THE_PATTERN 2 Manual

• LIBRARY rebuilds a loop from your own sounds. Drop in a drum loop you love. THE_PATTERN 2 hears the hits, rebuilds the loop from the closest sounds in your library, the release-ready CORE sounds and your own folders alike, sets each one to the level it played at, and writes the groove. You keep the feel and lose everything you could never mix: the bass under the kick, the room on every hit, one file where there should be a kit.
• MAKE SONG turns one groove into a whole song. Right-click any pattern and the rest of the song is written from it: an intro, a verse, a break and an outro, and in a club track the build into the drop. It arrives laid out as a song with fills, ready to drag into your DAW as one clip.

Every part of THE_PATTERN 2 holds its own against the tool you would otherwise open for that job.

• The pads each hold up to 32 samples with velocity layers and round-robins, play sixteen voices, and run their own seven-stage insert chain: transient shaper, bitcrusher, saturation, filter, four-band EQ, compressor and auto-pan, plus two envelopes and a ducker.
• THE KICK on pad 1 is a real kick synth: drawable pitch and level curves, a tuned click, a sampled top layer, sixteen factory kicks, and MATCH, which rebuilds a kick sample you drop on it as synth settings you can change.
• The sequencer puts velocity, chance, ratchets, micro-timing, pitch, pan and 23 conditional trigs on every step, lets any lane loop at its own length, and shows that polymeter on screen instead of leaving it to your ears.
• The library is release-ready: every kit, sound and groove in CORE is mine, and ready to go into a finished track as it is. It plays every kit with its groove before you load it, ranks every sound by how it actually sounds, and files your own sample folders next to the factory content.

Because it is one instrument, every part knows what the others are doing. A loop you drop tells MAKE SONG which lane is the kick. The ducker follows the kick that is actually loaded. GENERATE builds around the pads you lock. Your own folders feed the loop rebuild, the similarity search and the generator. And every sound you load arrives levelled, with a swap keeping the pad's mix, so trying another snare never throws the balance. A rack of separate plugins cannot give you that, however good each one is. The Magic Is Between the Features, further down, shows every connection.

If a card asks for your content, click GET CONTENT: the CORE library downloads once, and every expansion follows it in the background. Open Kits in the browser and press play on a few rows. Each kit plays with its own groove through a private preview, without touching your rack. Every sound in it is release-ready: it already sounds finished, so a kit can go straight into a track without an hour of EQ and compression first. Load the one you like, then click through the pattern chips on the strip under the grid. You are not hearing a lonely loop. The factory kits arrive as the parts of a song: the drop or the chorus, an intro, a verse, a break and an outro, named and in order.

Drag a drum loop onto the sequencer, from a sample pack, your DAW or your desktop. A card opens with the loop drawn across its top and a line for every hit it heard, coloured by drum. Choose LIBRARY, give it a moment, then press HEAR LOOP and HEAR RESULT in turn. That is the loop, rebuilt from sounds in your own library. Press the arrows on the snare's row to hear the next-closest snare, then APPLY AS NEW KIT (press it again when it asks REPLACE KIT?). The groove now plays on a clean kit of one-shots, and every pad is free to be shaped on its own.

Right-click the pattern chip and choose Make song from .... The intro, verse, break and outro are written from your groove, plus the build into the drop in a club track. The song is laid out with fills, and the CHAIN panel opens on it. Press play: it runs from the first bar of the intro to the last bar of the outro. MAKE SONG has the details.

Click the SYNTH chip on pad 1 and drop a kick you almost like onto the editor. MATCH rebuilds it with the synth and gives you two answers to compare against the file with HEAR ORIGINAL and HEAR RESULT. APPLY the one you prefer, read the note its tail lands on under TAIL, and drag the last pitch point onto the root of your track. Your kick, now in your key, with a length you can change without chopping the tail.

Click the snare pad, open Sounds in the browser, filter by snare and double-click a few, one after another. Then drag a snare in from your desktop. Each one lands at the level of the one before, through the same fader, EQ, compression and sends, so the kit keeps its balance while you audition. Every sound is levelled on the way in, from the library, your own folders or anywhere on your disk. It feels like the kit mixes itself. Levelling, in The Pads, explains how.

With CHAIN on, drag the AUDIO handle at the right of the controls strip into an audio track: the whole song, rendered as one file. MIDI gives you the same song as notes to edit, and STEMS gives you one file per lane.

Click LOCK on pad 1, open GENERATE from the browser toolbar and pick a genre. A new kit arrives, grown from one of the library's kits, with its own groove and its own song parts, and your kick stays exactly where it is. REGENERATE KIT rolls again. One Cmd+Z brings back the song you made.

Drop your sample folder onto the browser. MY SOUNDS listens to every file, leaves out loops and anything that is not a drum hit (and tells you why), and files the rest by drum and tag, next to mine. Your files are never moved. From then on, LIBRARY, Find similar sounds and GENERATE reach into your folders too, so go back to moment 2 and drop the same loop again.

That is the whole instrument in ten minutes: a loop in, a kit of your own sounds, a song, a kick in your key and a finished file in your DAW. Got a microphone? With my free companion app THE_BRIDGE running, BEATBOX turns the kick, snare and hat noises you make into pad hits, and REC prints them to the grid.

The rest of this manual is how each part works.

Every pad is a waveform tile over a mix strip. The tile shows the sound's actual waveform, drawn peak-plus-RMS, tinted with that pad's identity hue — the same hue its lane wears in the sequencer, so pad 3 and lane 3 always read as the same instrument. Underneath: VOL, PAN, PITCH, CHOKE, REV and DLY.

The tile also tells you the truth about its sound:

• MISSING SAMPLE in warm red when the file cannot be found — with Locate missing sample... in the right-click menu to point it at the new location.
• A small gold EXT tag when the sample lives outside the library — a Finder drop, or a file from one of your own folders. It travels inside the session, not in the library.
• The piece number when the pad holds one slice of a chopped loop, so "disco115 3" reads as the third piece of that loop rather than a mystery.

The chips on the tile itself:

• SOLO — an audio-level solo, so you can hear one pad against the pattern without muting seven lanes.
• MUTE — silences the pad. It is the same switch as the sequencer's M on that pad's lane: mute either one and both show it.
• LOCK — the kit-load lock. A locked pad keeps its sound through every kit load, every generation and every reroll. This one chip is what turns GENERATE from a slot machine into a tool.
• SYNTH, on pad 1 only (the sine glyph) — turns the pad into the synthesised kick and opens its editor. After that it opens and closes the editor; the editor's ON / OFF pill hands the pad back to its sample.
• EDIT — opens the pad's sample editor (the KICK editor on a synth pad).

Under the mix strip sit ten effect lanes — EQ, ENV, DRV, FLT, TRS, CRS, PIT, CMP, PAN and DUCK. Each one is a small picture of what that module is doing to the pad: the EQ curve, the envelope's contour, the pump the ducker draws. Click a lane and that editor opens. Hover one and the tooltip says what its letters stand for.

When you drag the pad section short, the tiles go compact: the mix strip and the effect lanes step aside so the waveform stays readable. Drag the section taller and they come back.

• Drag audio from anywhere — Finder, your DAW's browser, the desktop — straight onto a pad.
• Alt-drop to add the file as a layer instead of replacing the sound.
• Drag a sound from the library onto any pad.
• Double-click a sound in the browser to load it into the selected pad. A single click only plays it, so you can audition freely without losing what is on the pad.
• Right-click a pad for the full menu.

Every sound is levelled as it loads, so a kit you assemble yourself out of sounds from five different packs arrives roughly balanced instead of needing ten minutes of gain-staging before you can hear whether it works. And a new sound on a pad keeps the pad's mix. Levelling, next, explains both.

Auditioning should be about taste, not gain-staging, so THE_PATTERN 2 does the levelling at every step.

• Every sound is levelled as it loads. Wherever it comes from (the library, your MY SOUNDS folders or a drag from your desktop), its peak is set to a -12 dBFS reference on the way in. Your file is never changed, and a very quiet file is lifted by 24 dB at most. Every layer of a multisample is levelled on its own, and the layer volume offsets sit on top.
• A swap keeps the pad's mix. Load a new sound onto a pad and its fader, tuning, pan, inserts, envelope, sends, choke, ducker and mute stay exactly as they were. Only what belonged to the old waveform starts fresh: its start and end, loop points, reverse, slicing and sync. A stack of layers collapses to the new sound; Alt-drop when you want to add a layer instead.
• EQ and filter moves keep their level. Every move on a pad's EQ or filter is loudness-compensated against the sound's own measured spectrum, so a brighter snare is not also a louder one, and your ears judge the tone, not the volume. With both switched off, the compensation is exactly neutral.
• The compressor gives back what it takes. The pad compressor's auto make-up is calibrated to the same -12 dBFS reference, so squashing a hit does not drop it out of the mix.
• New kits arrive balanced. A kit load brings every pad's mix as the kit was saved. GENERATE matches each new sound to the level of the sound it replaces, and LIBRARY sets each pad to the level its drum played in the loop.

Levelling works on the peak of each sound, so it keeps the balance you set rather than deciding it for you: a long 808 and a tight kick at the same peak still carry different weight. Set the balance once with VOL, and every swap after that keeps it. Audition twenty snares on the snare pad and the kit stays mixed the whole time. It feels like the kit mixes itself.

Every pad carries its own mixer: volume from -60 to +12 dB, pan, pitch in semitones (with the detected note name shown, so you can tune a kick to the track), reverb send, delay send, choke group and output bus.

The right-click menu is grouped by job:

• SOUND — Find similar sounds, Build multisample from folder, Save to library, Show in Finder. Save to library saves whatever the pad actually is: a stacked pad goes in as a multisample with every layer and the map intact, a single sample from outside the library is adopted as a sound.
• PLAYING — Velocity sensitive (off means every hit fires at full level), Polyphonic (let voices ring instead of the drum-standard cut-self), Choke group (every group is listed with the pads already in it and which way they cut, plus the pad's direction), Cut fade (how fast the pad dies when it is cut), and Output (Main, Kick on Out 1, or Out 2 to 8 — plus "Also keep in main mix" when you want the aux as a tap rather than a move).
• EDIT — Slice, Loop -> pattern, Randomize sound design, Copy lane, Paste lane, Paste only.
• Clear sample and Delete lane, on their own at the bottom.
• ALL PADS — Collect loose samples into the library, which appears when any pad holds a file from outside the library.

