MPE Insight User Guide

Keyboard

A piano display of 88, 61, 49 or 25 keys (set via Keyboard Range in Global Settings), showing all active notes in real time. Each active key is highlighted in the colour of its MPE channel. Pressure is shown as fill intensity, and a Pitch Bend ring around each key visualises the current deviation in cents.

Keyboard Play Mode: Click or touch any key to send real MPE notes out. Horizontal position controls Pitch Bend; vertical position controls Pressure (upward) or CC74 Timbre (downward).

Pixel Grid: An eighth style, a from-above LED grid in three layouts: Piano (a dotted key silhouette, black keys read darker at rest), Fingerboard (equal-width semitone columns, no key shapes) and Accordion (the chromatic button accordion's field: three rows, a minor third per step along a row, neighbouring rows a semitone apart, so an interval spans the same distance in every key and an octave is four columns). Two combinable switches, Glow Trail and Splash (fires above an adjustable velocity threshold), plus its own Density (LED count) and Pixel Size controls, separate from the global Size slider.

Microtonal is a design and a playing mode in one, and it brings its own Tuning group with five scales. Quarter Tones (24-EDO) is the split-key one: every key gains a second, terraced field a quarter tone above its front field, so all 24 steps per octave are visible and playable on screen. The other four put one scale step on every key, the 1:1 mapping a Scala file assumes: 12 Equal is the plain twelve, Just Intonation is a 5-limit tuning, Equal Steps divides the octave into any number from 2 to 96, and Custom takes a list of cents and ratios with the period last, typed into the field or loaded from a .scl Scala file. The Root is the anchor key: it sounds its own 12-EDO pitch and every other key counts steps from it, so a 19-step scale repeats after 19 keys rather than after twelve. Reference is the concert pitch of A4, anywhere from 390 to 493 Hz, so the whole keyboard can sit at 415 for a baroque ensemble or wherever your group tunes; it is a constant shift rather than a step of the scale, which is why it applies to 12 Equal and Quarter Tones as well. Every key then carries a small gauge above its octave label showing how far it sits from 12-EDO at 440, scale and reference together, and the gauge widens its full scale with them, so the mark never runs out of groove. On-screen play strikes exact steps (a drag walks the terraces instead of gliding), and the tuning leaves the app as well: a key played with the mouse or the typing keys carries its offset in its own pitch bend, and a note arriving from your controller is retuned on its channel, so a synth downstream sounds the scale you picked. Hardware pitch bend itself stays continuous and glides the performance dot straight through the steps.

Settings: Nine visual designs (Classic, Glass, Neon, Minimal, Dark, Fingerboard, Motion, Pixel Grid, Microtonal) with per-design colours (Fingerboard stripe, Motion wave pair, Pixel Grid unlit/lit LED) · Tuning on the Microtonal design (scale, steps per octave, a cents or ratio list with .scl import, root, reference pitch) · pressure colour mapping (Low → High or Static, with adjustable intensity) · Fill Level (pressure fills the key from the bottom up like a meter) · Hand split (a separate colour pair for the left hand below an adjustable split point) · Brightness Ring for CC74 (min / max colours or static, intensity and size) · Key Light (Light, Shadow, Dim: light spilling across the key bed, shadows cast by the black keys, and a dimmer over the whole bed) · Transparent BG. The bend ring around each key reads the instrument's own range automatically, see Bend range.

CASCADE · Note Rain

A piano-roll-style note-rain visualiser that sits above the Keyboard display. Three note sources feed the same canvas: Live MPE: notes are born at the strike line and travel away from it (rising or falling), pitch bend drifts each note sideways and channel pressure blends its colour; any .mid file played by the global 🎞 MIDI File player in the toolbar, arriving exactly like live input; and CASCADE's own Play a Picture, which turns a picture, a drawing or plain text into a note rain, no keys needed.

Play a Picture: Three tabs: Image (threshold, detail, invert, original colours, keep aspect, with an Auto button that tunes the threshold for you), Draw (a small sketch pad with colour palette) and Text (typed words become falling glyphs, case and line breaks are kept). Image and drawing pixels map to notes through a scale (Chromatic, Major, Minor, pentatonics, Blues, modes …), root note and tempo. ▶ Play bakes the source into CASCADE's own scrolling transport (play / pause / stop / seek / loop), and ⭳ Export .mid saves the generated notes as a Standard MIDI File, all notes on channel 1, nothing dropped even for dense text, ready for your DAW or synth.

Render modes: Eight independent layers, freely combinable, Bars (classic solid bars / ribbons), Particles (dissolve into a drifting particle cloud), Lightning (notes as crackling electric bolts), Code Rain (falling code-rain glyph columns), Plasma (breathing energy columns), Waveform (an oscilloscope trace whose wavelength follows pitch and amplitude follows pressure, CC74 adding harmonic bite), Vines (growing tendrils that thicken with pressure as leaves unfurl along the note) and Stars (constellations of star nodes that weave webs between chords and twinkle with pressure, with an adjustable star shape). Four Render-Mode sliders (Opacity · Roundness · Amount · Size) act on every active layer at once.

Settings: Flow direction (up / down) and speed · note gradient (driven by Pressure or Velocity) with CC74-timbre and glow colour, or a Step driver that moves one slot along a named palette with every note played, so a run of notes arrives in clearly different colours and a chord fans out across them · hand split (a separate gradient per hand from a split point) · note texture fills (noise, lines, diamond, glass, chrome, outline or a custom image) · pitch-bend shift, its bend range on Auto by default with fixed values available as a display zoom for making small bends legible (see Bend range) · octave gridlines · a beat and bar grid locked to the incoming MIDI clock (from a DAW or the MIDI File player, so you can see whether a note landed on the beat) · optional sustain pedal note length, where a pedalled note keeps drawing until the pedal lifts instead of ending with the key · impact effects on landing (glow flash, sparks, ripple, fountain, firework, flames, water geyser, rain, lightning, vortex), ten independent layers that combine as freely as the render modes do, with Amount and Size acting on every armed one at once, and an Own color switch that gives every armed layer one shared colour instead of the colour of the note that set it off · a glow bar along the strike edge with six motion styles (Aurora drift, Wave, Flames, Weed, Bubbles, Sparks) · atmosphere layers: background colour or image with Transparent BG, background FX (motes, aurora, nebula, fireflies, starfield, light rays), note trails (comet, stardust, ribbon, bubbles, embers) and keyboard fog · playful game modes (retro block grid, alien shooter) · post-effects such as bloom, god rays and smear.

