A Harmony after an Arp harmonises the arpeggio. Before it, the arp runs over the harmony. Those are two different pieces of music, and neither is wrong, so the order of the chain is yours to change. What this chapter covers is the reasoning behind the order it starts in, so you know what you are trading when you move something, and the four moves the window will warn you about.
What you'll learn
- How to reorder a slot, by pointer and by keyboard
- The one boundary the default order is built around
- Why each slot sits where it does
- The four reorderings that quietly break something, and what the window says about each
- How to run an effect twice
9.1 Reordering
Drag a slot along the chain row. The row reorders live under the pointer, so the slot you are dragging is the feedback. A slot can be dragged whether it is on or off.
With a slot focused, Alt with a left or right arrow moves it one place.
The order is saved with your session and comes back as you left it. A session written before a slot existed gets that slot dropped in where it would run by default.
9.2 The one boundary
There is one line in the default order and everything else hangs off it: Chords writes the progression into the rack, and every harmony-aware effect after it reads what it wrote.
So the slots that decide what the phrase is go before Chords, and the slots that decorate the phrase go after it.
The default order is:
Motif · Chords · In Key · Bones · Harmony · Arp · Euclid · Echo · Register · Chance · Feel · Expression · Morph
- Motif is first because it changes what the melody is. Chords windows the melody it is handed and stops at its last note, so a Motif that inverted the line or appended a sequence after Chords would leave the progression fitted to a phrase that no longer exists, with no chord at all under the appended part. Running it first costs nothing: Motif reads no chords.
- In Key comes after Chords so that everything generated downstream is built from corrected notes rather than from the clams, and so the motif's own notes are corrected against the harmony too.
- Bones sits just after In Key, on the far side of the boundary, because it is the one reshaping slot that wants the progression: which sung notes are structural is scored against the chord underneath. Its skeleton is a subset of the take, so a progression fitted to the take still fits the variation.
- Feel is late because quantizing before generating means the generated parts inherit a grid you never played.
- Expression is last because it reads the sung pitch curve after every transform has finished moving it.
- Morph is last of all, because it walks between two takes as you would hear them, and this take's parts only exist once the slots that make them have run.
9.3 The four warnings
Most orders are just different music, which is the point. Four are quiet failures, and the window says so on the slot's node rather than letting you find out by ear.
too early on Expression
Expression before Motif or Euclid cannot be right, because retrograde reverses a note and Euclid cuts it into pieces. The remedy is on hover: move it later.
(Expression after Feel or Echo used to be broken in a subtler way, where the bend played at the beat the note used to be on. That is fixed at the source: a note that moves in time now takes its curve with it.)
chords won't follow on Motif
Motif after Chords leaves every harmony-aware slot reading a progression fitted to a phrase that no longer exists. The node says so while Motif is actually transforming something.
scale only on In Key, Harmony and Echo
Any of the three ahead of Chords falls back to the scale, correctly and silently. The label appears only while that slot's "follow the chords" switch is on, so if you deliberately chose the scale you are not nagged about it.
feel already tightened on Arp or Euclid
A Feel dragged in front of a slot that is following your feel has already pulled the line toward the grid, so there is less of your timing left to copy. The engine is right either way; this is what asking for both, in that order, means. The strip prints the smaller numbers it is now working from.
One more that is not a warning because it is not a mistake: Euclid with "Replace what came before" on eats everything before it, wherever it sits. That is what the slot says it does, and the switch is on the strip.
9.4 Two slots that change other slots
Switching Arp on does two things besides switching on Arp, because an arpeggiator with nothing to arpeggiate is not an arpeggiator:
- It switches Chords on with its bed silent, because Arp's whole input is the chord track.
- It silences the sung line, because an arp plays the idea itself rather than under it.
Both are one switch away, on the Arp strip: Play the chords too and Play the line I sang too. A rule that takes something away silently has to leave it within reach of the thing that took it.
9.5 Running an effect twice
The chain holds each slot once, so there is no way to arpeggiate an arpeggio or run Chance twice in one pass. Flatten is how: it writes what came out of the rack down as a new take with a fresh rack on it, and the take it came from stays one flip away. See Chapter 5.
9.6 Why the effects are safe to reorder at all
Every effect in the rack is a pure function: notes in, new notes out, no mutation. That is what makes slot order free to change without re-running anything from the audio, and it is why moving a slot is instant even on a long take.
The randomness is seeded per run rather than carried between runs, so moving a slot does not re-roll Chance's dice or re-jitter the humanizer. A take renders identically twice.
Chapter 10 covers the three ways a take leaves the plugin.