Choke groups work the way hardware does: pads sharing a group cut each other off — whichever pad of the group hits, the others stop. Open hat on the same group as closed hat, and the hat behaves. Set the group from the pad's right-click menu, where each group is listed with the pads already in it, or from CHOKE on the mix strip.

A group cuts both ways until you say otherwise. Under THIS PAD in the same menu, a pad can only cut (the group never silences it) or only get cut (it never silences the group). Set the kick to only cut and the 808 on its group stops for every kick, while the 808 never touches the kick. Set the open hat to only get cut and the closed and pedal hats close it, while an open hat never chokes a closed one. The group list reads each mate's direction back to you: cuts 3 OH; cut by 4 PH.

Cut fade, in the same right-click menu, is how fast a pad dies when it is cut: by its choke group, or by its own next hit when it is not Polyphonic. 5 ms is the tight hardware cut and the default. Around 60 ms is a hat closing rather than switching off, and 250 ms is a hand grabbing a cymbal. The fade belongs to the pad that gets cut, so the open hat closes at its own pace whichever pad closed it. Kits you save keep the group, the direction and the fade. Every pad in a group wears a CHOKE badge with the group's number; hover one and its group-mates light up with a dashed ring; and when a pad gets cut, its badge flashes red for a moment — you watch the closed hat stop the open one.

Copy lane and Paste lane move the whole lane: the pad's entire sound design — every insert, both envelopes, the ducker, the layers and their controls — and its groove in every part. Paste only takes just the sound or just the groove. Delete lane removes the sound and the groove together; Clear sample empties the pad and leaves the groove. Both are explained under Copy, paste and delete a lane in the Sequencer chapter.

Randomize sound design re-rolls the insert chain for a happy accident and keeps the sample and the routing. It is one undo step, so try it twice.

Select a pad and the editor tabs appear: SAMPLE (or KICK on a synth pad), SLICE, EQ, ENV, DRV, FLT, TRS, CRS, PIT, CMP, PAN and DUCK. The current tab sits raised in the tray, and any module that is switched on wears a lit dot and a hue underline, so you can read a pad's whole state from the tab strip.

Every editor closes with Esc. Every slider takes a vertical drag, Shift for fine, double-click to reset and right-click to type a value.

The waveform draws as one peak path and one RMS path filled with a gradient that carries three brightness levels: what lies outside the pad's region, what lies outside the selected layer's trim, and what actually plays. A comet tail trails the playhead, and the playhead itself lives in the ruler with the start and end flags.

• Zoom with the wheel, the overview strip, the 1x to 8x chips, or the + / - / 0 keys.
• START and END flags in the ruler carry their positions in milliseconds and snap to the attack.
• Display gain lifts a quiet sample to readable height without touching its level, with the dB guides labelled in true dBFS.
• REVERSE re-prints the sample backwards, padded so it lands on the next musical division at the host tempo.
• LOOP adds an independent loop start and end inside the trim — the steel A and B markers on the wave, or type a time into the LOOP A / LOOP B cells. The seam is crossfaded (up to 10 ms), so a loop point that does not sit on a zero crossing still does not click. The markers belong to the audio, not to the buffer: with REVERSE on they mirror with the sample and stay on the same sound, even when a tempo change re-prints the reverse with different padding. Switching LOOP on while a hit is still ringing leaves that hit alone — only hits that start after it loop.
• SYNC stretches the pad's audio to a chosen length at the host tempo, pitch-preserving (WSOLA). Switching it on reads the loop's own bar count; LENGTH beside it then sets any length from a 1/16 note to 64 bars — click - or +, or scroll over it — so a one-shot can be fitted to a quarter note as easily as a break to four bars. If the pad's lane is empty, SYNC also writes a hit at the start of every loop length, so the loop plays the moment you press play. The stretch runs on a background worker; the audio thread only watches for tempo drift.
• CUT AT END silences the pad the moment the pattern loops and when playback stops, so a long ambience or riser never rings past the pattern. It is the same switch as Cut sound at pattern end in the lane menu (see the Sequencer).

Click the waveform to hear the pad — the higher you click, the harder the hit. It is the quickest way to check a velocity-layered pad without reaching for a controller. In the ruler, the START and END flags snap to the attack; hold SHIFT to place them freely, and double-click the ruler to see the whole sample.

FOLLOW makes the waveform show the layer that just played, so on a round-robin pad you watch the variation you are hearing. Click a layer's chip to pin that one instead, which turns FOLLOW off.

A pad holds up to 32 sample slots. The LAYERS strip selects which slot the waveform and the controls refer to; a dot on a chip means that layer carries its own offsets. The + at the end of the strip adds another sample (Alt-dropping a file or a library sound on the pad does the same), and when there are more layers than chips, the overflow chip opens the MAP with every slot in view.

Three layer modes fill the per-slot fields for you:

• Stack — all layers play together. Kick plus click, snare plus noise.
• Velocity — the slots split the velocity range, slot 1 softest. Velocity crossfade softens the boundaries so a hit near a split triggers both neighbours with complementary gains instead of a hard step.
• Round-robin — the slots rotate per hit. Humanize adds anti-repeat selection plus small pitch and level jitter, so recorded round-robins stop sounding machine-gunned.

The modes are presets over a real per-slot map. The moment you author the map yourself in the MAP view, the presets stop overwriting it.

Each slot carries its own controls, and every one is an offset on the pad's control of the same name. Pad at -3 dB plus layer at +2 dB is -1 dB. Every default is exactly neutral, so a layer you have not touched sounds exactly like the pad.

Slicing, reverse, beat-sync stretch and the insert chain stay per pad — all layers sum into one buffer, then the pad's inserts run once.

A layer's own envelope is off until you want it: right-click the envelope on the layer's envelope page (E) to switch it on or off. The gold curve is the layer, the dim violet curve is the pad's ENV, and because the two multiply, the filled area is what you actually hear.

Right-click a layer chip to replace or clear it, reset that layer's offsets, or apply its offsets to every layer — the difference between a chore and a click on a 24-slot multisample.

Keys in the sample editor: [ and ] or 1 to 9 select a layer, E flips to the layer's envelope page, M opens the map, A opens ALIGN, Esc unwinds one level at a time.

MAP shows the pad's slots as a grid: velocity up the side, round-robin groups across. Drag a zone's edges to change its velocity window, drag it sideways to move it between round-robin groups, and see the crossfade bands drawn between neighbours. The last hit is marked on the grid, so you can watch which zone your playing is actually reaching.

This is where a multisample stops being a list of files and becomes a map you can read.

ALIGN stacks every layer from its trigger point so you can see whether the click sits in front of the body or behind it. Drag to nudge, INV flips polarity. Two layers fighting each other at the attack is the most common reason a stacked kick sounds smaller than either of its parts, and this is the view that shows it.

Point it at a folder of hits and it builds the velocity multisample for you — it reads SOFT, MID and HARD style naming, fills the slots and maps the windows. A humanised multisampled snare in one action.

The save icon in the sample editor header, beside the pad's name, writes the whole pad into your library as one sound: every layer, the velocity x round-robin map, all the layer offsets and the pad's shaping. Save to library in the pad menu does exactly the same thing once a pad has more than one layer, so it does not matter which one you reach for.

Name it, pick its type and its tags in the same card every other save uses. Any layer that came from outside the library is copied in on the way, so the multisample carries its own samples and survives the source folder moving or the session travelling to another machine.

Drag it back onto any pad and the whole stack returns. What does not come back is the pad's performance state — solo, mute, lock, trigger note, output bus and the ducker's trigger source belong to the pad you drop it on, not to the sound. A library sound that arrived soloing, or ducking from whatever sits on some other pad, would be a booby trap.

SLICE detects transients and cuts the pad into up to 64 slices. SENS changes how many it finds, with the slice count updating live while you drag. Markers can be added, moved and deleted by hand, every edit has its own undo step, and DETECT, SENS, GRID and adding a marker all switch slicing on for you.

Two playback modes:

• Note-mapped — the pad's trigger note plays slice 1, the next note slice 2, and so on. A sliced break laid across the keyboard.
• Sequential — each hit advances to the next slice. Drop it on a lane, fill the lane, and the break plays back in order.

In note mode the footer shows the note range the slices occupy and warns about clashes with other pads.

Behind EDIT CUTS is a full marker editor, the same one CHOP uses when it asks you to correct where a loop was cut.

• Hear it. Click a piece to play it. PLAY (or Space) plays the whole loop from its first cut with a playhead. The arrow keys step from piece to piece and play each one.
• Cut it. Double-click the waveform to add a cut, double-click a cut to remove it, or select it and press Delete. Drag a cut to move it: it snaps to the nearest transient or grid line, and always to a zero crossing, so no piece starts with a click. Hold Cmd to place it freely. With a cut selected, the arrow keys nudge it one grid step (Shift: 1 ms).
• SNAP decides where a dragged or added cut lands — TRANSIENT, GRID or OFF. GRID sets the step for grid snapping, for the arrow-key nudge and for EVEN.
• EVEN puts a cut on every grid step (up to one per pad): the classic straight chop. RESET goes back to the cuts the analysis found.
• See it. The overview strip shows the whole loop, with a box around what the main view shows: drag the box to move, drag its edges to zoom. Drag down on the ruler to zoom in, up to zoom out, sideways to scroll. Cmd+wheel zooms, the wheel scrolls, FIT (F) shows everything, and Z zooms to the selected piece — down to single samples.
• Undo has its own history inside the editor (Cmd+Z, Cmd+Shift+Z), and nothing reaches your pads until you press APPLY on the card. DONE takes you back to the card with your cuts.

Pad 1 can be a synthesised kick instead of a sample, and MATCH rebuilds a kick file you drop on it as that synth. It has a whole chapter of its own: see THE KICK below.

