Jam keyboard

The jam-keyboard is a live-input view that turns the Launchpad MK2 grid into a scale-aware piano keyboard whose held notes are checked by a 16-step rhythmic trig pattern. Press keys on rows 1–7 to hold notes; author the gate pattern that releases those notes into the engine on the top row of the same LPs, using the LC only as a modifier.

It is a rhythmic gate pattern instrument, not a play-on-press keyboard. Held notes only sound on active pattern steps; releasing the LP key clears the gate.

The gates are what make it playable. When you have a big chunk of latency between your fingers hitting the keyboard and the sound hitting your eardrums, it’s difficult to play in time, so here you hold the notes and let the pattern place them, and what you play lands on the grid whether or not your timing does. Hold a chord, edit the gates underneath it, and the part rewrites itself while you keep holding.

The keys are laid out isomorphically, a bit like what you’ve seen on the Ableton Push, and the same layout as the note keyboard in the note arp view, so a shape you learn in one place transposes to the other.

What You See on the Launchpads

Each player’s LP shows the same layout: rows 1–7 are a piano-style keyboard, row 8 is the trig pattern editor. Both pads show the same keyboard, not two halves of one, so either hand can play the whole range.

webapp hardware

An eight-note shape held across the keyboard and locked with the freeze toggle. The mustard notes and remaining slate octave markers repeat identically on both pads, because each LP carries the whole keyboard. The red pad at the right of row 7 says freeze is locked. Across the top, five trig-status pads are lit; step 1 is separately washed out under the playhead.

Rows 1–7: Keyboard

Notes are laid out as scale degrees plus octave offsets. The mapping is fixed and spans roughly four octaves across rows 1–7. Row 7 has only seven keys: the eighth pad in that row is the freeze toggle.

• Unlocked: the freeze pad is off-white.
• Locked (frozen): the freeze pad is red.

The pad that starts each octave is highlighted, so you can find your place at a glance. The octave you are on decides the tint that held notes take.

Held notes are drawn in the active octave colour. Unpressed keys show the default keyboard colouring with octave-start markers emphasised.

Row 8: Trig Pattern

The top row of each LP edits the 16-step gate pattern. The sixteen steps are split across your own two pads, the same way the trig view splits its sixteen steps:

• Your LHS pad’s row 8 edits steps 1–8.
• Your RHS pad’s row 8 edits steps 9–16.

Both players reach all sixteen steps this way, and both are editing the same pattern.

Cells use the same trig-status palette as trig view: ON, OFF, TRIGMUTE, PERCENTAGE_CHANCE, MOD1/2/4/8/16, INVMOD4/8/16, SUS_START, SUS_HOLD. The current playhead within the pattern is drawn with the positioner colour.

How To Play

1. Pick an octave with the LaunchControl: hold MUTE and press that sequencer’s button on the top row to go up, or on the bottom row to go down (see LaunchControl bottom row). The keyboard octave runs 0 to +8 and is remembered per sequencer.
2. Press an LP key in rows 1–7. The key holds its scale degree in the current key and scale, shifted by the octave you picked. Nothing sounds on the press itself: the note waits for the next active step of the gate pattern.
3. Hold the key. The note stays held until you release it.
4. Author the trig pattern with row 8 (steps 1–16). On active pattern steps the engine fires every currently-held note; on inactive steps it stays silent. Releasing the key drops that note from the gate immediately.

Both players, and both LPs of one player, play into the same set of held notes. If the same note is pressed from two different buttons it only stops when the last of them is released.

Freeze lock / unlock

The pad at row 7, column 8 (the one key row 7 gives up) toggles a shared freeze lock:

• First press (unlocked → locked): latches the current gate state.
• Second press (locked → unlocked): clears jam-keyboard gates/holds and sends all-notes-off for this jam sequencer.
• Pressing a new keyboard note while locked also unlocks first, then starts a fresh live hold state.

Freeze state persists across view changes and top-row trig edits.

Trig-pattern editing modifiers

Row 8 edits respect the LaunchControl XL modifier held at the moment of press, the same way the trig view does:

Those last two are the only whole-view gestures here. They do not act on the step you pressed: any row-8 press with the modifier held rewrites all sixteen steps at once, and there is no undo. SHIFT+MUTE also clears jam-keyboard freeze and holds and sends all-notes-off scoped to this jam sequencer (not a global panic).

Trig-pattern rotation

When the jam-keyboard view is active, the LaunchControl left/right arrows rotate the 16-step jam-keyboard trig pattern in place:

• left arrow shifts the pattern one step left with wraparound.
• right arrow shifts the pattern one step right with wraparound.

This path is intentionally destructive for the runtime jam pattern rather than a saved offset model; the jam-keyboard trig pattern is not session-persistent. SHIFT + MUTE / SHIFT + SOLO + arrow are ignored here. Use the row-8 grid gestures above to reset or randomise the jam pattern.

Behaviour Notes

• No persistent musical state. Note gates and the trig pattern exist only at runtime, so there is nothing to save per project. Reset and randomise still work. They clear or random-fill the 16-step gate pattern, as the modifier table above describes and Reset and randomise records. But nothing they touch outlives the session.
• Shared state across players. Both players share one set of held notes and one trig pattern. P1 and P2 cannot run independent patterns or note sets on the jam keyboard.
• Note-off path is always honoured, even when the view is not active for a player. This prevents stuck notes if a player navigates away mid-press. Note-ons are checked by view-active.
• Scale awareness. Changing the global key or scale retunes future presses immediately, but notes you are already holding keep their original pitch until you release them.

Cross-References

• Reset and randomise: JAM_KEYBOARD’s row-8 reset and randomise, in the full per-view matrix.

• Selecting sequencers and views

  how to bring the jam keyboard onto an LP.

• LaunchControl modifier buttons: LaunchControl modifier states used by the trig-pattern editor.