PB / Mod

Displays the Master Pitch Bend and Mod Wheel from the MIDI Master Channel (channel 1). Three display styles: Classic (two vertical sliders), Radial (circular dial) and the Expression Pad, a stack of tilting rings that reads Pressure and CC74 instead of the wheels, taking the strongest of the per-note values and the zone-wide one, so it keeps reading with nothing held. All three are colour-configurable; in the pad the two pickers colour the CC74 and Pressure rings, and a Plates slider takes the rings from hairlines to solid discs. The wheel styles never convert: they show the raw master pitch-bend position, so full deflection is full deflection whatever range the instrument reports (see Bend range).

In Mouse Mode the tile plays. The wheel styles send Master Pitch Bend (sideways) and Mod Wheel (up) relative to wherever you press; the Expression Pad sends real Channel Pressure (up) and CC74 (sideways) to every sounding note, or zone-wide when nothing is held, and both values spring back to zero when you let go. While your hand is down it dominates: a note that starts under it is given the held value at once rather than at the next mouse move, and when the last note ends the zone-wide value takes it over, so the reading stays where you put it instead of jumping back to rest. A note that is already fading keeps the shape the hand gave it. Letting go zeroes only what the pad itself wrote last: where your controller has since sent pressure or timbre on that channel, the instrument has the channel back and the pad leaves it alone.

Expression Overview

One module, five ways to see the same expression data. Expression Overview tracks up to 10 signal sources, by default Pitch Bend, CC74 Brightness, Velocity, Pressure and Release Velocity, each in its own freely chosen colour. The View menu at the top of the settings switches between two time-based views (Lines, 3D Box) that plot every source over a configurable window, and three current-moment views (Radar, Landscape 3D, Rack) that show where each source sits right now. Radar and Landscape 3D were the separate "Expression Breakdown" module in earlier versions; they now live here as modes.

Lines draws a flat chart of the last 5-30 seconds (default 10): bipolar signals such as Pitch Bend are centred on a dashed zero line, unipolar ones grow from the bottom edge. 3D Box lifts the same history into a slowly swaying perspective box, time runs along the box, each source gets its own depth lane, and every signal leaves a glowing trajectory whose bright endpoint marks the live value.

Radar spans a spider mesh across the sources (at least 3): a filled polygon updates in real time, its colour mixed from the most active axes, and each axis label shows the signed value while the shape uses the magnitude.

Landscape 3D turns the same values into a static 3D terrain: every source owns a fixed anchor point on the mesh, and its live value raises a smooth mound there, Pitch Bend can also dig below the surface. Mounds widen as they grow and blend softly where they overlap, glowing peak dots carry each source's name and value, and a spectral height ramp colours valley to summit, with fast attack and slow release, so hits land instantly and fade gently. A slow camera sway adds parallax while the terrain itself stays put.

Rack drops the curves entirely and draws each source as the piece of studio gear you already read it by. A value you set gets a control, a value that happens gets a meter, and every row lets you overrule that: Auto, Knob, Meter or Bar, the bar new in this release, so a source you want to read at a glance can be a bar even where the automatic would have drawn a knob: Pitch Bend and CC10 Pan appear as knobs with a centre detent, resting straight up and swinging either way, while Pressure, Velocity, Release Velocity and both Aftertouches appear as channel-strip meters filling from the bottom, each with a peak mark that holds for a moment and then falls, so a single strike stays readable instead of flashing past. CC74, the Mod Wheel and any other CC are positions too, so they get knobs. The elements arrange themselves into a grid that fits the panel and drop their readouts, then their names, as the module gets smaller. Unlike Radar and Landscape 3D this mode works from a single source.

Pitch Bend always reads in real semitones (e.g. +2.00 st). With several channels bending at once the scale follows whichever one is contributing the largest swing, at the range that channel itself reported (see Bend range), so nothing has to be set by hand here.

Settings: View · sources (add / remove / recolour, up to 10, Radar and Landscape 3D need at least 3) · Time Window (5-30 s, Lines / 3D Box, greyed out in the current-moment modes) · Glow · Transparent BG · MIDI channel filter.

MIDI Stream Log

A real-time table of all incoming MIDI events (up to 250 entries, newest first). Columns: timestamp (with milliseconds) · message type · channel · note · value · raw hex bytes. Each message type is colour-coded, Note On green, Pitch Bend blue, CC orange, and so on. The most recent entry briefly flashes on arrival. The module's toolbar offers ⌫ Clear and ⭳ Export, which saves the visible rows as a .csv table in chronological order (oldest first, the opposite of the newest-first table on screen); both respect the module's MIDI channel filter (the master channel 1 always passes). Transparent BG is available here too.

Five views share the module, picked with the View menu at the top of the settings (the toolbar names the one that is showing). Events is that table. Notes is a voice ledger, Channels is a per-channel breakdown, Stats is the numbers, and Tracker writes the note stream the way a tracker column writes it. Each Log instance remembers its own view, so two Logs side by side can show two different views of the same stream, each with its own channel filter; the view is part of a saved stand, like every other module setting. Ten presets come in pairs, one pair per view: the plain panel, and the same view as a chrome-less overlay floating over the visual modules. ⌫ Clear and ⭳ Export belong to Events and Tracker, which read the same rows, and ↺ Reset to Stats and Channels, since both read the totals it zeroes; each button greys out on the views where it has nothing to do.

Message colours. Eight message types, one colour each, edited in the settings under Message Colours: click a swatch and pick, the way Expression Overview's sources work. One palette serves every view, so recolouring Pitch Bend moves the Events rows, the Channels band, the Stats line and the ledger together, and the two note colours carry the Tracker cells. Each Log instance keeps its own palette and it travels with a saved stand. CC74 starts on the same orange as the other controllers, so nothing looks different until you decide the timbre axis deserves its own colour, which is one click. ↺ Reset colours puts the whole palette back.

Events, the detail line. Click any row and the strip below the table writes that one message out in full: the decoded fields and the raw bytes side by side. A pitch bend reads as its signed value, its 14-bit number, its normalised position and its deflection in semitones at the range that channel reported, so the number the app is drawing with is visible next to the bytes that produced it. The selection follows the message, not the row it was on, so it survives the table filling up around it. With Transparent BG on, the table stops taking clicks and the strip says so.

Notes, the voice ledger. One row per sounding voice, in the order the keys were struck: status, note, channel, velocity, pressure, bend in semitones, CC74 and a running duration. This is not a second reading of the wire, it is what the app believes: the same voice list Keyboard, Grand Staff, CASCADE and FORGE draw from, so a note that looks wrong on screen can be checked as a number here. A finished note stays for three seconds, greyed, with its release velocity if the controller sent one, which is the only way a staccato run is readable at all. Bend is written with two decimals, so a quarter-tone reads +0.50 and a sixteenth-tone is still distinct from it.