Every pad runs the same chain. TRS, CRS, DRV, FLT, CMP and PAN switch in and out over a 12 ms ramp, so switching one never clicks:

1. TRS — Transient shaper. Attack and sustain gain, plus and minus 24 dB each. The fastest way to give a sampled snare more crack or take the room out of it. The view is your pad's own hit, run through the shaper's own detector: the thin line is the hit as it was, the fill is the hit as you will hear it, and the ATTACK zone is marked where the detector actually finds it. Drag A or S up and down — fill past the line is lifted, fill inside it is pulled back. Double-click a handle to put it back to 0 dB.
2. CRS — Bitcrusher and lo-fi. 1 to 16 bits, 1x to 50x downsampling, dry/wet mix.
3. DRV — Saturation. Up to 36 dB of normalised drive into tanh, a post low-pass tone control from 200 Hz to 20 kHz, mix and output trim. It runs 2x oversampled by default, which is light on CPU. The small HQ switch next to ON moves it to 4x oversampling with anti-aliasing: a hat or snare driven hard keeps clean highs instead of turning into fizz, at a higher CPU cost. The curve is the same in both modes, and switching never clicks. A pad costs nothing between its hits.
4. FLT — Resonant filter. Low-pass, high-pass or band-pass, cutoff to 20 kHz, resonance from 0.3 to 12. Cutoff is one of the automatable parameters.
5. EQ — Four bands. A low cut at 30 Hz, bells at 250 Hz and 2.5 kHz, high shelf at 9 kHz; the outer bands re-type to shelf, peak or cut from their chip or a right-click. Drag a band for frequency and gain, the wheel sets its width, double-click puts it back to 0 dB.
6. CMP — Compressor. Threshold, continuous ratio from 1 to 20, attack and release, auto-makeup calibrated to -12 dBFS, parallel mix and a gain-reduction meter.
7. PAN — Auto-pan. A tempo-synced LFO — sine, triangle or square — locked to the beat while the transport runs.

Plus, on every pad:

• ENV — AHD(S)R. Attack 0 to 500 ms, hold to 2 s, decay to 8 s, sustain level, release to 8 s. SYNC, the first cell of the bottom row, locks hold, decay and release to note lengths from 1/64 to two bars (straight, dotted and triplet) at the current tempo. Attack stays in milliseconds, so a synced envelope never smears the hit. Turning SYNC on snaps the shape you already have to the nearest notes, and turning it off keeps the shape exactly as you hear it. While SYNC is on, the well shows the beat grid and H and D snap to it. Drag a synced cell up or down to step through the note lengths, or click it to pick one from the list. Everything is edited on the curve: A and H ride the peak, D is where the decay lands — drag it sideways for the decay time and up or down for the sustain level — and the sustain line itself drags up and down. Behind the curve, the sample is drawn as you will hear it, carved by the envelope. Park D in the top-right corner for no decay; double-click any handle to reset it. RELEASE acts on looping pads only — a one-shot plays its shape to the end of the sample, whatever the note length, so the cell says LOOP ONLY there.
• PIT — Pitch envelope. Up to plus/minus 24 semitones of start offset with an exponential decay from 1 to 2000 ms, applied as playback-rate modulation so it never clicks. This is how you get an 808 to fall, or a tom to drop. The sweep is drawn over the hit it bends: the start handle sets the amount, the end handle the decay, and a drag anywhere else does both.
• DUCK — Sidechain ducker. Two chips sit above the curve, and they are independent: TRIG is what restarts the dip, SHAPE is what the dip looks like.

TRIG is either a pad — every hit of the pad you pick ducks this one — or the GRID, a note division from 1/32 to 1/1 including triplets and dotted values. It starts on the kit's kick, so switching DUCK on does the obvious thing. On the grid it needs no source pad at all, and it locks to your DAW's song position, so a four-to-the-floor pump lands on the beat at any tempo without spending one of the 16 pads on a silent trigger sample.

SHAPE is one of two. FOLLOW uses the source pad's own measured amplitude envelope, so the bass breathes with the shape of the kick that is actually loaded and stays right when you swap that kick. DRAW hands you the curve, starting from the classic pump — the same sidechain curve THE_GAIN 2 opens on, and Reset to the sidechain curve in the SHAPE menu brings it back: click to add a point, drag it, drag the small ring between two points to bend that segment, double-click a point to remove it or a ring to straighten it. Points snap to the grid and to eighths; hold SHIFT to place them freely.

The mixed pairs are where it gets interesting. GRID + DRAW is a drawn rhythmic gate locked to the bar. PAD + DRAW fires a hand-drawn shape off the snare.

DEPTH sets how far the dip goes (the FLOOR readout shows where that lands in dB), LENGTH scales the window from 0.25x to 4x, ATTACK smooths the onset, and VEL tracks how hard the trigger hit — which the grid has no notion of, so that one dims when TRIG is on the grid.

• Auto tonal-gain compensation. EQ and filter moves are level-compensated against the sample's measured 32-band spectrum, so brightening a snare does not also make it louder and fool your ears into liking it.

One-shots always play to completion — with or without an envelope, so a short sequencer gate or a quick pad click never chops a hit. Looping pads stop on note-off: through the envelope's RELEASE when ENV is on, otherwise with a click-free fade.

Where that note-off comes from depends on who plays the pad. From your fingers, a controller or the DAW, a loop lasts as long as you hold the note. From the pattern, a looping pad holds until that lane's next hit — the old voice lets go at the exact sample the new hit starts — so a one-bar loop with one hit per bar plays the whole bar, and a loop on every quarter retriggers on every quarter. GATE does not cut it short. Stopping playback, muting or soloing the lane away, or switching LOOP off ends a held loop straight away. Live MIDI out to your DAW carries the same held note lengths. A dragged-out MIDI file writes every note at GATE length, so when you play a clip like that back into THE_PATTERN, raise GATE for its looping pads.

The SYNTH chip (a small sine glyph) sits on pad 1's tile, next to LOCK. Click it and the pad becomes a synth kick and the KICK editor opens. Clicking it again opens or closes the editor. The chip never switches the synth off: that is the ON / OFF pill in the editor's header, and OFF hands the pad straight back to its sample.

While the synth is on:

• The editor tab reads KICK instead of SAMPLE, and SLICE disappears, because a synthesised kick has no audio to slice.
• The pad tile reads KICK SYNTH, or TOP: and the sample's name when a top layer is loaded. The tile's waveform is the kick you will hear, rendered through the pad's whole chain.
• The ENV and PIT lanes and the pad's PITCH row step aside. The synth has its own level curve, its own pitch curve and its own TUNE, and two envelopes fighting over one kick would help nobody.
• Everything else about the pad still applies: TRS, CRS, DRV, FLT, EQ, CMP, PAN, DUCK, the sends, choke, routing and LOCK.
• Dropping a sample on pad 1 does not switch the synth off. The sample becomes the kick's TOP layer.

The synth kick lives on pad 1 only.

There are three ways in:

• Drop a kick file anywhere on the KICK editor. The graph says DROP TO MATCH THIS KICK while you hover. WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 and OGG are accepted.
• Click MATCH (the sparkle chip on the right of the graph's caption row) and pick a file.
• Right-click the editor and choose Match a kick from a file...

The card shows LISTENING TO THE KICK... while the analysis runs in the background. First it reads the kick: where it starts, how loud it is, where it dies, and how its pitch falls from the hit to the tail. Then it rebuilds that with the actual synth. It renders the synth, compares the result with your file, adjusts, and repeats hundreds of times. It fits the pitch curve, the level curve, PUNCH, HARM and its odd/even colour, DRIVE, CLIP, LOW CUT and the click. Last, it fine-fits the first 30 ms on the waveform itself, because the first 30 ms is where a kick's hit happens.

Then it gives you two answers, each scored out of 100:

• SYNTH ONLY — the kick rebuilt entirely by the synth, every part editable. The card says REBUILT BY THE SYNTH - EVERY PART EDITABLE. When the rebuild scores under 40 (usually a file that is not really a tonal kick, like a clap-like thud or a pure noise hit), the card tells you straight: NOT A TONAL KICK - THE SYNTH CAN ONLY SKETCH IT.
• KEEP ITS CLICK — the synth builds the body and the file itself becomes the TOP layer, split at a crossover so the file's own attack sits on a synth body. The crossover is chosen for that file, never below 150 Hz. The TOP is started at the file's onset, levelled from the file's own balance of highs to lows, and phase-aligned against the body when that measures better. The card reads SYNTH BODY + THE FILE'S OWN ATTACK ON TOP, or THE FILE'S SOUND + A LIGHT SYNTH BODY UNDER IT when the file carries most of the sound.

The closer of the two is marked (BEST) and pre-selected. KEEP ITS CLICK only takes that mark when it is clearly closer, so when both are nearly equal you get the kick that is fully editable.

HEAR ORIGINAL and HEAR RESULT play the file and the selected answer at the same loudness, without the pad's inserts. Your ears compare sounds, not levels. After HEAR RESULT, clicking the other answer plays that one straight away.

Nothing changes until you press APPLY. APPLY writes the new kick with TUNE at 0 and LENGTH on free time. KEEP ITS CLICK also loads the file onto pad 1 as its TOP and opens the TOP page, so the part you kept is right in front of you. SYNTH ONLY leaves any TOP sample you already had loaded, muted. CANCEL, Esc or a click outside the card walks away with the pad untouched.

A file that cannot be read, is too short to be a kick or is silent is turned away on the card, with the reason.

The big graph edits one of two curves. PITCH is how the kick falls from the hit to its tail. AMP is how loud the body is over that time: the punch at the start and how long the tail rings. Switch with the tabs in the header, or press 1 and 2.

The time axis is logarithmic. In a short kick, the first 50 ms (the drop, the click, the punch) takes about half the width, because that is where a kick's character is decided. Pitch is drawn on a log scale from 20 Hz to 2 kHz with the A of every octave marked. AMP runs 0 to 100 %. Behind the curve is the kick itself: its waveform is re-rendered by the same engine that plays it, every time an edit settles.

• Up to 16 points per curve. Click the line to add a point; the curve does not change shape until you move it. Drag a point to move it. Double-click or right-click it to remove it. The first and last points only move up and down.
• Pitch points snap to notes. Dragging a pitch point lands it on a semitone, with a guide line showing the note. Hold SHIFT to move between notes.
• Bend rings. The small ring in the middle of each segment bends it. Drag it and the curve follows your mouse, scroll over it for small steps, double-click it to straighten the segment. This is how a drop falls fast and then settles, which is the shape a real kick's pitch has and a straight line cannot draw.
• TAIL (on the PITCH tab) shows the note the kick ends on, with cents: A1 +12c. When the tail is more than 2 cents off a note, a TUNE chip appears beside it. One click lands the tail exactly on the nearest note.
• Hover or drag a point and a small readout shows its note or level and its time.
• SPACE plays the kick.

Every edit in the KICK editor is its own undo step: a drag, a click, a menu choice, a KICKS load, an A/B switch or a MATCH APPLY.

Under the graph are three tiles, one per layer. Each has its own level (drag it up and down) and an M mute chip. Click a tile and the value row underneath becomes that layer's controls. Every value takes a drag (SHIFT for fine), a double-click to reset and a right-click to type. Typing understands ms, hz, k, st, %, off and open.

BODY — the tuned part, and the whole kick's output stage.

Keep the sub clean when driving (right-click menu, on by default) splits the kick at 100 Hz and drives only what is above it. DRIVE and CLIP add grit to the part you hear, and the sub underneath stays round and in tune.

