Owner's guide · No. 03
Making sounds that are yours
The factory bank is a floor, not a ceiling. This is how the roll works, what the fourteen characters are, and how two people with the same device end up with sounds that share no DNA.
You can't break a saved sound.
Every roll, mutate and init checkpoints first, so Undo always steps back to the sound you just had. The ten slots don't change until you shift-save over one. Roll as hard as you like. Or start from one of the maker's own sounds and take it apart.
Press tab. Randomize is the first big button. Each tap does three things in order, and the order is why a roll is never garbage.
It commits to a character first.
A pluck that stops, a bell that rings, a pad that swells. The roll picks one of fourteen before it touches a single knob. Older generators drew every parameter independently from the middle, which is why everything they made sounded like the same buzzy wave with a different reverb.
Then it paints inside that character's bounds.
Every parameter is drawn from the window that character owns, and that window is finally allowed to reach the extremes: zero sustain for a pluck, a slow swell for a pad, a three-and-a-half-octave squelch for acid. A small chance of one off-character twist keeps the families connected instead of turning into fourteen presets with jitter.
Then the guardrails pass.
A deterministic sweep kills the known ways an in-range roll still sounds bad: a highpass parked so high the note whispers away, screaming resonance on heavy drive, echo and hall washing into mush, a struck sound with no body, a glide too slow to ever land on a pitch, and any pitch wobble past about a semitone. Then it names the sound after what it hears in it, and auditions it with a short lick so you can judge two rolls by ear.
Nine core families make up about three-quarters of rolls, with pads the most common. The five newer ones are weighted as discoveries, so the bank keeps its identity.
| Mutate | Don't start over: evolve what you have. Mutate amt sets how far. Gentle is a neighbour, same character nudged. Wild rewrites it. Sculpting toward a vibe instead of pulling a slot machine. Your own deliberate settings are never "corrected" by it; it only clamps what it rewires itself. |
| Undo / Redo | Walk your history. Nothing you liked is ever one tap from gone. |
| Init sound | A blank, neutral sound to build up by hand with the quick knobs and the settings below. |
| Re-roll bank | Presets back to factory, and fresh randoms for o and p from a new seed. New sounds whenever you want them. |
| Reset all sounds | The whole bank back, without changing the seed. Your o and p come back exactly as you know them. |
Why o and p are yours alone
Those two slots aren't stored. They're re-derived every boot from a seed created on your Cardputer's very first start, so no other unit has them. And an update never changes them: the generator that made them is frozen in the firmware, pinned by tests, and only a fresh seed or your own Re-roll bank moves you onto the newer pool. Randomize always uses the newest engine, because each press is a fresh seed with nothing to preserve.
Every sound rides the same engine. Once you know the five character-makers, a roll stops being a mystery and Mutate stops being random.
| filter envelope | Paraphonic: it retriggers on fresh attacks and never on legato hand-offs, so slides stay smooth. Attack, decay, depth in octaves. |
| sub-oscillator | Weight an octave down. |
| noise | Envelope-gated. The knock on an attack, the breath on a whistle. |
| drive | Into the soft clipper. Grit from 1 to 8. |
| vibrato | Built in, in cents, so a horn can sing without you leaning. |
| waveform | Sine, triangle, saw, square, fat (detuned saws) and pwm. fn+6 live. |
| filter mode | Lowpass is the original voice. Highpass is thin and airy, bandpass vocal and telephone, notch hollow and phasey. Free, because the filter already computes all four. |
| drift | Every voice wanders a few cents on its own slow random walk, per voice, so a held chord shimmers against itself. It's the imperfection that separates warm from sterile. Off for dead-still digital, up to 12 cents for something that hasn't seen a service in years. |
| glide mode | Legato only: fresh attacks hit pitch instantly, hammer-ons ride the glide. Always: every note slides in. |
The quick knobs
Hold fn and press 1..0 to grab glide, attack, decay, sustain, release, waveform, cutoff, voices, bend range or volume. Keep fn held: -/= turns it coarse, [/] fine. Nothing is hidden; every sound parameter has a control.
Tilt was the first assignable modulator. This is the whole rack. Everything defaults to off, so a fresh patch is the original GLIDE tone until you wire a slot.
| two LFOs | Each with a shape (sine, triangle, saw, square, sample-and-hold) and either a free rate in Hz or a tempo division locked to the jam clock, so a wobble breathes in time with the progression. |
| a second envelope | Attack and decay, retriggered on each note. |
| six slots | Each picks a source, a destination and a bipolar amount. All on the lead voice; the backing stays steady underneath. |
| sources | LFO 1, LFO 2, the mod envelope, key tracking, pitch bend. |
| destinations | Pitch, cutoff, resonance, amp, filter-envelope depth. |
It all saves with the slot
Every routing, LFO and envelope is part of the sound. fn+shift+letter keeps it, and because patches use a tagged format, the next knob the firmware grows will never wipe what you've saved.
One tempo drives the progression, the arp, the synced LFOs and the echo. Tap it in on \, set it in settings, or let LISTEN read it from the room.
| chorus | Width. Strings and organs live here. |
| delay | Send, time, feedback, and sync: free for a plain millisecond delay, or 1/4, dotted 1/8 (the Edge and Gilmour trick), 1/8, 1/8 triplet, 1/16 so every repeat lands on the beat. Too long a division at a slow tempo folds down an octave rather than clipping. |
| reverb | Send and size. The backing and the solo each keep their own voice but wash into one shared room, the solo's, so a jam sits together. |
Dial the space to taste and shift-save; the effects are part of the sound, like every other parameter. Every range and default, in one table, is on the reference page.
Two axes, each routed to off, cutoff, vibrato, volume or morph, with a depth. The default map is global and follows your hands across every sound: morph on forward and back, vibrato side to side. Flip Tilt map to per sound and each patch carries its own route, saved with the slot: ACID into a full wah, Organ into a swell pedal.
Morph blends continuously into the sound you were last on. Roll a pad, switch to a lead, lean back into the pad mid-phrase.
Seven actions at a depth, momentary or latched: muffle, brighten, a pitch dive, drive grit, synth morph, and two that move on their own clock. Wah sweeps a resonant peak from 350 Hz to 2.4 kHz once every two beats; both layers sweep, so a held drone breathes with the solo. Gate chops the whole instrument on sixteenths, reverb tail and all. The metronome is never gated; a stuttering click is a broken click.
Ten palettes ship with the instrument. The eleventh, custom, you turn yourself. It isn't eleven colour pickers; it's five dials, and the rest follows.
| Hue | The instrument's colour. Turn it and the whole palette rotates, because everything else is defined relative to it. |
| Accent | The angle from that hue to the annunciator colour, named as a relationship (same, near, wide, triad, split, opposite) so it survives turning Hue. |
| Vividness | How saturated the whole thing runs. |
| Ground | From black through dusk and ash up to paper and bright. Cross into the light half and GLIDE flips its whole colour model so every screen stays right. |
| Contrast | How far the ink sits off the stock. |
Roll look
The same bargain as the sound randomizer: one tap rolls a whole coherent palette, so you don't have to want to design anything to end up with an instrument that's yours. Cycling onto custom opens it as a copy of the palette you were on, every combination is held to a minimum contrast so you can never make it unreadable, and the recipe lives in the device's own storage, so it survives every update.