Channels. Sixteen rows, one per MIDI channel, always in channel order: a bar showing how much traffic that channel carried since the last reset, measured against the busiest channel, then what it is holding right now, note, bend, pressure and CC74. The bar is split into coloured bands, so its length says how much and its bands say of what: notes, pitch bend, pressure (channel and poly aftertouch together) and CC74, with everything else in a fifth, quiet band. On an MPE zone that is the whole picture at a glance, a channel carrying notes and little else looks nothing like one carrying a note under a wall of pressure. The colours are the same ones the Events table uses for those message types, and a key sits under the table. A channel that is quiet, or that the channel filter is holding back, is greyed rather than removed.

Stats. Two blocks, kept apart because they measure different things. Now is the live spread across everything sounding: how many notes, over which channels, and the lowest to highest note, velocity, pressure, bend and timbre among them. It carries the weight of the two, since it is the answer most of the time, and in silence it reads as empty rather than freezing on the last value. Since reset, set apart below it, is the running total: how many messages of each kind, split by type and colour-coded like the Events table, plus the spans each value has travelled, with bend given both in semitones and as the raw 14-bit pair. ↺ Reset zeroes those totals for this Log only; it is a separate account from Clear, which empties the Events rows.

Tracker. The same rows Events shows, reduced to the notes and written the way a tracker column writes them: the time, the note as C-4 or C#4, the channel, and the velocity as two hex digits, with a release reading OFF. Newest first like Events, finished notes greyed. Nothing new is stored here, it is the same stream read through another lens, which is why ⌫ Clear and ⭳ Export act on this view as well.

Two things an instrument says about itself get their own line here, because they change how every module draws: Bend Range (RPN 0, see Bend range) and MPE Zone (the MPE Configuration Message). Many controllers announce both only when they power up or when their zone changes, so the line appears on connect rather than while you play, and this is the one place to check that it arrived at all.

Grand Staff

Five display modes share one engraving engine, picked with the View menu at the top of the settings. Now shows only the currently held notes, Time lets played notes scroll across the staves like a timeline, Flow turns them into expressive MPE ribbons, Weave leaves notation behind for a harmonic field, and Tab writes the performance as guitar tablature.

Classic notation on treble and bass clef staves. All currently held notes are shown with accidentals matching the selected key signature. An optional Pitch Bend Hook draws a curved arc from each notehead, up for positive bend, down for negative, scaled to the bend depth. Chord detection recognises triads, 6th/7th chords, sus/add chords, altered dominants (♭9/♯9/♯11/♯5/♭13), quartal voicings, polychords and 9th/11th/13th extensions from the currently held notes and labels them lead-sheet style, including slash-chord inversions (e.g. "C/E"). Anything with a real 7th is named by construction rather than looked up in a list, so an ordinary jazz voicing that no table anticipated still gets its proper name: C-E-B♭-A♭-D♭-F♯ reads C7♭9♯11♭13.

Time: the scrolling take on notation (the former Note Timeline module lives on here): every played note travels across the staves, so phrases stay readable after the moment has passed. Noteheads keep the pressure colour mapping (Low → High, or Static), an optional CC74 / Timbre colour blends in as a note brightens, and Hand split gives the left hand its own colour pair below a configurable split point.

Flow, notation becomes ribbons: each note draws a band at its pitch whose length is the duration, whose thickness follows velocity and pressure, and whose curve traces the pitch bend. True legato merges into one continuous line, an adaptive phrase break starts a new ribbon when a silence is long relative to your playing speed, and a voice-split threshold keeps two-handed playing in separate voices. Colours per voice (each melodic line keeps its colour) or by scale degree, with eight palettes from Spectrum to Beige, plus a soft glow halo and a gap bridge across small non-legato gaps.

Weave, harmony as a field: the staves disappear and pitch becomes a position on an interval field instead of a height on a line. One step to the right is a fifth, the two diagonals are the major and the minor third. Because the directions are fixed intervals, a chord turns into a shape: every major triad is the same upward triangle and every minor triad the same downward one, in every key, so quality reads before a single note has been named. Transposing moves that shape rather than redrawing it, and voice leading becomes distance, a cadence stays in one small area while a modulation visibly walks away from it. Each pitch class recurs across the field, and Field width decides how much of that repetition you see: fully zoomed in there is exactly one figure, centred, and pulling back scales the copies in one at a time until the whole field is a wallpaper of the same shape. Pitch bend climbs the field vertically, its trail as long as the interval it travels, whole octaves folded away (a node is a pitch class, so a bend of exactly an octave has arrived back where it started and a slow full sweep breathes out and back once per octave). An adjustable afterglow keeps released chords burning so the harmonic path of a whole phrase stays visible. Two looks share all of it. Instrument draws the field the way an instrument face is drawn: the lattice itself in hairlines, hard-edged marks lit from a single direction, the lowest note carrying a collar so inversions read on a field that has no octaves, colour reserved for what sounds right now while the recent past drains toward grey, and the chord name set small on the panel's own margin. Glow keeps the softer luminous rendering. Key gravity weighs the resting field toward the current key: at zero every position weighs the same, turned up the key's own notes grow and brighten, foreign ones sink away and the tonic becomes a marked anchor. Field width sets how much of the field fits across the panel, counted in steps, so the same setting means the same thing in a narrow tile and a wide one. Labels appear only on what actually sounds, as scale degrees (1, ♭3, 5), as sol-fa syllables or as note names, and step aside once the field gets too dense to read them. They are spelled, not looked up: the route a note took across the field is a spelling, so a raised fifth and a flattened sixth stay apart even though they are the same key, and the label can never contradict the chord symbol above it.

Tab, the performance as guitar tablature: six string lines with a scrolling history of everything played. Each note's string comes from its MIDI channel on an MPE guitar (with the channel order flippable for controllers that count the other way), or, from a keyboard, is solved automatically into a playable fingering of the currently sounding set. Tuning and capo are adjustable, with the capo marked in the gutter; a note that lands on an unplayable fret is shown in red rather than hidden, so the display never silently rewrites what you played. Notes struck close together read as one strummed grip, hammer-ons stay on their string, and let-ring notes move to free strings instead of cutting each other off. The sheet export prints tab lines along with the staves.

Notation: How the score is written is a set of choices rather than one house style. Note labels beside each notehead in Now read as the note name with its octave (C4, E♭3), as a degree of the key (1, ♭3, 5, which is Jianpu, cipher and Nashville numbers in one), as a movable-do sol-fa syllable (do, me, so), or not at all. Chord labels write the detected chord three ways: Symbol (Cm7, G/B) is the lead-sheet name it has always been, Roman (ii⁷, V⁶₅) is the numeral of the key with the inversion figures a harmony class writes, and Figured bass (B 6) is the bass note under the figures a continuo player reads. Noteheads stay Round or become Shape notes, the seven shapes of the singing-school books, one per degree of the key, so the head says the degree before its position on the staff does. All three spell by the key signature, so a label can never contradict the notehead it belongs to.