CLICK — the synth's own attack: a short, tuned noise burst, identical on every hit.

TOP — a real sample over the synth body, split at a crossover. Your body, somebody else's attack.

The ◀ ▶ arrows on the TOP tile step through every kick in your library and play each one as you go. ✕ clears the TOP.

ALIGN is the button that makes a layered kick hit. It moves the TOP's START to the file's real onset, then tries both polarities and every offset up to 4 ms, keeps the one with the most energy around the crossover, and tells you what it won: ALIGNED +3.1 DB, or ALREADY ALIGNED. Two layers fighting at the attack is the most common reason a layered kick sounds smaller than either part on its own, and this is the fix. FLIP inverts the TOP by hand.

Body stays under the top (right-click menu, on by default) low-passes the body at the crossover while a TOP plays. The two layers share the spectrum instead of doubling up in the middle.

The KICKS chip (books icon, next to MATCH) opens the factory kicks by style, each listed with the note its tail lands on:

Every tail sits exactly on its note. Loading one replaces the synth and keeps your TOP: the sample and all its settings stay. So you can audition sixteen bodies under the same click. The chip shows the name of whatever is loaded, including the file name of a matched kick. Reset to INIT in the right-click menu goes back to the plain starting kick.

Two slots in the header for comparing versions. Switching saves the kick you are leaving into its slot and plays the other one. An empty slot starts as a copy of the kick you just left, so press B, make the bold move, and flip back to A to hear whether it was better. The slots hold the whole synth (curves, every layer setting, TUNE and LENGTH), not the TOP sample file. Both are saved with your session, so A and B are still there tomorrow. Kits don't carry them.

Right-click anywhere in the editor that is not a point:

• Keep the sub clean when driving
• Body stays under the top (split at X-OVER)
• Harmonics colour — More odd (hollow, hard), Balanced, More even (round, warm)
• Length — Free (ms), or synced from 1/32 to 1/1
• Match a kick from a file...
• Reset to INIT

• Its trigger note plays it, like any pad. It is a drum, not a keyboard synth: other notes don't play it chromatically.
• The sequencer's per-step pitch moves the body. Coarse (± 24 st) or fine (± 3 st) pitch locks transpose the body for that hit. The CLICK and the TOP stay where they are, so the attack is the same on every hit.
• Velocity scales the level when the pad is velocity sensitive, and VEL > SWEEP and VEL > LEVEL shape the drop and the click on top of that.
• Sixteen voices, choke groups and Polyphonic behave as they do on any pad.
• Out 1 is pad 1's aux by default, labelled Kick, and it stays in the main mix. Your bass can sidechain from the kick in the DAW without any extra routing.
• Ducking follows the synth. A pad that ducks from pad 1 in FOLLOW reads the synth kick's own level curve and length, so reshaping the kick reshapes the pump.
• LOCK keeps it. A locked pad 1 keeps its synth kick through every kit load and every generation. Kit loads reset an unlocked pad 1 to a sample.
• It travels with the project, and the AUDIO and STEMS drag-outs render it exactly as you hear it.

• Up to 16 patterns, each with its own name and colour if you give it one. The strip shows the patterns you have, in the order you put them, with a + to add the next.
• Up to 16 lanes — one per loaded pad, addressed by MIDI note, each with its own mute, solo, kit-load lock, focus view and grid division. A kit of ten sounds gives you ten lanes; nothing empty takes up room.
• 1 to 16 bars per pattern in 4/4 — click BARS on the controls strip to set the length — and a per-pattern time signature, numerator 1 to 16 over 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32, set in CLOCK. A pattern holds up to 64 quarter notes, so longer meters fit fewer bars: a 7/4 pattern runs to 9.
• A fixed internal resolution of 1/192 — 48 steps per quarter. The grid division you choose (1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, 1/8T, 1/16T, 1/32T) is a view. Notes never lose their timing when you change it, and a lane can override the global division while the others keep theirs. Every one of those divisions, triplets included, lands exactly on the internal grid.

TOOL picks the mouse:

• DRAW (key B, the default) — click an empty step to put a hit there at velocity 85 %, drag to paint a trail. Click a hit to remove it; drag a hit to move it. A lasso needs Shift, or Cmd from an empty step.
• SELECT (key S) — the mouse selects. A bare drag rubber-bands, a single click adds nothing, and adding a hit is a deliberate double-click.
• STAMP (key T) — opens the stamp bar, see Magic Stamps below.

LAYER picks what a drag on a hit changes: NOTES, VELOCITY, CHANCE, ROLL, WHEN, NUDGE, and in a lane's focus view PITCH and PAN. Keys 1 to 7 and 0 select them, and pressing the active layer again returns to NOTES. The selector wears the lane family's hue as a strip, and the same call-out opens from the grid, so the chips and the keys always agree.

On a value layer the mouse edits the hits that are there. Nothing is moved or removed, and a click on a hit leaves its value alone, so you can click one to hear it (the click also makes it the selection). Drag a hit up or down to change its value, and keep dragging sideways to set every hit you cross on that lane in the same stroke; a diagonal stroke draws a ramp. The tool decides how the value follows the mouse. With SELECT it moves from where the hit was (the full range takes 140 pixels, Shift for fine), and every hit you cross takes the value you are carrying. With DRAW it goes to the pointer's height, and a stroke can start on an empty step as well as on a hit. Each hit the stroke reaches is heard once as it gets its value, and a hit you drag in place is heard when you let go, at the value you set -- and every hit the grid plays for you sounds the way the pattern plays it, with its pitch and pan. Double-click a hit to put the value back to the layer's default (velocity 85 %, chance 100 %, x1, every loop, on the grid, no pitch change, centre), or right-click it to type the value in the units its badge shows: 85 (per cent, 85% types too), 1:4 or all, +2.5 ms, -3 semitones (cents on a FINE lane), L30, C or R30. Up and Down arrows step the selected hits' value, Shift for fine; Left and Right step to the previous or next hit on the lane (Shift adds it), so a lane can be levelled from the keyboard. A click on an empty step clears the selection, a double-click there adds a hit (the same one a double-click adds on NOTES), and a right-click there opens the grid menu.

Selecting works as on NOTES: Shift-click a hit, Shift-drag or Cmd-drag a frame. Cmd-click a lane name to select every hit on that lane.

STAMP drops hits, so it only works on NOTES. Pick a value layer while stamping and the stamp bar closes, handing the mouse back to DRAW or SELECT. Pick STAMP on a value layer and the layer goes back to NOTES. A note at the top of the grid says which switched.

Switching to a lock layer while the page is wider than two bars zooms to a two-bar page so the glyphs are big enough to edit, then gives you your page back when you leave.

Every lock is edited the same way: pick the layer, drag vertically on the note.

A whole selection at once. On VELOCITY, CHANCE, NUDGE, PITCH and PAN, select several hits and drag any one of them: every selected hit moves up or down by the same amount. On VELOCITY that means accents keep their shape while the part gets louder or softer. Each hit stops at the top or bottom on its own, and dragging back brings the original spread back. The full range takes 140 pixels of travel; hold Shift while dragging for fine steps. The badge reads the hit under the mouse, how far the group has moved and how many hits it holds (97% (+12) - 8 hits). A drag on a hit that is not selected, or with only one selected, is an ordinary stroke: it changes that hit, and every hit you cross on its lane, the way the tool says. ROLL and WHEN are steps rather than amounts, so a drag on them is always a stroke. A double-click reset or a typed value on a selected hit applies to the whole selection too.

To take a whole lane, Cmd-click its name or choose Select all hits in the lane menu; Shift adds it to what is already selected. A Shift-drag frame also adds to the selection, so it can grow across pages.

On the grid every lock shows on its note, in the colour of the layer that edits it, cut into a small dark pocket so it reads on any lane colour: a chance bar along the top, a ratchet split, the note shifted by its nudge, the X:Y tag (a dot when the cell is small), and one pocket in the bottom corner for pitch and pan. When the cell has room that pocket prints the values (+5 R30); when it is packed it shows an arrow per lock: up or down for pitch, left or right for pan. Hover a note to see every lock on it with its value.

PITCH and PAN turn the focused lane into that value's editor. The notes fade back, a centre line marks 0 semitones or centre, and every note carries a marker at its value with the number beside it, exactly where a drag would set it. A line joins the markers so you can read the pitch run across the bar.

Fine pitch. The PITCH row in the LAYER selector carries a small switch that changes the focused lane's pitch from semitone steps over plus/minus 24 to a continuous plus/minus 3 semitones, for tuning a hit by cents rather than by notes. Each lane keeps its own setting.

Twenty-three X:Y conditions, plus Always (the default): the step fires only on repetition X of every Y times the lane loops. 1:2 plays every other time round, 3:4 on the third pass of four, and so on, grouped in the menu by cycle length.

Two details that matter: conditions count that lane's cycles, so a 1:2 trig on a lane that loops every bar inside a four-bar pattern fires every other bar. And they survive export — a dragged-out MIDI file expands the conditions deterministically over the least common multiple of every lane's cycle (up to 64 passes), so the clip in your DAW plays the whole logic out.

Any lane can loop shorter than the pattern. Right-click a lane header and choose Lane length: whole bars for the common case, exact cell counts behind a submenu for the niche.

What makes it readable: the lane's editable loop draws at full detail, and the rest of the pattern is tiled with dimmed mirror ghosts of it, with a gold hairline at the loop end. Click a ghost and you edit the real cell it reflects. A lane with its own length wears a gold badge in its header — "2B", or "12/16" for a custom count — so a polymeter is visible without opening a menu.

The playhead still sweeps the full pattern width and lights whatever cell it is over, so you can watch the phase walk.

Long ambiences, risers and drones would normally ring on after the pattern loops. Right-click a lane header and tick Cut sound at pattern end: the moment the pattern's last bar ends (bar 4 of a 4-bar pattern), that lane's pad is cut with a short click-free fade. It is also cut when you stop playback. A hit on step 1 still restarts the sound — the cut always comes first. The cut follows the pattern's length, not a shorter lane length, and it travels with the project and with saved kits. It applies while the sequencer plays the pattern; a MIDI clip dragged into your DAW plays the notes only.

