Note mode R1

Program the selected track. The top four rows are its 32 steps; the bottom four rows are a chromatic keyboard.

Steps

• Tap an empty step to switch it on. Press or hold a lit step to see its notes: it stays on. Tapping never switches a step off — to remove one, hold CLEAR and tap it, as on Novation’s Circuit Tracks.
• A newly switched-on step plays the last note you assigned on that track. At first that is the track’s default drum note.
• Hold note keys and press a step to give that step the chord you are holding, up to 4 notes. Or hold steps and tap note keys: a key adds its note to the step, or takes it out if the step already has it. Taking out its last note empties the step.
• Holding a step lights every note of its chord on the keyboard in green. While playing, the notes of the step under the playhead light in the track colour.
• CLEAR + step clears it. DUPLICATE + step + step copies a step within the track.
• SHIFT + a pad of the four step rows goes straight to that page of 32 steps — pad 1 is page 1, the 32nd pad is page 32, one press, no walking. Where you are and where you can go are the same pads the steps were on, so there is nothing to hold open and nothing to count; the detail is under the step pages below. B1–B8 stay with the tracks.
• Hold R1 and tap a step to make it the pattern's last. It lights red and the steps after it go dark. Patterns run up to 32 pages, 1024 steps — 64 bars, which is what a MIDI file off the stick needs to arrive whole. It is R1 rather than SHIFT because SHIFT on those four rows picks the step page — something you do constantly while composing, where a length is set once a pattern.
• SHIFT turns the four rows of steps into the step pages, one pad each: all 32 of them, one press to any. While SHIFT is held those same pads are the map — green for the page on screen, blue for one holding steps, grey for empty, the playing page blinking — so the map is where the thing it maps was, and it reads as a map of the pattern rather than a menu. A pad past the last page is dark and does nothing. Every page that exists is reachable whether the pattern is that long or not, since ending it on a later step is how it is lengthened. The keyboard below the map is left alone: SHIFT there plays its single note, as it always did.

Keyboard

• The keyboard holds the notes of the song’s scale, or the track’s own scale, starting on its root in the track's octave (2 by default) at bottom-left and rising one scale note per pad, left to right and row by row upwards. Every row starts on the root, so a 7-note scale fills a row with one octave: the octave root sits on the eighth pad and again at the start of the row above. Chromatic keeps 8 semitones per row instead, which puts its roots on a diagonal, and runs from C2 (MIDI 36) to G4 (MIDI 67).
• A track can have its own scale. Turn it on with the bottom-right pad in Scale mode, then pick the track’s root and scale there; the other tracks stay in the song’s key. For every note from C, pick Chromatic with root C.
• Drum tracks show drum pads. Turn it on with the second-to-last pad of the bottom row in Scale mode. The keyboard becomes two 4×4 blocks, like a drum machine’s pads. Each block plays consecutive notes, rising left to right and then bottom to top: the left block starts on C in the track’s octave (C2–D#3 by default, kick at bottom-left) and the right block carries on (E3–G4). The left block is brighter so the two read apart. Shift + the top-left or bottom-left pad still moves both blocks an octave. Each pad is named by the kit it plays — BD, SD, CH, OH, T1–T6, CR, RD, in the General MIDI percussion map’s own shorthand — on the simulator and on the screen beside the instrument; moving the keyboard an octave renames them with it, and a note outside the kit carries no name rather than a wrong one.
• Root notes are tinted in the track colour so you can find the octaves. Pads past MIDI note 127 stay dark.
• SHIFT + the keyboard’s top-left key moves the whole keyboard up an octave and the bottom-left key moves it down; neither plays a note. Both light white while SHIFT is held, so the gesture can be found without the manual. The gesture is vertical because pitch is: every row of this keyboard is higher than the one below it, so an octave should move the same way. Every other key, the outer columns included, plays its single note under SHIFT. Each track keeps its own octave, so a bass track can sit low and a lead high, and it is saved with the project.
• A MIDI keyboard plays the selected track. Plug one in and its notes sound on that track's channel and port, at the velocity you played — and with REC on and playback running they are written at the playhead, exactly as the pads are. It follows the track, not the mode, so you can play while looking at the patterns or the song. A key you hold lights the pad that plays the same note, so what your hands are doing shows on the grid; rows repeat the root, so one note can light two pads. Its Start and Stop keys drive the sequencer too, so your hands needn't leave it. The keyboard is found at startup, and again from the devices page; name one in the config with midiin when there is more than one thing to listen to.
• One key, one chord. Turn on TRIAD or 7TH in Scale mode and every key plays three or four notes instead of one: its own note, and the rest of the scale stacked in thirds above it. The chord is built from the scale, so it is always in key — in a minor scale the first key gives a minor chord and the fifth a major one, with nothing to set up. It works everywhere a key does: press one to hear the chord, hold a step and press a key to write the chord onto it (pressing the same key again lifts it out), or play it in while recording. A seventh is four notes, which is exactly what a step holds, so a second key held with it adds only what fits. SHIFT + a key plays that one note, for a line inside a chord track, and the keys carry a hint of the track colour so you can see the track is in chords before you play one. Chords, Drums and the piano roll are three ways to use the same grid, so turning one on turns the others off: a drum track has no scale to build a chord from, and the roll has no keyboard to play one on. A track’s own scale does go with chords — they are built from the scale the track uses.
• Pressing a note pad plays that note for as long as you hold it.
• With REC on and playback running, the note is also written into the step nearest to when you pressed it. In the second half of a step it goes to the next step.
• The grid says when it is listening. The playhead runs white normally and red while REC is on, so you can see that what you play is being written, and which step it will land on, without looking away from your hands. Red is never a track colour, so there is nothing for it to be confused with.
• How hard you hit the pad is kept. The APC's pads are velocity sensitive, so a part played in arrives with its accents: the hit sets the step's velocity, which you can see and change afterwards in Step parameters. Velocity belongs to the step rather than to each note, so the last hit into a step speaks for its whole chord. The simulator's mouse cannot tell how hard, so a step written with it keeps the velocity it had.