Chord diagrams: The detected chord can also be drawn as a fingering in a band above its symbol, in Now, in Time and on the printed sheet, for Guitar or Ukulele. It asks nothing of your instrument, the input is the notes you are holding: a chord book of the common open and moveable shapes answers first, and whatever it does not cover (a rootless voicing, a slash chord, an extension) goes to a solver that searches a four-fret window for the fullest, least stretched grip a hand can really hold, at most four fingers or a barre. On the guitar the lowest sounding string carries the bass; the ukulele is re-entrant and its own chord books ignore which tone lies lowest, so the diagram does too.

Settings: View (Now / Time / Flow / Weave / Tab; the Flow, Weave and Tab groups grey out outside their own view) · key signature (all major and minor keys) · note labels (name / degree / sol-fa / off) · chord labels (symbol / Roman / figured bass) · noteheads (round / shape notes) · Pitch Bend Hook · chord detection with label colour and chord diagram (off / guitar / ukulele) · note colours (pressure Low / High, Static, Hand split with own colour pair and split point) · CC74 / Timbre colour (Time mode) · Flow: phrase break, voice split, gap bridge, colour mode (Voice / Scale (key)) and palette, halo · Weave: look (Instrument / Glow), field width, afterglow, key gravity, triad fill, labels · Tab: strings (Auto (nearest fret) / MIDI channel), channel order (Ch 2 = low E / Ch 2 = high E), tuning (Standard EADGBE, Drop D, DADGAD, Open G) and capo · Glow · Transparent BG · MIDI channel filter.

Grand Staff's engraving also powers the lead-sheet export: record a take and render it as a complete paginated notation sheet, chord symbols included, saved as one PNG.

Aura

A generative real-time visualiser that maps MPE expression data to one of twenty-seven rendering styles, grouped into four families, Elements, Rings & Radial, Flow & Organic and Scenes. In every style, size, width and twist are independently routed to the MPE dimension of your choice. A Scenes highlight is Orrery: notes orbit a central ring by pitch class, with octaves as orbital depth, pressure, bend and timbre animate each note's glow, size and trail, and the rotation direction is switchable.

Styles

Elements

Rings & Radial

Flow & Organic

Scenes

Elements are GPU shader fields: Silk Flames is a flowing WebGL flame-silk field that ignites per note and reacts to pitch, and Photo Swarm turns a photo of your own into a GPU particle cloud that scatters per pitch column and heals back (with no photo it runs neutral in the background colour). Smoke breathes a fine ribbon of incense smoke out of every played key: the ribbon rises straight off its pitch, only starts curling higher up, leans with the bend and dissolves as it ages, and Base Speed keeps a single idle wisp wandering between phrases (at zero, silence stays empty). A hard strike blows the smoke apart in a circle around its key like a stone hitting water, and letting go pulls what was displaced visibly back in, reaching exactly as far as your velocity had sent it. In Flow & Organic, Filament is the one style that keeps what you played: a note plants a glowing seed at its pitch, and for exactly as long as you hold it a thread grows out of that seed, wanders, forks and fuses with whatever it touches, so a phrase grows into a single lit net instead of a scatter of shapes. The whole structure travels the entire time, which is why the frame never runs out of room: new growth appears at one end, the other thins into out-of-focus points and is gone. Base Speed steers that journey and is the character switch of the style: forward the net recedes and dissolves in the distance, backward it comes at you and dissolves as it sweeps past, at zero it stands still and simply piles up. Strike a note a good interval away from what is already standing and it starts its own colony instead of joining the old one, so wide leaps build separate bodies. Attack and Decay are lengths here rather than brightnesses: a long Attack has the thread creep out of its seed and pick up speed, a long Decay has it keep inching onward after you let go. The Width source is the master ignition, so pushing CC74 up lights every node that is still standing and the whole net comes back out of the dark, not just the growing tips. And Note Rotation winds the body around instead of nudging it: low notes turn it one way, high notes the other, and it stays where you turned it. In Scenes, Tunnel is a flight through a tiled tube of light with no end in sight: the wall is a grid of glowing panels with dark seams, it curves away in the middle of the frame and leaves through the edge, and because the shell is translucent you can follow the pipe running on behind its own wall. Pressure is the thrust, a full pitch bend lays the exit out on the horizon to the left or the right, and CC74 climbs and bends the pipe harder into view. Every strike sends a wave of light down the wall towards you, a held note lights and bulges its own column of tiles, and two keys bent against each other tear the pipe open sideways. Tonewheel is a pitch-clock dial where notes ignite on the ring and drift back into a depth tunnel, and Glass Spiral winds the block field into a spiral seen from an elevated camera: low notes stand on the wide outer rim, high notes in the tight core, and every slab is lit glass. Shatter is the pane with a memory: every note is a knock on one shared sheet of glass, and the cracks never heal, the way glass never does. A knock does not open the whole star at once. The star is rolled at the strike and then released in eight stages, and only a further knock unlocks the next one, so between knocks the picture stands and that pause is the phase. What changes from stage to stage is the kind of crack rather than its size: a fine chip first, then the long cracks lengthen and the first ring segments nucleate around the impact, then bands ring the sheet at irregular radii and branches fork off, and at the last stage long fracture chords cut the web into large polygonal plates, an unstable pane rather than a denser spiderweb. Velocity never sets the size of a star, only where in that sequence you start and how fast you walk it: a soft knock opens at the first stage and takes one at a time, a hard one starts higher and takes two, so the same phrase played gently or firmly wears the glass down at a different rate. Pitch places the impact across the pane, velocity throws it high and timbre pulls it low. Leaning on a held key breaks the glass like a strobe rather than melting it, a short pause and then a chunk gives way at once, and once that crater is full the fracture runs on and opens fresh glass nearby. Holding a bent note marches the damage sideways across the sheet, to the right as the bend rises and to the left as it falls. Repeat a note and you keep working the same hole, play a melody and you crack fresh glass. Later impacts interact with what is already standing, a fresh crack ends where it meets an older one, and the holes are real missing material, so anything that ran into one is simply gone. The sheet gives way only once a knock can find no glass left anywhere, and then the finished picture stands for a moment before a white blink swaps in a clean pane, which makes how far you have worn the glass down part of the performance. Black Hole hangs two discs of silky orbiting streams around a pure black horizon: a wide band seen almost edge on (Colour B) and a second disc jutting out toward you (Colour A), crossing along one seam where the two streams flow into each other and trade colours. All the light belongs to the streams themselves; the fast inner orbits hug the rim and draw the ring light on their own. Seen from above the forward disc swings like a clock hand with what you play: its near end sweeps right for high notes and left for low ones, and the crossing point wanders with it. Pressure is pure luminosity and runs the inner streams white hot, Width simply lifts the brightness, and Segments turns the grain from distinct orbit rings into a smooth haze. The Twist source bows that forward disc from the inside: its near rim sweeps around the body, to the right as a bend rises and to the left as it falls, easing out to nothing by mid band, so the stance your playing set stays exactly where it is while the inner streams lean. One bent key does it even inside a held chord, because the disc follows whichever note is pulled furthest rather than the average of all of them.