• SWING from 0 to 70 %, shifting the off-beat 1/8 positions. Steps you have nudged by hand are exempt. Ratchet sub-hits and note-repeat hits swing too.
• SPEED — 0.5x, 1x or 2x, for half-time and double-time without re-writing anything. It lives in the CLOCK panel, because it is set once per kit rather than reached while writing; whenever it is not 1x, the factor reads on the CLOCK chip next to the tempo. Loading a kit sets it for you when the kit's tempo asks for it (see Kits).
• Humanize (timing + velocity) from the lane menu, or timing-only tools: Humanize timing for subtle drift, Randomize timing for looser, Straighten timing to put everything back on the grid.
• Copy groove (timing + accents) lifts a lane's per-16th micro-timing and accent shape; Paste groove at half or full strength lays it onto any other lane in any pattern. It only touches hits that already exist, the target lane's loudest hit keeps its level, and the template tiles across a longer lane. Your swung hat lane becomes a groove template for the whole kit.

The lane menu holds every way of filling one:

• Fill — every step, every 2nd, every 4th, every 8th.
• Euclidean — pick the number of pulses, then the rotation, both bounded by the lane's own visible cells so every choice makes sense.
• Random notes.
• Trig condition — assign one condition to every note in the lane at once, or clear back to Always.

Right-click a lane header, or a pad, for the lane's own clipboard.

• Copy lane (sound + groove) copies the whole lane: the pad's sound design and the groove in every part. It goes through your computer's clipboard, so you can paste it into another kit, another instance of the plugin or another project.
• Paste lane puts it onto the lane you right-clicked. The menu names what you are about to paste. Paste only takes just the sound or just the groove, so you can put a better snare under a groove you like, or a groove you like under the snare you have.
• Pasting follows the same rules as taking a lane from the browser's lanes view: parts matched by name, the groove fitted to your part lengths, your routing and trigger notes kept, one undo step.

Clear lane and Delete lane sit on their own at the bottom of the menu, each behind a confirmation. Clear lane empties the notes in the pattern on screen and leaves the sound. Delete lane removes the lane: the sound and its settings, the groove in every part and the lane's own settings. The lane disappears from the sequencer and the pad moves to the end of the rack, so a deleted lane leaves no hole in the middle of your kit. Undo brings it all back. A locked lane cannot be deleted until you unlock it.

Press T and the stamp bar docks above the grid with seven rhythmic motifs: 4 Quarters, 2 Half Notes, 1 Bar 8ths, 1 Bar 16ths, Offbeat 8ths, 8th Triplets and 16th Triplets. Hover a lane and the motif ghosts where it would land; click to stamp it, Alt-click to merge it on top of what is there instead of replacing.

Stamps drop at the cursor, not at the start of the lane, and they are placed on the internal 1/192 timebase — so an 8th-triplet stamp is genuinely triplet, whatever division the lane is showing.

REC arms live recording. Play the pads with your fingers, a controller or BEATBOX, and the hits land on the pattern quantised to the nearest visible cell — an early hit lands on the next loop rather than a bar too late. One-shot suppression stops a live hit and its recorded step double-firing, and your playing stays audible while it records.

REC records in SEQ mode only. THRU and TRIG play live MIDI but never record it, so in those modes the REC chip is dimmed and its tooltip tells you to switch MODE to SEQ.

RPT — note repeat. Hold a pad and it retriggers on the visible grid, swing included. Combine it with REC and it prints hat rolls.

• Click a pattern chip to play it; the grid shows it. ALT-click a chip to put it on the grid while the song keeps playing -- edit the drop while the verse runs. The chip you are editing wears the selection look, the one you hear keeps a white bar along its bottom, and the pager strip under the grid says EDITING DROP PLAYING VERSE; click it to go back to the pattern you hear. Live recording always lands in the pattern you hear.
• + adds a pattern after the last one and opens its name right away. Double-click a chip to name it: type anything up to 12 characters, or click one of the part picks underneath -- INTRO, VERSE, PRE, CHORUS, DROP, BREAK, BRIDGE, OUTRO, FILL. A pick that is already taken comes out numbered (VERSE 2). Enter, a pick or a click away keeps the name; Escape leaves it as it was. The same picks are under Name as on the chip's right-click menu. An unnamed pattern shows its letter. The picks are the words ARRANGE reads -- a name of your own is fine, it just stays out of an arranged song.
• Drag a chip along the row to give it a new place; a caret shows where it lands. Drag it off the row and it is that pattern as a MIDI clip, named after it, ready to drop into your DAW.
• Right-click a chip for Rename, Colour (the eight lane colours, worn as a band along the top of the chip), Make a fill, Duplicate, Copy, Paste, Chain patterns..., Clear and Delete. Clear keeps the pattern and empties it; Delete takes the chip away. Both ask twice, and the last pattern cannot be deleted.
• When names run out of room, the chips other than the one on the grid switch to short labels -- INT, VRS, VRS2, PRE, CHR, DRP, BRK, BRG, OUT, and your own names down to their consonants (GROOVE reads GRV). No two chips ever read the same, and hovering one grows it back to its full name without moving the row. What the row has no room for waits behind a +N chip -- the rest of the strip never moves to make room. Click it and every pattern opens at full name, with its colour and states: click one to play it, ALT-click to edit it while another plays, double-click to name it, right-click for its menu, and NEW PATTERN underneath (the + folds into it while patterns are hidden). It stays open, so you can click through your patterns to hear them. The pattern on the grid is always one of the chips on show, and a wider window shows more of them.
• Make a fill -- Light, Medium or Heavy -- copies the pattern into a new pattern right after it and reshapes its last bar by role, read from each pad's sample name: snares and claps build on 16ths with rising velocity, hats gain rolls, off-beat kicks drop out so the break breathes, toms fill lightly, crashes are left for the next downbeat. Locked lanes stay untouched. A named pattern names its fill (VERSE makes VERSE FILL, and Duplicate makes VERSE 2). Nothing you made is ever written over, and the whole thing is one undo step.
• CHAIN -- your song. The link chip sits on the strip beside BARS and reads OFF until you build one. Click it and the song opens as a list: each row is a pattern, its length, and how many times it plays in a row -- VERSE x4, FILL x1. Drag the repeat well up or down (or scroll on it, double-click for x1), drag a row to a new place, hover a row for its remove x. Your patterns sit underneath, by name; a click adds one to the end, a drag takes its trigger clip into your DAW (see below). The footer adds the song up (SONG 43 BARS), ON/OFF parks it without throwing it away, and CLEAR asks twice. While it plays, the chip counts you through it -- 3/5 is the third entry of five -- and the playing row counts its passes (3/4). Every entry starts at its own bar 1 and the next takes over on its bar line, time signatures included. The song rounds when it ends; stopping the transport, looping in your DAW or clicking somewhere else on the timeline starts it again from the first entry. Clicking a chip or switching by MIDI takes over and switches the chain off. Dragging a chip out while the song is on exports the whole song, repeats and all.

• SEQ — the sequencer plays the patterns and blocks incoming MIDI notes unless REC is armed. If you play while it is blocking, the MODE cell itself says MUTED in red and falls back to SEQ about a second and a half after the last dropped note, so a held phrase reads as one steady state instead of a flicker. Switch MODE to THRU to play the pads live, or arm REC to record.
• THRU — pure MIDI passthrough. The plugin is a drum rack and your keyboard plays it.
• TRIG — incoming MIDI passes through, and holding a pattern's launch key (C0 upward) plays that pattern for as long as you hold it, stopping bar-quantised on release. Last note wins. This is the performance mode: the launch keys sit two octaves below the pads, so one keyboard plays the kit with the right hand and launches patterns with the left.

The note map: pads 1 to 16 sit chromatically from C3 (60 to 75), so pad 1, the kick, answers to C3 just as THE_PATTERN 1's kick did, and the 16 pattern launch keys sit two octaves below them, chromatically from C0 (24 to 39). One octave-down press puts the launches under your left hand with the kit still under your right. A pad answers to its own note only -- per-pad trigger notes are editable if you need a different map. Note that C0 to D#1 is inside the bottom of the GM drum range, so a GM drum clip routed to the plugin can arm patterns; keep pattern launching on its own MIDI track, or move the keys: CLOCK > MIDI > LAUNCH FROM drags the whole 16-key block anywhere, and PATTERN KEYS switches them off entirely. (TRIG always listens to them -- they are its control surface.)

MIDI pattern switching: C0 to D#1 (notes 24-39) are your patterns' launch keys. Each pattern keeps its key for good -- reorder the chips and nothing moves, so a clip in your DAW always means the same pattern. The key is in the chip's right-click header and in the +N list. A key for a pattern you have not made does nothing. Bar-quantised while playing, immediate when stopped, and a manual switch cancels a pending one. A launched pattern always starts at its own bar 1, whatever was playing before it.

Songs. MAKE SONG, ARRANGE, trigger clips and MIDI PARTS have a chapter of their own: see MAKE SONG, right after this chapter.

One chip holds the settings that you set once: SYNC (DAW or free-run), BPM for free-run from 30 to 300, SPEED (0.5x / 1x / 2x), GATE note length from 1 to 500 ms (for sounds that answer to note length; looping pads ignore it and hold to their lane's next hit), MIDI channel 1 to 16, PATTERN KEYS and LAUNCH FROM (see SEQ, THRU and TRIG), the pattern's TIME SIG, snap, MODE, note repeat and MIDI learn.

DAW follows your host's tempo and transport; BPM then shows the host's tempo and cannot be dragged. FREE runs at its own BPM and keeps playing when the host stops. The chip itself wears the state it holds — DAW 120, or FREE 128, with the speed factor beside it whenever the clock is stretched — and shows the one non-default thing when there is one, so LEARN, THRU, REPEAT or NO SNAP never hide inside a menu.

The grid DIVISION is not in there. It is a cell of its own on the transport row, between SWING and CLOCK: you reach for it constantly while writing a groove, so it is one click away and reads at a glance. Click it to pick a division, double-click to go back to 1/16; a triplet grid lights the cell so you always know when you are on one.

• The pager under the grid moves you through a pattern longer than the view: the arrows step a page, the dots jump to one, and the follow toggle flips pages with the playhead. The magnifier + and - buttons in the same strip show fewer bars per page for detailed work, or more, back to the view that fits the whole pattern.
• WAVE draws each step as the pad's actual waveform at its true musical length, in the lane's hue, bedded on a per-bar recessed well with a three-level gridline hierarchy. It reads like a DAW arrangement, which makes it the right view for judging whether a ringing tom is stepping on the next hit.
• Focus on a lane header gives that one lane the full height — and unlocks the PITCH and PAN layers. Selected hits on the lanes it hides leave the selection, so Delete, a drag or an arrow only ever touches the lane you see.

