Arc

The Arc tab draws the phrase: how the sound changes across several bars, in step with the transport. An LFO repeats every cycle and automation has to be drawn per track. The arc is one canvas for the whole phrase, and a wander rides on it so no pass repeats the one before, while the same bar still plays the same way on every playback.

The arc is drawn in the standalone only. The plugin plays it once you load the patch it was saved in. See The plugin.

Lanes

One lane per destination: Shape, Tone, Drive, Motion and Spread. Pick a lane to draw on it. Each lane keeps its own colour on the picker and on the canvas.

The phrase length

The slider at the right of the lane picker sets how many whole bars the phrase lasts. Longer phrases change more slowly and take longer to come round.

The canvas

Drag to draw the selected lane. The centre line is where the destination's own setting sits. Drawing above it opens the destination up during that part of the phrase; drawing below closes it down.

What the canvas shows, back to front:

• The bar lines, so the phrase reads as a musical length.
• The other lanes' drawings, dimmed. A lane's line is as thick as its Depth, so how the phrase is spread across the destinations reads off the picture. A lane with no depth is dashed: it is there to draw on, but it moves nothing.
• The next pass, as a faint trace, and this pass, in the lane's colour. They differ because the wander carries on from one pass to the next.
• Your drawing, on top, because it is what the pointer edits.
• The playhead.

When a stroke starts behind the playhead, the phrase plays again from the start of the bar the stroke began in, so you hear the change straight away.

If anything is drawn while Drift is full, the canvas says so: at full drift the drawing is not played.

Amount

How much of the phrase reaches the destinations at all. At zero nothing moves, whatever the lanes say. Turned up, every lane moves as far as its Depth allows.

Depth

How much of the phrase reaches the selected lane's destination, under Amount. Its line on the canvas is drawn as thick as this. In a new patch Spread has no depth, so the phrase leaves the stereo image alone until you turn it up.

Drift

How much of the wander rides on the drawing. Turned down, the phrase plays exactly what you drew and loops it. Turned up, the wander takes over. At full drift the drawing is ignored and every lane follows the same wander, set apart only by their depths.

The wander follows song position, so it never repeats within a song and still plays the same way every time the song does. A bounce matches what you heard.

The readout

Below the sliders, the selected destination's setting and where the phrase has it at the playhead, in the destination's own units: Hz for Tone, and the setting's value for the others.

Clear, Rise and Swell

Replace the selected lane's drawing: Clear empties it, Rise is a ramp across the phrase, Swell rises and falls back. The phrase then plays from the top, since a preset is a whole phrase.