Autodrops

An autodrop is a temporary mute or unmute that fires on a musical boundary and puts itself back. You cue it, it lands at the next timing point in the 16-bar cycle, and at the top of the next cycle it undoes itself. There is nothing to remember and nothing to press again.

They work at two levels: sequencer autodrops drop a whole sequencer, and row autodrops drop one row of one sequencer.

Why they are worth cueing rather than muting by hand

Because the length of the drop comes from when you press. Every autodrop ends at the same place, bar 0 of the next cycle, and starts at whichever timing point comes next, so a cue placed early in the cycle produces a long absence and one placed near the end produces a quick fill. Pressing later gets you a shorter drop, which means you can accelerate a passage by pressing the same button faster, and none of it needs counting: the cycle does the timing.

The inversion is the other half. A muted row autodrops in rather than out, so the same gesture that drops a busy row for eight bars brings a silent row in for four.

Try this first

1. Get a sequencer playing, unmuted.
2. Press its button on the LaunchControl bottom row. Nothing happens yet: the button starts flashing, which means the drop is cued.
3. Wait. At the next timing point the sequencer goes silent and the button goes solid.
4. At the top of the next 16-bar cycle it comes back on its own.

Then do it again in the last bar of the cycle and hear how much shorter the drop is. That is the whole feature.

To take it back before it fires, press the sequencer’s top-row button, which cancels the cue and leaves the sequencer playing.

When your press takes effect

Sequencer and row autodrops share the same timing. Nothing happens the moment you press: the cue sits flashing until the cycle reaches one of six points, and only then does the drop start.

Two consequences worth holding on to:

• Bar 0 is the only place a drop ends. However late in the cycle a drop begins, it finishes at the next bar 0, so pressing later gives you a shorter drop. That is the acceleration effect: cue early for a long absence, cue near the end of the cycle for a quick fill.
• The 16-bar autodrop is the exception. It starts only at bar 0, never at the intermediate points, which is what makes it last a full cycle.

The drop lengths that come out of that, for a row or a sequencer:

Quick reference

Sequencer autodrops

Sequencer autodrops are cued from the LaunchControl XL bottom row, one button per sequencer. They temporarily mute a playing sequencer for a portion of the 16-bar cycle, then unmute it.

The three gestures

Cancelling and replacing

Pressing the top-row button for that sequencer while a cue is pending cancels the autodrop and returns the sequencer to unmuted. Pressing the same bottom-row button again either cancels or replaces the cue, depending on what is already pending:

No modifier, and REC ARM, both follow the same table:

SHIFT + SOLO hands the request to the autodrop engine instead of writing a mute state directly, so it follows its own rules:

Unlike the other two gestures, the drop length here is not fixed: it comes from where you are in the 16-bar cycle when you press, the same rule the view-8.1 manual cues use.

What the LEDs do

State transitions

Each autodrop type is a two-step chain: cue → active → resolved.

Standard autodrops fire at bar 0, bar 8, bar 12, or bar 15 steps 1/9/13, whichever comes next, and resolve back to Unmuted only at the next bar 0, never at an intermediate timing point. The 16-bar autodrop fires only at bar 0. 8-bar cued mutes also resolve at bar 8, but those are regular mutes rather than autodrops (see Mutes and row states).

Row autodrops

Row autodrops are cued from the Launchpad mute column (column 9, the rightmost column of the LHS pad). Hold SHIFT and press a row’s mute button to cue one; press again with SHIFT held to cancel it.

They are symmetric but inverted, which is the point of them:

• A muted row autodrops in: it plays for the length of the drop, then goes back to muted. Use this to bring a row in for a fill.
• An active row (unmuted, drone or legato) autodrops out: it goes silent for the length of the drop, then returns to the mode it was in. Use this for a brief break.

Cancelling returns the row to its clean base state (MUTED, DRONE, LEGATO or UNMUTED).

State transitions

Step 1: the cue fires and the row flips:

Step 2: the drop reverts at bar 0:

Row LED colours for each of these states are in the “Row LED colours” section of Mutes and row states.

View 8.1: the autodrop view

A modifier-free manual-cue surface on the Launchpad that complements the LC bottom row. Reach it with the col-9 view selector; it renders on both LPs of both players.

Voice 0 (the boom-tsk control row) and voice 8 (ghost RS) are deliberately excluded: they are performance-mode cells, not autodrop targets.

Colours. Row 8 eligibility shows the sequencer’s own colour when on, dark when off. A sequencer-cue cell shows slate grey once that sequencer has at least one active trig on an unmuted row, flashes its flavour colour when cued (tan for mute, burnt orange for CC, yellow for note), and goes solid once the drop is in flight. TR-8 cells keep their usual voice colours and flash purple when cued or in flight.

Cancellation. Pressing a cued cell again with the same flavour cancels the cue. Pressing a different-flavour row replaces the cue, provided the new drop is at least as long as the one it replaces. A drop already in flight cannot be cancelled: the engine rejects the press. TR-8 row cues toggle straight back on a re-press.

Eligibility only affects automatic cycles. A sequencer switched off is skipped by them, silently, but manual cues from this view or from the LC bottom row still fire (see Toggle views).

CC autodrop sweeps

Automatic CC autodrops on the master-bus slots (22/23/24) ramp the CC rather than jumping it. You hear a sweep up from 0 to 127 across the whole drop, and then on the way out either a sweep down back to 0 (three times out of four) or a hard snap to 0 (one time in four), so repeated drops do not all end the same way.

The sweep follows the tempo, so it stretches and shrinks with the BPM rather than running at a fixed speed. Pressing Stop in the DAW sends every active CC back to 0, so nothing is left hanging.

Limitations

Four things that are silent when you meet them, so they are worth knowing before a set rather than during one.

• CC and note drops do not silence a synth sequencer yet. The intent is that a CC drop suppresses notes while letting CC through, and a note drop does the reverse. On a synth sequencer the engine treats both as unmuted: the cue times, lights and resolves correctly, and you still hear the notes. The two mute flavours work exactly as documented. TR-8 voices and the master bus are the exception, and do fire real MIDI.
• Automatic cycles only ever mute a synth sequencer. They never pick the CC or note flavours for you. View 8.1’s manual cues are unaffected: you can still choose note or CC explicitly with a row 5 or row 6 press.
• Sequencer 13 has no CC autodrop, and sequencers 14 and 15 have none at all. On sequencer 13 the SHIFT + SOLO gesture falls back to a plain mute autodrop cue, exactly as if you had pressed with no modifier. On 14 and 15 the press does nothing.
• TR-8 voice CC sweeps land on a placeholder. The per-voice CC map is not in place yet, so a TR-8 sweep currently moves a placeholder controller number rather than the parameter it is meant to move.

Cross-References

• Mutes and row states: the mute states autodrops move between, and every LED colour
• Toggle views: the per-sequencer autodrop eligibility toggle
• LaunchControl bottom row: what else the LC bottom row does under a modifier
• Trigs: the row mute column autodrops are cued from