Session mode

Session mode provides access to broad control over the playback and configuration of the 8 tracks, and it’s also the prettiest mode. Each track is displayed across its own row with the position of the playhead indicated by the brighter light, and any skipped beats indicated by not being lit at all.

The simplest interaction in session mode is to press any pad, which will queue the sequence to start playing from the beginning of that beat, or jump the playhead there immediately if the sequence is already playing. By holding shift, you can queue a sequence to play on beat, as described in playback submode. An important fact is that on-beat queueing only works for sequences that aren’t already playing. If a sequence is playing it jump immediately regardless of the shift button.

##Clock Division

When you hold the click button in session mode, you’ll see the first column of pads light up white. This indicates the clock division. Clock division can be set independently for each sequence to any value from 1 to 8. The clock that is being divided is the global tempo clock, NOT the master track’s clock, so slowing down the master track will not slow the others down even more. Playback Reverse Holding undo while pressing a pad will switch that sequence’s play direction between forward and reverse.

##Note Clear

By holding delete and pressing a pad the notes in a selected beat can be deleted. This deletes any notes within the 4 step range from the sequence and they can’t be brought back.

##Beat Skipping

Using the quantise button rather than the delete button will set a section of steps to be skipped. The notes are still in the sequence, but the playhead will jump over them and immediately begin playing the next enabled step when it encounters skipped notes. This can be used to create sequences in different time signatures. Be wary of setting tons of notes to be skipped because every step, the track has to search for the next enabled note and it gets slower the further it has to search. This warning especially applies when you have many linked sequences (see below).

##Copy/Paste

The duplicate button is used for copy+paste. Hold duplicate and press a row. You’ll see half of the row start to blink white to indicate that it is in the clipboard. Each track has 2 clipboard slots, divided into the left half of the row and the right half. The left half is the “live” sequence, the notes that are currently playing. The right half is the storage bank, which is not played, but can be used to store not data that you want to save for later.

Once you have a flashing row, press another row (left or right side) to copy the note data into that slot. Only the notes will be copied, not other properties of the sequence, like layout/transpose settings, midi channel, etc. When a track is selected it stays in the clipboard until the duplicate button is released, so one track can quickly be copied into multiple destinations.

If you hold shift while pressing duplicate, you will initiate a swap operation rather than a copy/paste. Swaps are shown by blue flashing pads rather than the normal white. A swap copies the data from the source to the target and from the target to the source so that no data is lost.

##Supersequences

Double is a very important button: it allows you to make sequences longer than the normal length. While double is held, pressing a row sets it to be linked to the sequence below (“doubling” its length (or tripling etc.)). The pads of the second sequence will turn the color of the first sequence to indicate that it has become a “sub” sequence. Subsequences are no longer in control of their playhead, so they can’t be used independently. Think of it as losing the linked sequence entirely, and creating one extra long supersequence that behaves mostly like a normal sequence.

Jump to pad, note skipping, note deleting, and clock dividing should work like normal, and will use the supersequence’s settings. Pressing the play button of a subsequence will not make that sequence start playing anymore, it will make the supersequence’s playhead jump to the beginning of the selected row. Sequence copying, however, still works on a row-by-row basis rather than copying an entire group of linked sequences at once.

##Sequence Transposing

In session mode, the transpose buttons also work as modifiers. By holding a transpose button (either octave, or half-step), and pressing a row, that whole sequence will be transposed by the selected amount. Try using this in conjunction with sequence copying to create chords!