Right-click a pattern chip and pick Make song from ..., or press MAKE SONG FROM ... in the CHAIN panel while the song is empty (it is also the first row of the ARRANGE menu). That pattern becomes the main part -- DROP in a club song, CHORUS in a song or a hip-hop one, gold and first in the row -- and the other parts are written from it: a stripped-back INTRO, a VERSE of kick, backbeat and the lane that keeps time, an 8-bar BUILD whose snare or clap rolls into the drop (club), a BREAK or BRIDGE without the kick and the cymbals, and an OUTRO that winds down on the kick, the backbeat and one more lane. Then ARRANGE lays the song out in the same form, fills and all, and the CHAIN panel opens on it. The whole thing is one undo step.

It reads what every lane is from what the loop analysis heard (for a loop you just turned into a pattern), from the library, or from the sample's name, and anything it still does not know by what it plays: the lane on the downbeats is the kick, the one on 2 and 4 the backbeat, the busiest one the hat. The form is guessed from the groove -- a four-on-the-floor kick is club, a snare on 3 is hip-hop, otherwise the tempo decides -- and MADE AS CLUB / SONG / HIP HOP in the CHAIN panel remakes it in another form with one click. Parts you already have are kept, so MAKE SONG only writes the missing ones, and a part you have edited, renamed or recoloured is yours: another form never takes it away. Locked lanes play exactly as they are in every part. The same groove always makes the same parts; the fills are rolled fresh each time ARRANGE writes them.

The ARRANGE button in the CHAIN panel's title builds the song for you from your pattern names. Pick a form -- Song (verse, pre, chorus, bridge), Club (groove, build and drop), Hip-hop (hook and verse) or In order (every pattern once) -- and it reads each name for its part: INTRO, VERSE, PRE (or BUILD), CHORUS (or HOOK), DROP, BREAK, BRIDGE, OUTRO. Every part you made plays, whatever the form: a Club song grooves on its VERSE before the first build, a Hip-hop song takes its BRIDGE or BREAK before the last hook, and a song with a BRIDGE and a BREAK plays both. Numbered parts take turns -- the second verse is VERSE 2, the last chorus your last CHORUS. A part you have not made is played by its neighbour (no CHORUS: the DROP plays it; no BRIDGE: the BREAK), never invented, and the same pattern never plays twice in a row -- two sections of it become one longer one. Every section gets its usual length: a 16-bar verse from a 2-bar VERSE plays it x8.

Fills. Sections hand over with a fill. Each pattern gets one fill, sized for the biggest change it leads into -- heavier when it leads into a CHORUS or DROP, lighter when it only leads into a VERSE or the OUTRO -- and plays that fill wherever it hands over. A PRE or BUILD is already the way in and gets none, and the song ends on its last section, not on a fill. ARRANGE takes the fill you made for that pattern (VERSE FILL -- the name Make a fill gives it), else a fill named for the part, else it makes one: a new pattern right after its source, named after it (VERSE FILL) and in its colour, and the panel lists what it made. Try another form and it reuses them; the fills ARRANGE made that the new song does not play are removed again -- unless you have edited, renamed or recoloured one, which makes it yours. The chain holds 16 entries, so in a long song the lightest fills give way first. ARRANGE replaces the song as one undo step, new fills included, and everything it made is an ordinary chain of ordinary patterns you can edit. A pattern whose name says no part is left out, and the panel lists which ones.

With CHAIN on, the MIDI, AUDIO and STEMS handles export the whole song as one clip (see Getting Sound Out). For a song you want to keep arranging in your DAW, there are two more ways.

Arrange in your DAW with trigger clips. A trigger clip is one note on a pattern's launch key, named after the pattern -- one pass long for a single pattern, or a whole song part long when it comes from the song. Put the plugin in TRIG and lay the clips out on its track: each clip plays its pattern from bar 1 for as long as it lasts, a looped clip repeats it, a gap is silence -- and change a pattern in the plugin and every clip of it changes with it. They live with the song, in the CHAIN panel: drag a pattern chip out of it for that pattern's clip, or drag TRIGGER CLIPS for the whole song as trigger clips -- one clip per entry of the chain, in order and named after it (01 INTRO, 02 VERSE...), each as long as all of that entry's passes, so laid end to end they play the song. With no song built you get one clip per pattern, in chip order. Click TRIGGER CLIPS instead to save them into a folder. While MODE is not TRIG the handle says so, and a click switches it. SHIFT-drag a chip on the strip is the shortcut for one clip.

Or take the song's real notes. MIDI PARTS, under TRIGGER CLIPS, is the finished MIDI cut at the song's parts: one clip per entry of the chain, in order and named after it (01 INTRO, 02 VERSE, 03 VERSE FILL...), each holding every pass of that entry with swing, locks, ratchets, chance and conditional trigs played out exactly as the song plays them. Lay them end to end and it is the song, note for note -- and every part is its own named clip to move, cut or re-voice. With no song built yet you get one clip per pattern. They play the pads in THRU -- in SEQ the plugin ignores MIDI in and plays its own pattern -- so while MODE is not THRU the handle says so, and a click switches it. Drag it into the DAW, or click to save the clips into a folder.

YOUR KIT plays the loop's rhythm on sounds that have nothing to do with the loop. LOOP'S SOUNDS keeps the loop's own sounds, with the bass and the room baked into every slice. LIBRARY is the third answer: the closest thing to that loop you can build from clean one-shots you own.

Click LIBRARY and the card says FINDING THE CLOSEST LIBRARY SOUNDS - A MOMENT while it works, which takes a few seconds on a dense loop and longer with a very large library. It does not simply look up the sound nearest to each slice. It rebuilds the whole loop out of library sounds at the hits it heard, compares that with the original, and keeps the sounds that recreate it best. That matters, because in a real loop the kick rings under the hat and the room sits on top of everything, and a sound picked slice by slice gets fooled by exactly that. Every sound in your library can win for its own kind of drum: CORE, installed expansions, your own saves and your MY SOUNDS folders. Snares and claps can stand in for each other, and so can closed and open hats; toms, cymbals and effects compete for the OTHER row.

Every drum's row then shows its pick: the sound's name, its tuning when a semitone or two brought it closer (+2 ST), and which match it is (1/12, up to twelve per drum). The ◀ ▶ arrows step to the next-closest or previous match, and the volume and velocities follow each sound, so HEAR RESULT always plays the rebuild the way the pads will play it, as a quick mono preview.

APPLY AS NEW KIT is exactly what it says. LIBRARY builds a new kit from scratch: the rack, the master FX and every pattern are cleared, the way a kit load clears them, and the groove lands in pattern A. Each drum's pad gets its sound as a fresh pad, with no EQ or envelope left over from before, at the level and tuning the rebuild found. If you already have a kit loaded, the button asks REPLACE KIT? first. Locked pads and locked lanes keep what they have, as they do through every kit load. It is one undo step, so one Cmd+Z brings your old kit and patterns back.

The pattern LIBRARY writes is the one the rebuild heard, not the raw transcription: a doubled hit that no drum explained is gone, a clearly audible hit the first pass missed is in, and every velocity comes from how loud that hit really was in the loop.

If your library has no sounds yet, the card says so and points you at the content and at MY SOUNDS.

Drop a MIDI file on a lane and it lands there as notes. Drop a pattern from the library and it ghosts in as a teal preview before it commits.

BEATBOX doesn't care whether the sound comes from your mouth. THE_BRIDGE plays whatever you taught it, so you can drum the groove on your desk instead. Click THE_BRIDGE's KICK card and knock on the desk eight times. Teach SNARE a slap, HAT a fingertip tap, or whatever three sounds feel natural to you, and keep them clearly different. Turn on ONLY YOURS so the mouth-sound defaults stay quiet, and teach IGNORE the bump of your hand landing if it fires hits. Then press LISTEN in THE_PATTERN 2 and play: the knock plays the kick pad, and with REC armed it lands on the grid. SAVE KIT in THE_BRIDGE keeps your desk kit for next time.

Sounds, Patterns and Kits, each with a TYPE column (kick, snare, hat, clap, open hat, tom, crash, perc...), a multi-select TAGS column, a text search (just start typing — an open browser owns the keyboard, so there is no field to click into and no Cmd combo for your DAW to swallow; Cmd+F still works if you reach for it, and Esc unwinds one layer per press: the similarity result, then the search, then the field) and source chips for CORE, your user library, installed expansions and each of your own folders.

Favourites — the star on any sound, pattern or kit. Stored per machine and shared between every instance and every session, so a sound you starred while writing is starred when you open tomorrow's project.

• Sounds preview on click; a double-click, a drag onto a pad or Enter loads one. The small icon just left of a sound's star starts Find similar sounds from that sound, and clicking a row's source label filters the list to that source.
• Kits play through a private preview engine — a second sampler and sequencer pair that auditions a kit without touching your live rack, and costs nothing when idle. You hear the kit with its groove before you commit. While a kit is playing, Up and Down move to the next kit and play that one instead, so you can step through kits the way you step through sounds. Enter loads the one you are hearing.
• Patterns skim: with a lane selected, click a pattern or use the arrow keys and it plays live in that lane. Enter or a double-click keeps it. Esc puts the original back — complete. Velocity, chance, roll, nudge, pitch, pan, the conditions and the lane's own length all come back exactly as they were.

A kit is an instrument plus its grooves, never a session. Loading one brings the sounds, the pads' full sound design, the patterns and the feel controls that belong to a groove — the free-run tempo, the division, swing, speed and gate. A kit also carries the tempo it was written at, and loading its patterns fits the clock to it: a 70-BPM kit in a 140-BPM project comes in at half-time, a 140-BPM kit in a 70-BPM project at double-time, and the plugin says which it did. This happens however the kit arrives — picked from the list, dropped on the grid, or generated. It does not arm your record button, change your DAW sync, or bring somebody else's solos and lane locks into your project. Mutes do travel, because a muted lane is part of how a groove was written.

A kit also keeps its patterns as you left them: which ones exist, their names, colours and order, and the song chain with its repeats.

Three load buttons on every kit row: full kit, sounds only, or patterns only. Sounds-only over your own pattern is how you audition a kit against what you have written.

Pad and lane locks are respected by every load and every generation. Lock the kick pad and the kick survives ten kits. Lock a lane and your hat pattern stays while everything else changes.

If something in a kit cannot be resolved — a missing pack, moved content — it tells you, in an alert and on the pad itself. No silent half-loads.

The hats in that other kit are exactly right, and the rest of your kit is staying. You do not have to load the other kit to get them.

Click the lanes icon next to a kit's star. The list makes way for that kit's lanes, one tile each: its colour, its name, how long its groove is, and the groove itself, drawn as it will play on the pattern you have on screen. Nothing has loaded. Your kit is untouched.

