Owner's guide · No. 02
Playing GLIDE
Four rows of keys, played like four strings, gliding between whatever you press. The scale is handled for you, so the first thing you press already sounds right.
Two takes, no edits. The first is the slide; the second is what a backing and a solo sound like from one pair of hands.
The slide
Backing and solo
You can't really hit a wrong note.
Every key is a note of the current scale — A minor pentatonic out of the box — so there are no dead keys and nothing to avoid. Press anything. The skill isn't finding the right note; it's how you move between them.
Left to right walks up the scale. Each row is a register of its own, and behaves like a string: one voice at a time, gliding between whatever you press on it.
| shift (hold) | the notes between — off-scale semitones, only while held |
| - / = | octave down / up |
| [ / ] | bend down / up |
| space | sustain |
| bksp | panic — silences everything |
| ctrl / opt | volume down / up |
| \ | tap tempo — tap it in time |
| fn + q..p | switch between the ten sounds, live |
| fn + k / fn + s | key up a semitone / next scale (add shift to go back) |
| fn + a | arpeggiate the backing chords |
| alt | the loop pedal (left thumb) |
| enter | tilt on / off |
| tab | settings — and a full help screen |
The whole manual is on the device
Press tab for settings, then open help. Every gesture on this page is listed there, so you're never stuck without it.
Four gestures. The first two take a minute; the third is the one people keep the device for.
Hammer-on
The voice glides to the new note instead of restarting. No new attack, no click — one continuous line, exactly like sliding a finger up a string.
Pull-off
It glides back down to the key you're still holding. Hammer and pull together give you trills, grace notes, and the lazy scoops that make a line sound played rather than typed.
Slide a chord — this is the thing
Hold two or three keys across different rows, then move that shape while the old notes still ring. Every voice glides to its new home at once. It's the gesture no ordinary keyboard can make.
The notes in between
Pure chromatic semitones for as long as you hold it. The scale keeps you safe; shift is how you earn the notes it was protecting you from. It's momentary on purpose — let go and you're back on safe ground.
The big waveform is the real output, drawn with a phosphor afterglow. The readout above it tracks the lead voice in cents through a glide, so you can watch a slide land.
Settings → Display swaps it for the pitch trail: pitch drawn over time across about seven seconds, with gridlines on the root. Every glide and bend becomes a visible curve.
| top left | the sound's name |
| top middle | key and scale |
| OCTn | which octave you're in |
| vox | voices sounding, against the cap |
| a * | the sound has unsaved edits |
Tilt
enter turns it on. Lean the device forward and back to morph toward the sound you were last on; tilt it side to side for vibrato. It is never pitch bend — that's what [ and ] are for. Settings → Tilt center teaches it where your flat is.
Ten sounds sit on fn+q..p, switchable while you play. Eight are a curated bank. The last two are not like anyone else's.
o and p are rolled for your device alone
Those two slots are generated from a seed created on your Cardputer's very first boot, so no other unit on Earth has them. They aren't stored — they're re-derived from that seed every time, which is why a factory reset brings them back exactly as you know them.
Press tab for settings — Randomize and Mutate are the two big buttons at the top. Every action auditions itself on the spot with a short lick, so you can judge two rolls by ear.
| Randomize | A whole new sound, and a whole new kind of sound. Each roll commits to a character first — a pluck that stops, a bell that rings, a pad that swells, an acid squelch, a wobble bass, a bowed string section, or pure chaos — then paints inside that character's bounds. Guardrails mean a roll is never dead, blown out, or off-key. Roll until you love one. |
| Mutate | Don't start over — evolve what you have. Gentle keeps the character and nudges it; wild rewrites it. Sculpting toward a vibe instead of pulling a slot machine. |
| Undo / Redo | Every roll and mutate checkpoints first. You can always step back to the sound you just had, so nothing you liked is ever one tap from gone. |
| Init | A blank, neutral sound to build up by hand. |
Fast — onto a slot. fn+shift+q..p saves the live sound over that slot. Your ten favourites, always a chord away.
A * in the switch list marks a slot holding a sound of your own.
Unlimited — onto the card. Settings → Save to SD writes a .gpat file, offering the sound's own auto-name (warm-haze-3f) — press enter to keep it or type your own. Load from SD browses the whole library back.
No card? The instrument plays perfectly without one. Want a head start? Eighteen of the maker's own sounds are ready to drop onto a card.
Nothing you save is at risk from an update
Slots, settings and card files all live outside the program, in a format built to be added to rather than replaced. Installing a new GLIDE cannot touch them — see the updating guide.
Three ways to put something underneath you. All are performance state: they live until you clear them or power off, and none touch your saved sounds.
Drones — the zero-timing option
The bottom row latches. Tap a key and it rings an octave down, hands-free, until you tap it again. Lay down a root, or a root and a fifth, and solo on the rows above. Drones never compete with your lead for voices, and your bends and vibrato move only the solo.