Signal sources (per parameter)

Each of the three dynamic parameters (Size · Width · Twist) can be independently routed to: Pressure · CC74 Timbre · Velocity · or Pitch Bend (bipolar). Glow is a fixed amount, and Attack / Decay shape how fast every routed parameter rises and falls. Wherever a style places a note on a key axis, its Pitch Bend Range is Auto by default, with fixed values available as a display zoom (see Bend range).

Aura Presets

Two built-in presets for every style, with the MPE Insight signature at the top of the list. Each is a starting point rather than a finished look: change anything and save your own alongside them. The pair belonging to a style differs in more than colour. Presets set the style, colour pair, segment count, envelope, signal routing, and background colour simultaneously, so a handful deliberately drive a knob from a different signal where that fits the picture better, for example a strike-driven look running Size from Velocity, which also keeps it working on a keyboard without aftertouch. Custom configurations go into the per-instance Aura Snapshot list, which has no upper limit and simply starts with five empty rows.

FORGE · Depth Shader

A live WebGL shader driven by the same MPE data every other module reads. Feed it an image or video, the webcam, or the live picture of other modules, the shader reacts to your playing in real time: pitch bend, pressure and CC74 shift, warp and animate the picture. FORGE runs as a single instance (one GL context, one source chain).

Sources: Drop an image or video anywhere on the module, or pick a source in the settings: a file, the webcam (with camera selection), or the Module Feed: CASCADE, AURA, Grand Staff, Expression and Keyboard can each be routed through the FORGE effect chain, alone or several at once. Multiple feeds composite with a selectable Feed Blend: Screen and Lighten add light, Stack and Multiply luma-key each layer (dark areas turn transparent), Difference inverts overlaps. While a module feeds FORGE, its own tile hides itself, and a file or the webcam can sit underneath the whole feed as a Base Layer.

Real depth: On first load FORGE uses AI to estimate a depth map of the image (Depth Anything V2, Apache-2.0) and builds real parallax and relief from it, instead of a flat filter. If the model or a backend is unavailable (e.g. fully offline), the shader falls back automatically to a luminance pseudo-depth, so the module always works, just with flatter parallax when offline.

Effects: Parallax · normal-map relief · heat shimmer · flow · kaleidoscope · Infinity Spiral · glitch · mosaic · chromatic aberration · False Color palettes · point cloud · strobe · feedback trails · Retro Pixel VHS · cell screens · zoom · rotation · tunnel warp · camera shake, each effect independently switchable between off, MPE-driven and a constant value.

Global & mapping: Sensitivity shapes how your pressure reads: to the left you have to lean in before much happens, to the right a light touch already carries. Full press always arrives at full, whatever it is set to. Every disc effect carries its own Size slider, the radius of the disc it plays inside. Pitch → Position (Global), marked ◈ in the panel, decides where a note lands on the image: Circle, Horizontal, Vertical, Center (the whole keyboard on one middle disc), Random (a fixed scatter, one place per key), Color key (nearest matching colour) or Hue key. The 88 / 12 pair beside it sets how finely that mapping reads the keyboard: 88 gives every key its own place, 12 lets all octaves share one, so a note name always lands in the same spot however you voice it. The pair matters for places only. Color key and Hue key always read the whole keyboard: the lowest key aims at the darkest value or the start of the hue circle, the highest at the brightest or the end, whatever the 88 / 12 switch says. Every effect can also leave that global choice and run its own mapping, from the small menu on its own OFF / MPE / CONST button; all seven mappings are on offer there, Color key and Hue key included, so one effect can key to brightness while its neighbour stays on a place, and a button showing ◈ is simply following the global switch. A Depth Preview toggle shows the estimated depth-map thumbnail.

Envelopes: Pressure, Pitch and CC74 each have their own Attack and Release times, so the shader can snap instantly or ease in and fade out smoothly after every note, from tight, percussive reactions to slow, breathing swells.

Effect parameters: Each effect has its own toggle, OFF, MPE (driven by your playing inside the Size disc at the note's pitch) or CONST (a constant value over the whole image), plus its own sliders: its own Size (the disc radius around each note), Parallax (Depth, Motion, Drift), Heat shimmer, Flow and Chroma (Strength, Motion), Kaleidoscope (Segments, Motion), Mirror (Angle, Folds, Motion, Size and a Flip switch: one straight fold line where Kaleidoscope folds a wedge, so it can stand off centre at any angle; in MPE the line runs through the pressure weighted centre of what you are playing and the average pitch bend tilts it, and Size sets how far along the line the fold reaches), Infinity Spiral (Twist, Rings, Motion), Glitch (Strength, Rate, Density, each strike tears inside its note's disc), Mosaic (Blocks, pressure carries the block size from the start ring to the slider, so it can build up or heal away), False Color (Mix, Solarize, Hue, pitch bend can spin the palette live), Normal Light (Strength, colour, plus a diffuse Fill and its own Motion and Orbit), Strobe (Intensity, Speed, colour, plus a Backlight mode that fires the God-Ray pass instead of a flat flash) and Feedback Trails (Decay). Every Motion slider is a true time control: at zero the movement stops and the effect settles into one defined resting state, so the same slider position always gives the same picture, and where the two directions look different (Parallax, Normal Light, Heat, Flow, Kaleidoscope, Mirror, Infinity Spiral, the Ripple, the VHS tracking bar) the slider runs both ways, left of centre playing the same movement backwards.

Point Cloud: A second render path, WebGL2 only: instead of the flat picture, FORGE plots a grid of points across the image and pushes each one toward or away from the camera by the depth map, so the Virtual Camera flies through a real point cloud instead of a flat plane. Shape switches between hard Dots, soft Splats and Glyphs, Size sets how large each point is, Density thins or fills the grid, and Depth sets how strongly the depth map pushes points out. In Glyphs mode each point stamps a character instead of a dot, picked from a ramp so that brighter points carry denser characters, kept in the point's own colour, for a live ASCII look you can fly through. The character set is a field you can edit, and the ramp re-sorts itself by density from whatever you type. In MPE mode, played notes push the points inside their disc toward the camera: presence brings them in and lets them fall back on release, pressure holds them out further the harder you press, slide opens the cone wider, and pitch bend moves it sideways. Under a global Color or Hue mapping the cloud selects its points by brightness or by hue instead of by place, exactly as the flat effect rows do. CONST mode runs the camera and depth alone, with no note pushing anything. The Depth of Field and Motion Blur post passes and the camera's own Relief slider are not available while Point Cloud is on (their rows grey out): they read scene brightness as distance, and the cloud already carries its own real depth. Camera Ground tilt, Heading and Lens distortion all work with it. Spin turns the whole cloud about its own centre, in two halves that read like handling an object. The pose: Angle turns it left or right, Tilt tips it toward you or away, Roll leans it sideways, and each of the three holds exactly where you put it. The motion: Speed sets rate and direction of a continuous rotation, and the Axis buttons name what that rotation is, a flat Turntable spin, a head over heels Tumble, or Clock hands turning in the picture plane. With Speed at zero the picture stands exactly on the pose. In MPE mode the spin winds while you play and settles back onto the pose in silence; CONST turns steadily. Point Cloud has its own section in the panel now.

