1. Your first beat
A drum loop on three tracks, in about five minutes. Everything here happens on one screenful of pads: eight tracks, thirty-two steps, no paging.
About sound. GroovixBox sequences; it doesn’t make a sound on its own. Each track plays out of a MIDI port and channel, or out of one of the internal instrument slots — see Global settings. With nothing connected the pads still light and the sequence still runs, so you can do this whole tutorial silently.
What you are looking at
It opens on your last project, in Note mode, on track 1, stopped. R1 is lit on the right because that is the mode you are in, and B1 is the brightest of the track buttons because track 1 is selected.
The grid is in two halves. The top four rows are the 32 steps of the selected track’s pattern — step 1 at the top left, step 8 at the end of the first row, step 9 at the start of the second. The bottom four rows are a keyboard, which the next tutorial is about; ignore it for now.
Put a kick down
Tap steps 1, 5, 9 and 13: the first pad of row 1, the fifth pad of row 1, then the first and fifth pads of row 2. Each lights in the track colour.
A step you switch on plays the track’s current note, and a fresh track starts on a sensible drum note: track 1 is 36 (a kick), track 2 is 38 (a snare), track 3 is 42 (a closed hat), and so on down the usual drum map. That is why you can build a beat before touching the keyboard at all.
Press play
PLAY, on the page panel beside the grid, starts and stops playback — Space in the simulator. It lights green while running, and a white pad walks along the steps. Playback always starts from step 1.
Leave it running. Everything below can be done while the loop plays.
Two more tracks
- B2 selects track 2 (2). The steps you see are now its own, and empty. Tap steps 5 and 13 for a backbeat.
- B3 selects track 3. Tap steps 3, 7, 11 and 15 for offbeat hats.
B1–B8 switch tracks from any mode, and always land you back in Note mode. All eight tracks play together; you are only ever editing the selected one.
Make the loop one bar
A new pattern is 32 steps long, so what you have repeats over two bars of sixteenths. To hear a one-bar loop, hold R1 and tap step 16 — the last pad of row 2. (It is R1 rather than SHIFT, because SHIFT over those four rows picks the step page.) It turns red, the steps after it go dark, and the loop is now 16 steps.
Each track keeps its own length, so this is per track. Set the same on tracks 1 and 2, or leave them long on purpose: a 16-step hat against a 32-step kick is two bars of music from one pattern.
Fix what you got wrong
- Remove a step: hold CLEAR and tap it. Tapping a lit step never switches it off — that would be too easy to do by accident while playing.
- Copy a step: hold DUPLICATE, tap the one you like, then tap where you want it. Keep tapping for more copies. This carries its notes, velocity, gate and probability.
- Start the track over: there is no clear-the-whole-track button; hold CLEAR and wipe the steps you don’t want.
Set the tempo
- Hold SHIFT and press R4 for Global settings — or press SETTINGS on the panel.
- Tap pad 1 of the top row. It turns green and the tempo appears across the middle of the grid in big digits — 120 to start with.
- Step it with the bottom row: pad 2 is +10 and pad 3 is −10 to get near, pad 5 is +1 and pad 6 is −1 to land on it. 20 to 300 BPM. No fader sets the tempo — fader 1 sends its CC here as it does everywhere else.
- Press R1 to go back to Note mode.
The tempo belongs to the project, so each project keeps its own.
It saves itself
There is no save button. The project is written when you quit (Esc) and whenever you switch to another project, and the simulator reopens it next time. To keep this beat and start something else, hold SHIFT and press R3 for Project mode — or press PROJECT on the panel: the open project is the green pad, and any other pad you tap becomes your new project — the one you were in is saved first.
Mouse tip. Some things want two pads at once. In the simulator, right-click latches a pad down and left-click stays momentary, so you can right-click CLEAR, clear several steps with the left button, then right-click it again to let go.
What you learned
- Steps are the top four rows; tap to switch on, CLEAR + tap to remove.
- B1–B8 pick the track; every track has its own steps and its own length.
- R1 + a step sets where the loop ends.
- PLAY on the panel plays, SHIFT + R4 holds the tempo, and nothing needs saving.