short-header

Note arps

Note arps store an 8-step pitch pattern per row of a sequencer’s arpeggiator. Each row’s pattern plays back at its own length (1–8) and its own position, looped against the live major / minor scale tables. The note-arp view is where you edit those pitches: select a row and step on the overview pad, then press a key on the other pad to write a pitch into that slot.

What this view is really for

We call this view arps, but it isn’t really. It’s more a stepped modulation sequencer for pitch: each row holds a list of notes, and every time that row’s trigger fires it plays the next note in the list. Nothing here advances on the clock, it advances on triggers, and that is where all of the flexibility comes from.

Even with octave trees, eight fixed notes can make a pattern feel a bit stale. Octave trees allow you to shift a row up or down by hand, whereas note arps shift it automatically, to any note within a four octave range.

By default the list for each row holds one note, chosen such that the eight rows form a scale. This view allows you to extend that list to include up to 8 notes in any order, including rests.

Put a trig on every step and you get an arpeggiation effect, which is where the name came from. But the more interesting uses are the sparse ones, because the length of the list and the length of the pattern are independent of one another. A pattern with four trigs playing the same note can be turned into something that is constantly evolving by giving that row a three step arp, as three notes against four trigs takes twelve trigs, or three bars, to come back round to where it started. Pick lengths that don’t divide into each other and a two bar loop can take the best part of a minute to repeat itself.

Two further consequences are worth holding on to:

Try this first

Start with a row that already has trigs on it, so you can hear the arp move.

  1. Open the note-arp view and press the bottom-left pad of the LHS overview. That selects row 1, step 1.
  2. Hold SHIFT and press column 3 on that same row. The row’s arp is now three steps long, and three lit pads say so.
  3. Press step 2 on the overview to select it, then press a key on the RHS keyboard. That pitch is written into step 2.
  4. Do the same for step 3.

The row now walks three pitches, advancing one place every time its trig fires. Give the row four trigs and it takes three bars to come back round.

To move faster, hold MUTE and press a pad on the overview instead: that writes a ready-made figure to all eight rows at once. Set your lengths first, because a figure does not set them.

What you see on the Launchpads

LHS (LP1 for P1, LP3 for P2): pattern overview

An 8×8 grid showing every row of the arpeggiator at once.

RHS (LP2 for P1, LP4 for P2): keyboard editor

A piano-keyboard-style editor for the row currently selected by that player.

A note-arp view: the LP LHS's first column is red on every row, with runs of two, five and three coloured pads on three of them; the LP RHS shows eight visible slate-grey keyboard anchors and three adjacent pitches lit red, orange and mustard along the bottom A note-arp view: the LP LHS's first column is red on every row, with runs of two, five and three coloured pads on three of them; the LP RHS shows eight visible slate-grey keyboard anchors and three adjacent pitches lit red, orange and mustard along the bottom, photographed on the hardware

Three rows have been extended past their single default note, to lists of three, five and two. The LP LHS is the overview, with one colour per slot so you can count a length without reading a number. The LP RHS is the keyboard for the selected three-note row. Its three pitches overpaint one of the nine baseline slate landmarks, leaving eight visibly slate.

The gestures

Select a slot, then write a pitch

Editing is two presses, on the two pads.

1. Select a slot on the LHS overview. Column is the step (1–8), row is the arp row (1 at the bottom of the pad up to 8 at the top). Every press selects, whatever you are holding, so you never have to let go of a modifier to move focus. The LHS does not visibly change; the RHS redraws as the keyboard for the newly selected row.

2. Write a pitch on the RHS keyboard. You do not hold anything: the selection stays put until you move it. The key’s grid position resolves to a pitch in the current scale, with octave offsets built into the layout (4 octaves across the 8×8 grid). Position 88, the bottom-right pad, is the rest pad and clears that step to silence. Keys outside the 4-octave layout are ignored.

P1 and P2 each have their own selected row, selected step and cached key position, so both can edit different rows of the same sequencer at once without overwriting each other.

Set a row’s length

Each row has its own arp length, from 1 to 8 steps, set from the LHS overview:

Rows beyond the new length go dark immediately, and the engine wraps the playback cursor to the new length on its next step.

Write a preset figure

Holding MUTE and pressing the LHS overview writes one of 56 arpeggio figures to all eight rows of the sequencer, or resets the sequencer to init.

