genpad

The idea here is to have some handy popups that can be controlled with a few keys (mostly just the arrows) to offer a sort of gamepad like control-scheme (although the tool doesn’t respond to actual gamepad inputs out-of-the-box).

Provides key-bindings under Tools in both the Pattern Editor and Phrase Editor, they can also be launched from the right-click context menu inside each editor. Look for entries named as genpad - [name-of-pad].

There are a few different pads available in this tool, all of them serving a somewhat singular function

• chorder - fast chord input method using harmonic intervals
• euclidean - spread notes and hits based on equal distribution algorithm
• bars - length and time signature helper for patterns
• glider - generate glide commands based on note lengths

chorder #

Create chords faster by stacking intervals.

usage #

• Launch chorder from the pattern or phrase editor
• Press Right to stack notes a consonant interval apart from the last note
• Press Left to do the same but for dissonant intervals
• Up and Down will change the selected intervals and the last note as well, the currently active intervals will be displayed at the bottom of the window.
• Backspace will remove a note

Consonant intervals include major and perfect intervals while dissonant intervals include minor or diminished intervals. This allows you to quickly type out chords of different qualities using combos as if your were in a fighting game.

🥷 For example…

• pluck a major seventh chord by doing ➡️ ⬅️ ➡️
• or bath in a minor seventh with ⬅️ ➡️ ⬅️
• go far out with a dominant seventh sharp nine by executing ➡️ ⬅️ ⬅️ ➡️ ⬆️
• or spam the circle of fifths with ➡️ ⬆️ ⬆️ ➡️ ➡️ ➡️ ➡️ ➡️ …

You can also access different functions to modify your chord further by holding down Shift or Control/Command

holding shift #

• Left and Right will move the bottom note up - and the top note down - an octave (or more if the same note already exist at that octave)
• Up and Down will shift the entire chord by octaves (or semitones if you hold down Control as well as Shift)

holding control #

• Left and Right will select the previous or next note in the chord (displayed with a * sign at the top), you can use Backspace to delete the currently selected note
• Up and Down will transpose the selected note

play and retrigger #

Only relevant in the Pattern Editor

If playing the edited pattern on loop to listen to your chord isn’t enough, you can somewhat preview the edited notes by playing the pattern from the currently edited line with by holding down Space (playback is stopped when you let go). Unfortunately, notes will be dropped sometimes.

You can also toggle retrigger mode with Shift + Space, this will automatically retrigger the pattern whenever you add or modify notes.

euclidean #

Generate euclidean rhythms from a set of notes in a pattern or a phrase.

usage #

• Have some notes in a pattern or a phrase
• Launch the euclidean genpad.
• Select parameters using the Up and Down arrow
• Adjust them by pressing Left or Right (hold Ctrl/Command for bigger steps)
• The pattern will be continuously changed while you are adjusting
• Press Enter or bounce around when you are happy

You can start from a single note or multiple notes, you can even use chords or a mix of single notes and chords. These notes will be collected when you launch the genpad and will be used as a note-pool to fill your pulses. If there are less notes in the pool than pulses you picked, they will be repeated over and over.

You can select a range inside the pattern to only generate the rhythm there, if you haven’t selected anything or only selected a single line, the rhythm will be generated over the entire pattern.

parameters #

rhythm #

• pulses - the number of pulses to distribute over the selected steps
• steps - how many steps to distribute the pulses over
• rotate - rotate the generated pulse-rhythm across the steps
• offset - rotate the resulting rhythm by a line offset in the pattern

notes #

• cycle - cycle the pattern of notes you have (if you only selected a single note or the same one multiple times, this parameter will have no effect on the output)
• repeats - number of times to use each note from your note-pool, for example if you have notes C, E, B and set repeats to 2 the pattern will contain notes as C, C, E, E, B, B

swing #

• swing - the amount of swing to apply to pulses that fall into the swing-window
• size - how many lines to repeat the swing pattern over, by default this should match your LPB
• window - where to start applying the swing inside the size, for example if you have 4 lines-per-beat with a swing size of 4, a window of 2 will mean the swing amount will be applied to lines 3 and 4 in each beat
• shift - shift the swing-window around to swing different parts of the beat

delay #

• delay - apply a uniform delay to every generated note
• snap - by default the generated notes will be quantized to lines, if you want actual equal distribution of pulses you can switch this to none and have wonky rhythms