Automation: recording a knob

A knob or fader moved while REC is on and playback is running is written into the pattern, and sent again on every pass. There is nothing to arm and no lane to open first: the control says which controller it is — whatever the control map has it sending — and the strip says which track, so moving mixer fader 3 writes Volume on track 3 of the page. The master faders follow the selected track, as they do when they are only sending.

• It lands on the step nearest to when you moved it, as a played note does: past the middle of a step and it belongs to the next one. The step is the track's own, so a sweep automated on a track at /2 lands where you heard it land.
• Eight controllers a pattern. The ninth is refused rather than taking one of your recorded moves away — the one way a move can be turned down. A controller that already has a lane always takes a new move, full or not, and the later value wins its step.
• The lanes live in the pattern. Switch pattern and the automation goes with it; copy a pattern and the moves are copied; clear a pattern and they are gone; write a library pack over a slot and it takes that slot's lanes away, as it should.
• Only the steps you moved on say anything. A lane with a value on every step would send a message every pass, which floods the port and fights whatever your hands are doing at the time — so a stationary knob writes nothing, and a lane is silent everywhere you did not touch it.
• It goes out before the step's notes, so a sound is shaped before it is struck rather than a step late. It plays on steps that hold no note at all, and a step's probability has no say in whether its filter moves: automation shapes a sound rather than being one. A muted track sends none of it.
• To take a move off, CLEAR + the step. That empties the position — its notes and the moves recorded there — and leaves the rest of the lane alone. Clearing the pattern forgets the lot. There is no lane drawn on the grid in this version, which is exactly why a move has to come off through the step it was recorded on: otherwise there would be no way to find it again.
• The panel beside the instrument says so. This mode's values band reads AUTOMATION — 2 controllers when the pattern has any and says nothing at all when it has none, so a knob nudged by accident while recording cannot become a pattern that moves something and never admits it.
• Controllers 0–119 only. 120–127 are the channel mode messages — All Sound Off, Reset All Controllers, All Notes Off — and a lane sending one of those every pass would silence the track it was meant to shape.

Piano roll

A track can show its notes as a piano roll instead: turn it on with the first pad of the bottom row in Scale mode, on its own at the left end. The whole grid then edits one stretch of the pattern. Columns are 8 steps; rows are 8 notes of the track’s scale, lowest at the bottom, starting on the root in the track’s octave.

• Tap a pad to add that note to the step; tap it again to take it out. Hold a pad to hear its note without changing the step. A step holds up to 4 notes and switches off when its last note goes.
• SHIFT turns four pads of the bottom right into arrows — left at (8,6), down at (8,7), right at (8,8) and up at (7,7), the inverted T your thumb finds without looking. They scroll the view one step at a time — or one note of the track’s scale: up and down move through the notes, left and right through the steps. One press, one place, so you can land on exactly the note you want; to cross a pattern in a hurry, hold R1 and press B1–B8 for a whole step page instead. An arrow with nowhere further to go is dark, so a lit arrow always moves something. The scrolling is on the pads because the thing being moved is the grid; B1–B8 are left to the track pages.
• SHIFT does nothing to any other pad of the roll, and lights nothing else. Every pad here is a note, and a note is not something to add by accident with a thumb on a modifier.
• A page panel’s four arrow buttons scroll the same view by the same amount, without needing SHIFT. Both gestures go through one scroll, so they are interchangeable — the amount belongs to the roll, not to whichever arrow you reached for. The four buttons are dark whenever no roll is on screen.
• Hold R1 and tap a pad to make its step the pattern’s last — the same gesture the step grid uses, since the roll is the same mode with another grid on it. Steps past the end are dark.
• Hold R1 and press B1–B8 to jump to a step page, a stride of four at 1024 steps. CLEAR + pad clears a step and DUPLICATE + pad + pad copies one.
• The rows follow the track’s keyboard: the song’s scale, its own scale, or every note from C on a drum track. Each track remembers where you scrolled.

Tracks

B1–B8 select tracks on the current track page. SHIFT + B1–B8 changes the track page (8 pages, tracks 1–64). See Pages.