Virtual Camera: Using the AI depth map, the Virtual Camera moves a real 3D camera through the image instead of applying a flat filter. Relief sets how strongly depth separates near from far. Ground lays the image down into a plane that recedes to a horizon, so parallel lines converge and near content really is larger than far; with it, Depth of Field and Fog stop reading brightness and start reading actual distance. Heading turns that ground under the camera, letting content run diagonally into the distance. The rest of the rig is grouped by what it does. Position moves the camera itself: Truck X/Y slide it sideways and up, Dolly drives it toward or away. View turns it on the spot: Yaw left and right, Tilt up and down, Roll tipping the horizon. Optics holds FOV (telephoto ↔ wide) and Lens (pincushion ↔ barrel/fisheye), and camera-motion Blur sits below. The distinction between the two groups is worth knowing, because it is the one thing that makes these sliders feel duplicated. Moving the camera and turning it only look different when there is depth in the picture: a real move shifts near content further than far content, which is parallax, while a turn shifts everything equally. With Relief and Ground both at 0 the image has no near and far at all, so Truck X and Yaw genuinely produce the same result, and so do Truck Y and a gentle Tilt. Raise Relief or lay the plane down with Ground, and they separate immediately. Likewise Truck Y against Dolly: one keeps the distance and changes the angle you look down at, the other keeps the angle and changes the distance. Three different rotations exist, and they are easy to mix up. Roll tips the camera head, so the horizon tilts with it. Heading turns the ground plane itself, so the horizon stays level and the content swings around underneath. Spin, over in the Whole Frame group among the Distort FX, is not a camera at all: it rotates the finished picture around its centre like a turntable. Move Amt sets how strongly the chosen Move preset plays on top of your framing. How far your playing moves the camera is not a separate number: it is the journey on each row, from the small start ring where it begins to the handle where it ends, so every axis says its own reach and you can read it off the panel. Reset Pose returns the framing to neutral, Ground and Heading included. With the Conductor running it keeps drifting those two on from there, which is what that target is for: close the range rings on the Ground and Heading sliders if you want the floor to stay flat. A cinematic DoF post-pass adds bokeh blur off the focal plane, its Focus slider is auto in the centre (focus follows your playing), far to the left, near to the right, and Fog fades distant content into atmosphere; both work in every camera mode. ● REC records up to 60 seconds of your own slider moves, Ground and Heading included, as a seamlessly looping Custom move preset. While a take is running the Conductor lets go of the camera and its bands go quiet, so the recording holds your move rather than its drift; it picks the camera back up the moment you stop.

Virtual Camera move presets: The Move dropdown offers around twenty cinematic camera paths in two groups. Fly in & home presets (Slow Push In, Orbit, Drift, Handheld, Crane, Dolly Zoom, Smash Zoom, Free Fall, Whip Pan, Quake) perform the move while you play and fly the camera back home on release. Continuous presets (Figure-8 Glide, Carousel, Endless Wander, Pendulum, Pull & Repel, Corkscrew Drill, Vortex Pull, Surge, Slingshot, Kite) wind forward like a loop while you play, release freezes the camera in place, and the next note continues the move from there, and the manual sliders below stay live as a trim on top of the preset. A move you recorded yourself always plays back at the tempo you recorded it.

Camera & post-process: CC74 Rings is what the slide axis does to the picture: lean into CC74 and the frame is pulled toward the note you are playing, with waves running outward on that pull. One bipolar slider carries the whole effect, and its two sides are two different pictures: to the right it pulls in and the waves run out, to the left it pushes away and they run in, and the centre is off. Splash is the strike's own ring in the picture: every note you play sends one wavefront out from its place, shoving the picture aside as it crosses and thinning as it grows. Strength sets how hard it shoves, Speed how fast it travels, and both reach a real zero. It is MPE only, because a splash needs something to throw it, and once thrown a wavefront always completes its journey: letting the key go, or playing on top, never cuts it short. These rings are drawn in the image; the rings on the sliders themselves are a different thing entirely, see Conductor and Start point below. Simpler whole-frame transforms live with the Distort FX, in a group called Whole Frame: Zoom, Spin (speed and direction, a turntable rotation of the finished frame rather than a camera move), Tunnel warp and Shake. Shake is played, not looped: every strike throws the frame off centre and a spring brings it back, low notes throwing it left and high notes right, and the harder you strike the further it goes. Strength sets the weight of a hit, Motion how much movement each one releases, from a single short nudge up to a long ring-out. Play nothing and the picture stands perfectly still, unless you set its start ring away from zero, in which case that is where it rests and a gentle tremble carries on by itself (its CONST mode keeps a steady idle tremble too, for a look that runs without playing). They bend the finished picture without a camera behind them, which is why they sit with the other distortions rather than with the Virtual Camera. Four post-process passes run last, on the finished frame: Bloom (Threshold, Intensity, Radius) blooms the bright areas, God Rays (Intensity, Length, Decay) casts volumetric light shafts, and Retro Pixel VHS puts the finished picture through an analog tape and CRT chain: Scanlines with a rolling tracking bar whose Roll slider sets its speed and direction, Dot Glow (the image resolves into a grid of glowing phosphor points), Chroma Tear (RGB offset, in MPE mode every strike bursts a harder tear), Grain with its own Grain Speed, and a Duotone tint with its own colour. Cells breaks the finished frame into a grid and redraws each cell by its own brightness, in one of three looks: ASCII stamps a character whose density follows the brightness, in the cell's own colour, Halftone lays down a rotated dot screen whose dots grow with the brightness, and Dither steps the frame down to a few colour levels in an ordered dot pattern. Cell Size sets how coarse the grid is and Contrast shapes the brightness ramp, and like every pass it runs off, at a constant value, or answering your playing, where harder playing breaks the picture further into cells. Every FORGE setup can be stored in the module's preset and snapshot slots, and FORGE respects the same MIDI channel filter as the other modules.