You can reset each parameter to the default value using Backspace.

bars #

Manage the timing of your patterns from a dialog that can create new patterns with length based on beats and bars. If you want, it can write FX commands for you as well to change BPM, LPB, TPL, it might even make you BFF with odd time signature changes.

usage #

• Open the pad using the key-binding you’ve set up
• Select fields with Up and Down
• Set values with Left and Right (hold ctrl/command for coarse stepping)
• Press Enter to apply your parameters

parameters #

• beats - how many beats you want to have in the pattern
• bars - each bar will have the previous number of beats inside it
• LPB mode select what to do with the lines-per-beat value
  • keep - no ZL command will be written, the pattern will play at your current LPB
  • edit - a ZLxx command will be inserted into the first line of the master track
• n lines - becomes available on edit LPB, it affects how many lines each beat has
• BPM mode select what to do with your pattern’s beats-per-minute setting
  • keep - no ZT command will be written, the pattern will play at your current BPM
  • edit - a ZTxx command will be inserted into the first line of the master track
  • calc - same as edit but lets you pick a new BPM based on an integer ratio, useful for metric modulation
• n beats - set your desired new BPM value
• * x, / y - these lines will only appear on calc BPM mode, they will let you pick values to calculate the new BPM with the equation BPM * (x / y)
• TPL mode select what to do with the ticks-per-line setting
  • keep - no ZK command will be written, the pattern will play at your current TPL
  • edit - a ZKxx command wil be inserted into the first line of your master track
• n ticks - avalaible when edit TPL is set, use it to pick the desired TPL
• n patterns - select how many new patterns to insert after your current pattern with the settings you have chosen
  • to modify the current pattern, set this to zero. edit pattern will appear and no new pattern will be created when pressing Enter.

odd meters and fractional beats #

In case you wanted to use fractional beats (like 3.5 to achieve a 7/8 rhythm while keeping beats as quarter notes), you can hold down Shift while stepping the beats parameter. This lets you to pick from all proper fractions based on the selected LPB value.

If you want to know what fraction you need to achieve a certain time signature, you can divide your beat value (the denominator in the time signature) by 4, then divide your beats (from the time signature) by the result.

For example to solve for 7/8

Quarter = 8 / 4 = 2
Beats = 7 / Quarter = 3.5

So you’d pick 3 + 1/2 for beats.

Or for 13/16

Quarter = 16 / 4 = 4
Beats = 13 / Quarter = 3.25

Gets you 3 + 1/4 for beats.

Unfortunately, your line highlight in these cases will be disconnected from the actual beats after the first bar. One workaround is to set the Pattern highlight in your Song Options to the length of your bar or to only use patterns containing a single bar.

You could also just set the number of beats based on the numerator in your time signature (for example 7 for 7/8) but then you’d also need to double your BPM if you wanted to keep quarter notes as 1 beat. Unfortunately the ZT command to set the tempo only allows for BPMs up to 255, so if you do this you will not be able to change tempo mid-song and whatever effect you use that relies on BPM will have to be adjusted accordingly.

glider #

brought to you by @icasiino

A pad that generates glide commands (-Gxx) that arrive at your note in a desired number of lines. You need to launch it from a note that has a previous note in the pattern and the pad will fill up the sample FX column with the calculated glide commands.

parameters #

• lines - how many lines should the glide take up (between 1 and the length of the note)
• steps - how many steps to distribute the necessary glides onto (by default this is the same as lines, when lowered, an euclidean pattern will be used for equal distribution)
• remainder - often the exact glide value needed is not divisible by the number of lines you select (which is why there is always a -GFF inserted at the end of glides), you can choose to spread the remainder across steps or drop it. The effects of the choice won’t be audible in most cases, but drop is there if you want the glide to be completely uniform.

usage #

The pad will have different start settings depending on where you are launching it from (you can still change the settings while it’s open of course)

• From the exact line of the note you want to glide: it will cover the entire duration of the note
• Further down from inside the note: it will glide until that line

vim keys for all pads #

If you are using vim or just don’t like arrows keys, you can also use the H J K L (⬅️ ⬇️ ⬆️ ➡️) keys to navigate, and X instead of Backspace.

download v0.4.1 #