A chord progression, spelled with no timing at all
Tap the chords you want in order on the bottom row — four taps for I–IV–V–IV. No metronome, no pocket to hit. The clock walks them one chord per bar, looping, gliding between them, while you solo on top. Each step is a real triad from the current scale, so the backing is in key too.
The loop pedal
It records the performance, not the audio — so the loop plays through whichever sound is selected. Record a bassline, switch to a lead, and the whole arrangement re-voices itself. Hold alt to clear; fn+alt peels the last overdub back off.
Change your sound over a running jam and the split appears
Switch patches while a backing is going and it keeps the sound it was playing, while the new one becomes your solo voice. Same for octave: shift up and only the solo moves. Lay down a pad, flip to a lead, wail over it. An amber LK marks the split; bksp clears everything and drops it.
Hold fn+k and GLIDE goes quiet and listens. The mic works out the song's key and mode from a few seconds of it, and the instrument retunes so your scale fits what's playing. If it lands close but not quite, tap space on the result card to cycle the other likely readings, applied live. A quiet room changes nothing and says so. Tapping fn+k on its own just walks the key up a semitone by hand.
Switch ON, then plug USB-C into the port on the side. Any phone charger or computer port will do. It charges slowly, but lasts a long time once full.
You can leave GLIDE running the whole time. It dims itself after a while and then drifts into a screensaver, so nothing is burning into the panel — and any key wakes it and plays the note, so the first touch back is never wasted.
Restart into Launcher, open CFG, and choose charge mode. The screen drops to a dim battery percentage and stays there — the tidiest way to leave it charging overnight on a desk.
They look identical and they do completely different things. Worth learning once.
Restarts the whole device. Nothing is lost — your sounds live in the Cardputer's memory, not in the program. This is the reliable way back to Launcher: press it, then tap any key as the device comes up. You'll use it every time you update GLIDE.
Yours to assign. While you play it fires the trigger macro — muffle by default, and settings will swap it for brighten, a pitch dive, or drive grit, as a momentary press or a latch. It never restarts anything.
I plugged it in and nothing happened.
The side switch was off. Slide it to ON and plug in again — that's nearly always all it is.
On battery it shows the Launcher logo, then restarts — over and over.
A completely flat battery, not a broken unit. Switch ON, plug in, choose charge mode, and give it a full hour — an empty cell charges slowly at first and can read full while plugged in. Trust the hour, not the number.
I want to get out of GLIDE and back to Launcher.
Press the left trigger, BTN RST, then tap any key as the device comes back up. Holding ` inside GLIDE only restarts GLIDE — you'll land back at its splash.
The screen went dark on its own.
That's the idle dimming, and then the screensaver. Any key wakes it and plays the note, so the first touch back is never wasted. Settings → Screen idle turns it off if you'd rather.
Watching the battery
Below 25% the perform screen says so, and at 10% it blinks red — a pocket instrument should never die mid-jam without warning. Settings always shows the exact percentage if you want to check before heading out.
None of this is needed on day one. All of it is waiting on the same keyboard, and every piece locks to the same clock.
Key and mood, under one finger
fn+k walks the key up a semitone; fn+s walks the scale — pentatonics, the modes, blues, a few exotics — and the screen names each one in full. Held notes keep ringing, new notes land in the new scale. Play a phrase, tap, play again, until it locks in with whatever's on.
The arpeggiator
With a progression on the bottom row, fn+a breaks each chord into notes instead of holding it: up, down, up-and-down, off. fn+z steps the rate from eighths to sixteenths, fn+x stretches it over two octaves. It always starts off after a restart, so you can never be stuck in it.
One clock for everything
Tap \ in time and the jam tempo follows your hand. One tap only reports the tempo; it takes two to move it, so a stray press can't derail a jam. fn+\ adds a soft wood-block click with a brighter tick on beat one; fn+ctrl/opt sets its volume. LISTEN sets the same clock by ear when a song has a confident beat.
An echo that stays on the beat
Lock the delay to a division — quarter, dotted eighth, eighth, triplet, sixteenth — and every repeat lands in the pocket of the progression. Chorus, delay and reverb are all live in settings and save with the slot, so the space is part of the sound.
Two macros that move on their own
Most trigger actions are a throw: muffle, brighten, a pitch dive, drive grit. Two of them run in time. Wah sweeps a resonant peak once every two beats; gate chops the whole instrument on sixteenths. Put either on latch, hold a chord, tap the trigger, and play over your own moving texture.
The instrument teaches you
A fresh unit boots into a sixty-second tour that asks for one gesture at a time and only moves on when your fingers do it. ` skips; settings → Tutorial replays it, which is the thing to hand a friend. After that, one-shot tips appear only at the moment a gesture would have helped, and each one fires exactly once, ever.
Past this page
The sound engine, the modulation matrix and the palette have a guide of their own. Every key, setting and range is on the reference page. Eighteen of the maker's own sounds are in the library, ready for a card. And if something looks wrong, start here.