Click a tile to hear the lane in your groove. It plays on top of your kit, in time with your sequencer, with your swing and through your own master chain at your master level, so the question you answer is "does this fit", not "is this a nice sound". When your song moves to the next part, the lane moves to its part too. If your sequencer is stopped, the lane plays on its own at your tempo. Click it again to stop it. Cmd-click or Shift-click builds a set and plays the lanes together, the open and closed hat as a pair. While a lane plays, its tile shows where the loop is: the part already played fills with the lane's colour up to a thin white playhead, hits light up as they sound, and the play mark pulses on every beat, so a bar of rest still visibly moves.

Up and Down step through the kits without leaving the view, and what you were hearing carries over: listen to lane 3 of one kit, press Down, and you hear lane 3 of the next. Hats against hats, down the whole library. Left and Right walk the tiles of one kit, playing each. Esc stops what is playing, then clears the selection, then goes back to the list.

Take it in whichever way fits the moment:

• Drag it onto a pad or onto a lane to replace that lane. While you hover, the lane underneath falls silent and the new one plays in its place, so you hear the swap before you let go.
• Drag it between two pads, or onto the edge between two lanes, to add it. The row opens where it will land: the pads step aside for an empty one, the lanes below move down for an empty row with the new groove already drawn in it.
• Double-click a tile, press Enter or click ADD TO KIT to put it on the first empty pad.
• Right-click a tile to replace a lane you pick from a list, or to copy it.

A set of lanes lands on neighbouring pads, in the order the tiles show. Every take is one undo step.

What comes with a lane. The pad's whole sound design — every layer, the inserts, both envelopes, the ducker's shape, the kick synth — and its groove in every part, with every lock: velocity, chance, roll, nudge, pitch, pan and conditions. The lane's own settings come too: its length, its division, Cut sound at pattern end, fine pitch. A taken lane is never muted; you took it to hear it.

How it fits your song. Parts are matched by name: the source kit's BREAK goes into your BREAK, its VERSE into your VERSE. Unnamed parts are matched by position. A part of yours that the source kit does not have gets the lane's main groove, the one you auditioned. A one-bar groove in a two-bar part repeats, so every bar has real hits you can edit. A groove that does not divide your part keeps looping at its own length. A groove longer than your part lengthens the part, and your other lanes are repeated into the new bars so they sound exactly as before. The one exception is a song chain: there a longer part would change the timing of the whole song, so the groove is trimmed instead, and the plugin says so.

What stays yours. The trigger note, the output routing and MIDI learn belong to the pad the lane lands on, not to the lane. A locked lane refuses, and says why. Choke groups come in with a fresh number no other pad of yours uses, so an open and closed hat taken together still choke each other and nothing else. A ducker listening to a pad that did not come along is switched off, and the plugin tells you.

Right-click any pad and choose Find similar sounds. The browser ranks your entire installed library by how much it actually sounds like that sound.

It is not filename matching and it is not machine learning. It is a 21-dimension perceptual descriptor — spectral shape, decay, transient character, noisiness, the whole envelope — measured for every sound and compared honestly. Loudness is deliberately not a dimension: everything is peak-normalised before analysis, so a quiet clap and a loud clap are neighbours, as they should be.

Role mismatch is a soft penalty and never a filter, because a clap is very often the right answer for "something like this snare". The library shows it: in CORE, one clap's closest match is a snare, ahead of every other clap.

Every sound is measured once, when it joins the library, so the ranking is there the moment you ask for it. There is nothing to bake and nothing to wait for.

The toolbar's map button turns the library into a picture.

Every sound in your library is a point, placed so that sounds that measure alike sit together. Nobody drew this: kicks form their own island, snares and claps sit adjacent, hats and open hats hold the far end, and percussion smears across everything because percussion genuinely is a catch-all. The families arrange themselves.

• Your loaded kit is marked on it in white. Two of your pads sitting on top of each other are two sounds of the same character, doing the same job in your kit. That is the insight a ranked list cannot give you.
• The legend is a filter. Click a family to show only it; click again for all. Filtered-out points stay as faint ghosts so the map keeps its shape and you never lose your bearings.
• Zoom from 1x to 40x with the scroll wheel at the cursor, drag empty space to pan, double-click empty space to fit. Names appear above 6x and are dropped rather than overlapped when they collide.
• Opening the map from a pad centres it on that pad's neighbours. FIT shows you the whole library again.
• 3D (the 2D | 3D chips in the map's header) flips the cloud into three dimensions and unfolds it in one motion. The 3D view grows out of the flat map, so nothing jumps. Orbit it, and the families become a galaxy.

Coordinates are cached, and new sounds are placed next to their neighbours rather than triggering a re-layout. A map that rearranges itself every time you add a folder would be worse than no map.

Everyone has the folder. Twenty gigabytes of samples off five different drives, named by five different people, half of it called Audio 14.wav. It is the reason most people keep using the same eleven sounds.

Press the folder button in the browser toolbar, or just drop a folder anywhere on the browser, and MY SOUNDS takes it apart.

Your files are never moved, copied or renamed. The folder stays exactly where it is on your disk. THE_PATTERN 2 only reads it.

For every file, the scan answers three questions:

• Is it a drum sound at all? A loop — several hits on a grid, or a bar that never decays — is left out. So is tonal, vocal or musical material, anything far too long, and anything that does not resemble the drum library at all. A drum machine wants the one-shots.
• What is it? The role comes from the filename when the filename actually says, and otherwise from a vote of the nearest sounds in the library — the same 21-dimension descriptor that powers Find Similar. So "what is this" and "what is this like" can never disagree with each other.
• How is it filed? Tags are inherited from the closest matches in CORE and your installed packs, plus any library tag your folder path spells out — a folder called Techno Kicks tags its contents accordingly. Your sounds land under the same tag facets as factory content, instead of under a meaningless "custom".

The audio decides whether a file is a hit at all. A file called Snare Riser is still a riser, and it is left out. The name only decides which drum a hit is, and only when it actually names one. Filenames lie, and half of every real folder is Audio 14.wav, so those are decided by ear.

Your own folders are deliberately excluded from the reference set the scan learns from, so a folder can never end up tagging itself from its own guesses.

Point it at a whole sample drive. MY SOUNDS is built for the real thing: the top folder of a drive with hundreds of thousands of files. The scan runs in the background while you work, and it keeps what it has done as it goes, so closing the plugin halfway through loses nothing: the next time you open it, the scan carries on where it stopped. Anything longer than 12 seconds is left out as TOO LONG FOR A DRUM HIT without even being read, which is what keeps the songs, stems and field recordings on a drive from slowing it down. Hidden files, system folders and the little ._ files macOS leaves on shared drives are skipped, and a folder shortcut that points back at itself cannot send the scan in circles. With several instances of THE_PATTERN 2 open, in one DAW or in two, only one of them scans, and the others pick up its results.

Two halves, in working order.

FOLDERS — everything you have added, and what each one actually gave you: how many sounds went into the library, how many files were left out, and the progress bar while a scan is running. Per folder: SHOW filters the list to it, RESCAN, LOCATE when a drive has moved and the row reads FOLDER NOT FOUND, and remove.

LEFT OUT — and this is the half that matters. Every single file the scan kept out, with the reason written on it, in its own words: LOOP - 7 HITS. TOO LONG FOR A DRUM HIT. SUSTAINED - NOT A HIT. SOUNDS LIKE A TEXTURE - NOT A HIT. NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE DRUM LIBRARY. Click any row to hear it. Press KEEP and it goes into the library anyway.

Nothing is ever silently discarded. A scanner that quietly throws away a fifth of your folder is a scanner you cannot trust, so every exclusion is listed, playable and reversible. Files you excluded yourself are grouped separately under LEFT OUT BY YOU, so your decisions never look like the scanner's.

New files appear on their own. When you open the plugin, anything added to or removed from a registered folder since last time is picked up quietly in the background — it only speaks up when it found something. Your project never waits for it: the plugin opens straight away, however big your folders are, and your own sounds join the browser a moment later.

Once a sound is in, it is in properly. It is fingerprinted, so it turns up in Find similar sounds and takes its place on the SOUND MAP among the factory sounds. It can be filtered by role and tag, starred as a favourite, dragged onto a pad, and picked up by GENERATE like anything else — which is the real payoff: generation starts drawing on your sounds, not just mine.

Right-click one of your sounds in the list for Rename / edit tags, Leave out of the library, and Show in Finder. Only what differs from the scan's own answer is stored as your edit, so BACK TO AUTO still reaches everything you left alone — and a smarter scan in a future update improves the sounds you never touched, without overwriting the ones you named yourself.

Four saves, all of which produce first-class library content, indexed and filterable exactly like factory content:

• Save kit — snapshots the entire live rack, with a name, tags and BPM. Any loose samples are copied into your library and re-pointed, so the kit is portable.
• Save lane as pattern — right-click a lane header. That one lane becomes a reusable pattern: name (seeded from the sound), role (inferred — a closed-hat lane pre-fills "hat"), the BPM it was written at, and tags. Length follows the lane, so a 1-bar hat inside a 4-bar pattern saves as a 1-bar pattern, not three bars of padding. Micro-timing, exact velocities and every per-step lock are preserved, while the file itself stays an ordinary MIDI file that any DAW can read.
• Save multisample — the save icon in the sample editor header, or Save to library on a pad with more than one layer. The whole pad as one sound: every layer, the map, the layer offsets and the shaping, with any outside samples copied in. Drop it on a pad later and the stack rebuilds itself.
• Save sound to library — Save to library on a pad holding a single sample from outside the library. It is copied in with its role and tags, which is what makes a kit you built from desktop drops portable. The entry is hidden for a single sound that is already library content, because it already is.

A name that is already taken turns SAVE into an OVERWRITE, and overwriting keeps the item's ID — so re-saving is an edit of the same item, not a new one that orphans every kit referencing the old. A free name never overwrites anything.

One item in the pad menu, when any pad holds a file from outside the library: every loose sample in the rack — all layers included — is copied into your user library and the pads are re-pointed at the copies. Trim, FX, layers and locks all survive. One undo step, and a toast tells you how many moved.

This is what makes a session you built from desktop drops portable to another machine.

The store is where new content arrives. It fetches the hosted catalogue of packs, badges what is new, and downloads and installs inside the plugin. Every expansion is free.