Living World: The image grows a world of its own, every style draws its palette and material from the source picture instead of a canned pattern. Four styles: Organic Growth (a grown reaction-diffusion culture; your playing seeds it at the note's position), Fractal Tunnel (an enclosed corridor ride), Fractal Open Space (free flight through floating folded formations; Density sets how many cells hold one) and Ink Bloom (an amber macro fluid-art blob that is its own light source). Pattern, Flow, Growth and Blend shape the behaviour, and ↺ Reseed World restarts the world from the current image.

Conductor: Autonomous slow drift on top of your sliders, so the look keeps living between notes. Switch it on and every slider it can reach grows a pair of range rings, one for each end of the range that knob may drift in. The panel has just two marks and they read the same everywhere: an outer range ring is a point you set, the green dot is the value right now. Closed, the two rings sit on the value as one, with the dot inside it, so a dot in its ring means the image is on your handle and a dot anywhere else means something else is moving it: a Move preset, or the play envelope on a camera in MPE mode. Drag the left ring to move the value as always; pull the right one outwards and the pair opens: the groove between them is the range, and the green line inside it shows what the drift can reach at this moment. Once open, either ring sets the reach and the line itself moves the value. Pull a ring back onto the value, or double-click one, and the pair closes again. Where a range runs into the end of its travel it slides inwards instead of getting narrower, so a knob at the very bottom of its slider still drifts its full width. The range always sits around your own value, so nothing jumps when the drift settles: at rest the picture is exactly what your sliders say. Intensity sets every open range at once, Cycle sets the pace, from a lazy ~5-minute sweep down to 0.4 s (the readout switches to BPM at musical rates). Its Sync button hands that pace to the transport tempo instead: the same slider then snaps to musical divisions, 1/16 up to 4 bars, and the readout names the division and the tempo it is riding. Or hand the timing to Silence: the drift holds still while you play and re-rolls in every pause. Because the drift breathes with your playing energy, the band widens as you dig in and settles back in the rests, and the live tick on the slider shows what is being rendered right now. The whole Virtual Camera is included: position, view, optics, Ground and Heading all take a range, so the Conductor can operate the camera the way it operates an effect. On a camera in MPE mode every row starts on its own handle, so the framing you dial in is the framing you see, in silence and while you play; pull a ring off the handle and that axis becomes a journey your playing travels, drift included. CONST mode drifts on its own. The Conductor drifts camera values, never the camera PATH: which move runs is the Move dropdown's answer alone.

Start point (MPE): In MPE mode a slider is the destination and your playing performs the trip to it. That trip begins at the parameter's neutral, which is why playing can only ever add a look, never clear one. It does not have to. Move the pointer over a camera, Bloom, God Rays, Living World, Glitch Strength, Strobe Intensity, Hue, Mosaic Blocks, Zoom Speed, Shake Strength, Tunnel Warp or Point Cloud Spin, Angle, Tilt and Roll row in MPE mode and the small start ring appears where the journey begins. Drag it anywhere on the travel, including past the slider's own handle, and the move runs the other way: start wide and play your way in, start fogged and clear the air as you dig in, hold the camera off centre and let a phrase bring it home. A groove under the track draws the trip and the green bar inside it fills as you play, so you can see how far your playing is actually getting. Mosaic is the one row where every note travels its own trip inside its own disc, so a soft note stays blocky while a hard one right beside it comes clean; its bar reads the note pressing hardest. Double-click the start ring to hand the start back to the neutral. With the Conductor's range rings open on the same knob, its drift is capped to the stretch you drew, so every phrase reaches a different distance along the trip and none of them leaves it.

DRIFT · MPE Processor

DRIFT is a live MPE processor that sits between your controller and your synth. It turns an ordinary MIDI keyboard into an expressive MPE instrument: one note per key goes in, a randomized, humanized MPE stream comes out, spread across the member channels with its own pressure, pitch and timbre motion per note. Every module, and every synth downstream, then reacts as if the part had been played on an expressive controller. While switched on, DRIFT replaces plain MIDI Thru on the enabled outputs. The master Intensity knob scales every randomization at once. Two modes decide how it reacts: Independent keeps the randomization running constantly, regardless of how you play, while Follow scales it with your own expression (pressure, pitch bend, CC74), subtle when you play plainly, wide when you dig in. By default Follow reads whichever of the three is strongest; an axis picker beside the mode pins it to Press, Bend or Timbre alone, so a slide no longer drives the swing when you meant aftertouch to. Follow never scales all the way down: a floor of 5 % keeps a trace of movement even on a perfectly flat note. A plain, non-MPE keyboard sends no such expression, so Follow stays near that floor and Independent is the mode to use. The factory presets are grouped as Keys, Pads, Chords, Arp and FX. Selecting a DRIFT preset also sets the ⏻ power switch: presets meant to be heard arm DRIFT, all others switch it off, so the switch always matches the picked entry.

Modulation: Five independent per-voice modulators, called lanes. Each lane carries its own target, shape, depth, rate and colour, and a target can sit on one lane only, so the colour stays a readable legend. A target you cannot pick is greyed out rather than dropped from the list, since numbers missing from a numbered row read as a fault. Two things grey a target: another lane already holds it, or it is protocol rather than modulation. Ten numbers are protocol, Bank Select (CC0 and CC32), Data Entry (CC6 and CC38), Data Increment and Decrement (CC96 and CC97), NRPN (CC98 and CC99) and RPN (CC100 and CC101). They carry the bytes of a state and parameter protocol instead of the position of a control, and with RPN it is not theoretical: DRIFT sets the bend range itself with RPN 0 on exactly the member channels a lane writes to. The catalogue stays complete behind the greying, so a saved stand keeps whatever target it was given. The target list is Pitch, Pressure and every continuous controller from CC0 to CC119 under its own name. That last part is worth more than it sounds, because on member channels an ordinary CC becomes a per-note CC, and that does not exist without MPE. Out of the box the lanes are the four classic destinations, Pitch, Brightness (CC74), Pressure and Pan (CC10), with the fifth lane switched off, so an older take sounds exactly as it did. Where a wave rests is knowledge in the list rather than a control you have to find: CC8, CC10 and CC74 swing around the centre, CC7 and CC11 dip from the top, everything else rises from zero.

Eight shapes are available: Drift (organic), Sine, Triangle, Saw Up, Saw Down, Square, S&H Random and Static (per note). Pitch depth is in cents, and its ceiling is the bend range itself: 4800 cents at the MPE standard of 48 semitones, 200 at the narrowest setting the Output tab offers. Every other target is a percentage of its own range. Rate runs from 0.02 to 25 Hz while the lane is free, curved so that the lower half of the slider covers everything up to 3 Hz. Each depth readout says setting then reach, the number the handle stands on and the number that actually leaves the module, because the master Intensity scales every one of them. On a plain keyboard DRIFT generates pressure and timbre from nothing; on an MPE controller it layers on top of what you already send.

