editor. The harmony sequence runs above the roll; the lane's key, fill, swing and clock sit in the column beside it, and a selected note's five fields take their place.

A selected note's Start chip opened, switched to Generative: a from-to range in bars, beats, sixteenths and ticks, a snap grid and jitter — A note's Start chip switched from Fixed to Generative. Each play draws the note's position from the range, snapped to a grid, with jitter on top; Length, Velocity, Slice and Bend have chips of their own.

Harmony

A phrase walks a sequence of cards, and each card has a key and a shape (a scale or mode). The lane's key reaches the engine, so a device that stacks chords stacks them in the key of the moment, and a transposition is a change of card rather than a rewrite of the notes. Cards can be fixed or drawn from a list, so a progression can vary too.

Variations

A phrase holds several variations, each a complete card progression. A clip on the movement timeline picks one, so one lane can play its A material under the intro and its B material over the drop without duplicating the phrase, the rack or the lane. Variations share the phrase's seed, so a duplicate sounds identical until you edit it.

The note rack

Generation is a stage, not a bake. Each lane owns a note rack: an ordered chain of note devices that its notes flow through before they reach the instrument. An arpeggiator, a chord builder that stacks voices in the lane's key, a note shifter, devices that place notes in the stereo field and in depth, chance. They are built from the same modules as instruments, they compose, they are deterministic from the seed, and the result can be recorded back into the phrase as plain notes. A Parallel Notes container feeds the same notes to several branches at once, so one branch can arpeggiate while another sustains the chord.

A note can also carry automation of its own: a curve that bends a control on the instrument for exactly the note's duration, per voice, so two overlapping notes sweeping one filter each sweep their own.