Row picks the mode; column picks the interval; column 1 is reset-to-init. 8 rows × 7 intervals = 56 preset pads, plus 8 reset pads (one per row, all in col 1).

              col 1    col 2     col 3     col 4    col 5    col 6    col 7      col 8
row 8  UP              seconds_  thirds_   fourths_ fifths_  sixths_  sevenths_  octaves_   ← LP top
row 7  DOUBLE_UP       _up suffix on each interval
row 6  UP_PEDAL        _up_pedal_tone suffix
row 5  DOUBLE_UP_PEDAL _double_up_pedal_tone
row 4  DOUB_DOWN_PEDAL _double_down_pedal_tone
row 3  DOWN_PEDAL      _down_pedal_tone
row 2  DOUBLE_DOWN     _double_down
row 1  DOWN            _down suffix                                                          ← LP bottom
       (reset to
        init)

Intervals: seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths and octaves. Modes: up, double up, up with a pedal tone, double up with a pedal tone, double down with a pedal tone, down with a pedal tone, double down, and down. Every combination is reachable from the 8×7 grid.

A press on cols 2–8 rewrites all eight rows of that sequencer, so it changes what you hear as well as what lights up. The pressed pad flashes lime-yellow for about a second to confirm, and the flash cancels if you switch sequencers part-way through.

Two things to know before you press one:

Reset, and getting back

Col 1 of the preset grid resets the sequencer to init. It writes the canonical diatonic cascade to all 8 rows, zeroes every row’s length, and redraws the keyboard overlay to match.

This is the one destructive gesture on the view, and it clears every row’s length as well as its notes. Every other preset leaves your lengths alone. There is no undo here, so save the session first if you might want the old arps back.

SHIFT + MUTE and SHIFT + SOLO, which reset and randomise elsewhere, are not bound on this view at all (see Reset and randomise).

Scale mode

Switch the global scale between major and minor and every note arp moves with it. What you hear afterwards depends on how each note got there:

The keyboard overlay does not move: it shows scale degrees, so the lit pads stay where they are and only the sound changes. The change appears straight away, with nothing to re-press.

Where each note came from

MSEQ remembers how every step was authored, which is what lets the rule above work:

Step Behaviour on a scale change
Played from the keyboard, or from a preset or reset Follows the new scale
A pitch that is not in the saved scale, recognised when a session loads Keeps its pitch
A rest, set with the rest pad at the bottom right of the RHS Stays a rest

This survives saving and loading, so a session reopened months later still knows which notes were deliberate outsiders.

Diatonic mode

With the chord-adjustment selector on Diatonic (see Chords and scales), chord progressions and moving note arps both stay strictly in scale. Notes kept as deliberate outsiders are the exception: they plane chromatically as before.

Reference

What a figure is made of

A figure is generated on the press from five things: the interval (how far apart the notes are), the direction, whether each note is doubled, whether there is a pedal tone, and the row you are writing to. Nothing about a figure is stored anywhere, so the notes you hear, the pads that light and the degrees the session saves are all the same piece of data and cannot disagree.

Pads and duplicates

Most degrees appear on two or three pads of the RHS keyboard. When the overlay is rebuilt, a cell keeps whichever pad it already holds as long as that pad still means the right degree, so a pad you chose by hand stays chosen. A cell that disagrees is re-lit on the candidate nearest its neighbour, which is what makes a generated figure read as a diagonal instead of a run along the bottom.

The overlay is display state and is not saved with the session, so after a load the pads come back in their canonical positions while the notes are exactly as you left them.

The length picker in detail

Every LHS press updates the selection first, whatever modifier is held, so focus never waits on your hands. The length write then fires on top of that in two cases: a SHIFT press, or an unmodified double-tap.

The double-tap arms a 350 ms window on the first press. A second press of the same cell inside that window commits the write, provided it is at least 40 ms after the first, which rejects switch bounce. Pressing a different cell during the window re-arms on the new cell instead.

Modifiers other than SHIFT behave like this:

When the editor redraws

The editor refreshes whenever the selected row or step changes, a pitch is written, the global scale changes, a preset or reset fires, or the engine advances the arp position, so the playing cursor tracks playback live.

Limitations

Cross-References