Mode, the phase across the voices: Each lane also says how its voices relate to one another, which is the difference between a chorus and a breath. Chaos is the default and the behaviour DRIFT always had: every voice draws its own phase and its own rate variation, so MPE's 15 member channels never move in lockstep and even one sustained chord feels chorused and organic. Parallel puts every voice on one clock and one phase, so the chord swells and falls as a single block. Orbit spreads the phase evenly across the member channels, so the movement travels through the chord as a standing wave. Split puts alternate channels in counter-phase, so two halves pull against each other. Static and S&H Random have no phase to spread, so Orbit and Split are greyed out on those lanes and the lane runs as Parallel. Where a voice enters the wave is a setting of its own: Start is Auto (the mode decides, Chaos rolling a fresh phase per note while the other three run free), or Free, Random or Fixed stated outright, with the fixed start given as an angle. On an Orbit lane the fan itself is adjustable: Spread sets how far around one oscillation the 15 member channels are laid out, and Phase turns that whole fan, so the movement can travel through a chord over part of a cycle instead of always the full turn.

Sync, the lane on the tempo grid: A lane runs free or locked to the transport. Ticked, the same Rate slider stops reading in hertz and becomes the division picker, stepping through 22 divisions from 16/4 down to 1/64 with the dotted and triplet values in between, against the transport clock (MIDI Clock when one is present, otherwise the Internal Clock in the toolbar's tempo pill). Switching back and forth loses nothing, the hertz rate and the last division are both kept. A synced lane also drops the per-voice rate variation, because a rate that scatters cannot sit on a grid; where a voice sits inside the bar stays the Mode's business.

Notes: On top of the modulation, DRIFT can generate whole new notes. Octave Layers stack octave copies above and/or below every played note, each its own MPE voice with its own drift and a settable relative velocity, but each layer costs one of the 15 member channels per note. Chord Machine turns a single key into a full chord: the played note becomes the root and each interval gets its own voice (also with its own relative velocity). Scale Lock snaps every generated note into a chosen key and scale, so the Chord Machine becomes diatonic and Note Spread and Bend Quantize follow the same scale. Note Spread displaces each played note to a nearby degree for instant width (snapped to the scale when Scale Lock is on), with a Max displacement control. Bend Quantize pulls continuous glides onto scale notes (100% = hard snap, lower keeps some of the slide) while leaving plain held notes untouched, and a second switch applies the same snap to the drift DRIFT generates itself. The scale list ends in Chromatic, which holds every pitch class and so gives Bend Quantize an explicit semitone grid. Strum fans stacked voices out by pitch instead of sounding them together, with the delay set per voice rather than as a total, and running low to high or high to low. Humanize adds subtle per-hit velocity variation and a few milliseconds of random timing so no two notes are identical.

Arpeggiator: With the ARP engaged, held keys become a step pattern instead of sounding directly, and every step still runs through the full randomization chain (drift, pan, spread, even the Chord Machine for rhythmic chords). Direction can be Up, Down, Up & Down, Random, As Played or Chord, extended over 1-4 octaves. Chord is a distribution rather than a direction: it plays the whole held chord on every step instead of one note at a time, and because each step builds new voices, every hit re-rolls its own detune, LFO phase, velocity and timing offset, so the same chord breathes differently on every beat. There the octave range rotates the chord one octave per step instead of stacking it, keeping the voice count flat; every note still takes one of the 15 MPE channels, so a wide chord together with the Chord Machine can run past them. Free runs it at the Internal Clock tempo set in the toolbar's tempo pill; Sync locks the divisions (1/4, 1/8, 1/8T …) to the transport clock, MIDI Clock when one is present, otherwise the Internal Clock. Ratchet splits one step into 2, 3 or 4 equal repeats, so a step can machine-gun without the grid moving. Gate sets note length as a fraction of the step; Latch keeps the pattern playing after you release the keys, with the next key press starting a new chord. Shuffle makes every second step of the grid play late, from 50% (dead straight) through 66% (triplet swing) to 75% (hard dotted). The grid itself never moves, so a pair of steps always adds up to the same span of time and the pattern stays locked to the bar however far you push it.

MPE Output: DRIFT sends to the enabled MIDI outputs, and what listens there has to be an MPE-capable receiver: a synth, or a DAW track switched to MPE mode. Send MPE Setup transmits the MPE Configuration Message (15 member channels) plus the pitch-bend range to those outputs, it is sent automatically every time DRIFT is switched on, and the range must match what the receiving synth uses on its member channels (MPE standard is 48), or the drift depth will be wrong. The 👁 In / Out monitor decides what every visual module displays while DRIFT is active: the raw input you play, or DRIFT's processed output: the actual randomized MPE stream the synth receives, including chord voices, arp steps and channel allocation. The monitor changes what you see, not what is sent. With output monitoring, the toolbar's ● Rec captures DRIFT's output instead of the input, so you can export the humanized, arpeggiated or chorded MPE performance as a .mid file for your DAW. DRIFT also has its own glow and Transparent BG for the voice-lane visualiser.

The field, and where the controls sit: DRIFT carries its own controls on the module tile rather than in the settings overlay. A head row holds the ⏻ power switch, Intensity, the Motion mode with its axis, the global Mode and the preset bar; below the field sits a card with four tabs, Lanes, Notes, Arp and Output, which folds away when you want the picture alone.

Field views: The bar above the field picks what it draws. Lanes gives every lane its own band, Flow puts every curve in one band, Levels shows one bar per lane and channel, and Notes names the sounding notes and marks each voice as a drift node. The same bar sets the time axis: Hold runs a band whose right edge is now, over a span of 1.5, 3 or 6 seconds, while Scope retriggers on each note onset and is one arp step wide. The monitor beside it shows either Out, DRIFT’s own stream, or In + Out, which lays the values you played underneath the curves as pale lines, so what you did and what DRIFT made of it read against each other. A trail is kept per channel, so a voice keeps glowing for a moment after its note ends.

Seed: Randomization can be made repeatable. A seed of 0 is free randomness, the way DRIFT always ran; any other number replays the same take, from every ⏻ On and from every transport start, which is what makes a drifted performance recordable twice. The dice beside the field rolls a new seed and applies it to held notes at once.

Visuals only: DRIFT engages as soon as a MIDI output is enabled, or, with the monitor set to 👁 Out, entirely without one: the status then reads visuals only · no MIDI out, and DRIFT re-voices a plain keyboard or a single-channel DAW track across the member channels purely for the on-screen modules, no synth required. While it runs, thin ghost ticks on the sliders show what is effectively being sent: the toolbar Intensity tick appears in Follow mode (how far your expression scales the randomization below its maximum), and each lane's depth slider carries one thin stripe per sounding voice in that lane's colour, which is what tells the Modes apart at a glance: Chaos reads as a spread of stripes, Parallel collapses them onto one line.