DOWNLOAD ALL in the store's header gets every pack you do not have yet in one click; the button tells you how much that is. Packs download one after another: the one on its way shows its progress, the rest read QUEUED, and the header counts what is left. You can keep clicking DOWNLOAD on single packs while another one is coming in; they queue instead of waiting for you. The X on a row takes that pack out of the queue, and CANCEL ALL stops the lot. A cancelled download picks up where it stopped the next time you ask for it.

Downloads carry on when you close the store or the plugin window, and the store's button in the browser toolbar turns into a progress ring so you can see one is running. Each pack shows up in your library the moment it lands. If you quit your DAW halfway through, the plugin picks the download back up the next time you open it. If a pack cannot download, its row says why and offers RETRY.

If your library came from the PHIL SPEISER Control Center with CORE only, the first time you open THE_PATTERN 2 a COMPLETE YOUR LIBRARY card lists the free expansions you do not have yet, all ticked, with the total size on DOWNLOAD. Untick the row for none, or click CHOOSE... to pick from the list. NOT NOW (or Esc) closes it; the store keeps them for later.

When the store has packs you do not have yet (a new release, a new version of one you have, or packs your library is missing), a small card drops in under the browser's toolbar the next time you open the plugin. DOWNLOAD (or DOWNLOAD ALL) starts them right there and opens the store to show them coming in. NOT NOW puts the card away. You see each pack on this card once, on this machine, across every instance. The download button's dot stays lit until you have had the store open once.

The first time you open THE_PATTERN 2, a card asks where your library should live. GET CONTENT downloads your library once, CORE first and then the free expansions, and the card tells you how much that is. INCLUDE THE FREE EXPANSIONS is ticked for all of them; untick it for CORE alone, or click CHOOSE... to pick packs from a list you can filter by typing, with ALL and NONE for whatever the filter shows. Anything you leave out stays in the store for later. You can play as soon as CORE is in, and the expansions keep arriving in the background: USE THE DEFAULT LOCATION keeps it with the rest of your PHIL SPEISER content, and CHOOSE A FOLDER... puts it anywhere, an external drive included. Already have it? LOCATE FOLDER points the plugin at it. CONTINUE WITHOUT CONTENT lets you start on your own sounds. The library sits in a THE_PATTERN 2 CONTENT folder with Packs and User inside. If the drive is not connected, the card says so and offers TRY AGAIN, and pads that failed to load while content was missing retry themselves once it appears.

I was pickiest about this part, because the obvious implementation sounds terrible.

Procedural generation — euclidean patterns, density parameters, random sounds by role and tag — sounds random, because it is. What you want is something that sounds like a producer made it.

So generation starts from one authored kit. The pool is every kit in the library matching your tags; one is chosen, and its groove comes across with it. Kick, snare and clap stay exactly as that kit wrote them, unless your words ask for a different one, because the relationship between them is the groove. The other lanes stay too, unless VARIATION re-grooves them.

Then every sound is replaced by a close fingerprint neighbour of that kit's own sound for that lane — same role, level-matched to the sound it replaces, pitch-matched when both sounds have a clear pitch, and kept from landing on top of another lane's sound. Not a random draw from a tag: a close relative, at the authored level. Novelty without losing the kit's character.

And then it judges the result. Several candidate sound sets are built for the same groove, and the one that measures closest to the original authored kit wins — spectral balance, how much the lanes collide in frequency and time, how much the kit rings, level spread, punch. All measured from what is already known about the sounds, so it takes a fraction of a second and nothing is rendered.

The authored kit is the curation. Everything else is a careful variation on it.

And it arrives as a song. The kit it grew from is a song -- its DROP or CHORUS plus its INTRO, VERSE, BUILD, BREAK and OUTRO -- and the generated kit brings every one of those parts along, played by the new sounds, in the same colours and the same order. A lane that got a new groove carries it into every part where that lane simply played the main groove; where a part does something of its own on that lane -- the roll in a BUILD, the thinned hats in a VERSE -- the part keeps it. Open CHAIN, press ARRANGE, and the song is laid out. A kit that grew from a one-pattern kit arrives as one groove: MAKE SONG writes the rest.

Three wells on the result page, which persist for the session and feed every reroll:

• DENSITY — how busy the groove that gets picked is.
• ENERGY — how hard the kit hits.
• VARIATION — how likely a non-rhythm lane is to be re-grooved, with the replacement feel-matched for density and swing to the pattern it replaces.

Double-click any lever to return it to the engine default.

• REGENERATE KIT — same vibe, new roll.
• REROLL SOUNDS — keep the grooves, change the kit. The song's parts stay as they are.
• REROLL PATTERNS — keep the sounds, change the grooves, and take the parts of the kit the new grooves come from. Tempo is preserved.
• Reroll sound and Reroll pattern in a lane's right-click menu — one lane at a time, which is how you fix the one thing that is wrong instead of rolling the dice on everything.

Locked pads and locked lanes are never touched. The generation, including its animated reveal, is a single undo step.

The plugin declares a MIDI output. In SEQ, what leaves is the sequencer's own notes plus the CC20/21/25 lock stream; in THRU, the passthrough. So your DAW can record the pattern as MIDI live, or the drum machine can drive another instrument — no drag-out needed.

121 parameters are published to your DAW with stable names, indexed by pad rather than by sample: per pad Volume, Pitch, Pan, Cutoff, Decay, Reverb send and Delay send, plus Master Volume, Reverb and Delay level, Comp threshold and mix, Tone tilt, Drive, Width and Limiter ceiling.

It works in both directions. Automation from the host reaches the rack safely, and moves you make in the plugin are mirrored back with proper gestures at 30 Hz — so a knob drag records as automation, and kit loads, undo, session restore and MIDI-learn moves keep your DAW's parameter list current instead of letting a stale value stomp your rack on reload.

One main stereo pair plus eight stereo aux outputs, all declared active so Live's VST3 routing behaves. Route any pad to Out 1 to 8 — Out 1 is labelled Kick, because that is what it is usually for — and optionally keep it in the main mix as well, when you want the aux as a tap for a sidechain rather than a move.

A pad routed to a bus that is not enabled falls back to main, so this is always safe to set.

This is the whole instrument in one pass, and you never leave the plugin.

1. Drag a drum loop you like onto the sequencer. Take LIBRARY as the result, compare HEAR LOOP with HEAR RESULT, and press APPLY AS NEW KIT. The groove now plays on a clean kit from your own library.
2. Click the SYNTH chip on pad 1 and drop a reference kick on the KICK editor. MATCH rebuilds it; APPLY the closer answer and drag the last pitch point onto the root of your track.
3. Open the SOUND MAP. If two white markers sit on top of each other, those two pads are doing the same job. Right-click one of them, Find similar sounds, and take a neighbour from a clear part of the cloud.
4. Right-click the pattern chip and choose Make song from .... The intro, verse, break and outro are written from your groove (plus the build, in a club song), fills included, and the CHAIN panel opens on the song.
5. With CHAIN on, drag the MIDI handle into your DAW. The whole song arrives as one clip.

Open the plugin, go to Kits, press play on a few until one moves you, load it. Hit the pattern chips to hear its grooves. Right-click the pattern chip and make a fill. Open CHAIN and make it VERSE x3 then the fill. Drag the MIDI out.

Drag the reference loop onto the sequencer. Take YOUR KIT as the result and check the tempo chip against what your track is actually doing. Apply. You now have the reference's rhythm played by your sounds — a starting point, not a copy, because you will change it.

You love a loop, but you can't use the file: it has a bass under the kick, a room on everything, and it isn't yours. Drag it onto the sequencer and pick LIBRARY. Give it a moment, then press HEAR LOOP and HEAR RESULT in turn. If one drum is off — say the snare is too bright — step its row's arrows to the next match and listen again. Then APPLY AS NEW KIT. You get a clean kit of one-shots from your own library, playing the loop's groove, with every pad free to be processed on its own.

Start THE_BRIDGE, click the mouth mark and press LISTEN. Make sure MODE is on SEQ, arm REC, start playback and beatbox the groove in your head. It lands on the grid. Tidy two hits, then GENERATE with the lanes locked to hear your groove on a different kit.

Drag the break onto the sequencer and choose CHOP. Press EDIT CUTS and fix the two cuts the detector got wrong. Apply. Now mute a piece, move two hits, drop the chance on a third to 60 %, and set the hat lane to three bars so it walks against the loop.

Load the kick you love onto pad 1 and lock the pad. Type the vibe into GENERATE. Every kit it rolls keeps your kick and builds around it. When one lane is wrong, right-click that lane and reroll just its sound.

Your kit is right except the hats. Go to Kits and click the lanes icon of a kit whose hats you like. Click its hat tile: the hats play in your groove, in time, through your master. Press Down to hear the same lane of the next kit, and the next, until one sits. Then Cmd-click its open hat as well, so the pair plays together, and drag both onto your hat lanes. Your old hats fall silent while you hover, and you hear the new pair in their place before you let go. They arrive with their choke intact, their groove in every part of your song, and one undo step to take them back.

Drop the folder on the browser. Let it listen — it runs in the background while you keep working. Then open MY SOUNDS and read the LEFT OUT list: play a few, and KEEP the ones you disagree with. Now filter the Sounds list by kick and your source chip, and see your own kicks filed next to mine. From here on, Find Similar and GENERATE reach into your library too.

Open the SOUND MAP with your kit loaded. Look for two white markers sitting on top of each other: two sounds of the same character, doing the same job in your kit. Right-click one pad, Find similar sounds, and take a neighbour from a different part of the cloud. Nothing else about the kit changes.

Drop the reference kick on pad 1's KICK editor. Listen to both answers with HEAR RESULT, check them against HEAR ORIGINAL, and APPLY the closer one. Now it is yours: click the TUNE chip so the tail lands on a note, then drag the last pitch point to the root of your track. SHIFT-drag LENGTH down until the tail clears the next hit. If the rebuilt click is not quite it, match again with KEEP ITS CLICK and let the file supply the attack.

On a synth kick, read TAIL on the PITCH tab and drag the last pitch point to your root, or move TUNE. The CLICK and the TOP stay where they are, so the attack does not change. On a sample kick, look at the pad's pitch readout: it shows the detected note. Set it to the root of your track, then open PIT and give it a few semitones of drop with a short decay, so the attack keeps its click and the body lands in key.

Switch MODE to TRIG. Now the patterns are under your fingers: hold a pattern's note and it plays for as long as you hold it, stopping cleanly at the bar. Map the lane mutes to a controller with MIDI learn and perform the arrangement.

Route the kick to Out 1 and keep it in the main mix, so your bass can sidechain from it without you bouncing anything. Or drag the STEMS handle and hand your mixer one WAV per lane, pad processing included and master glue left off.