This is the reference: every slot in the rack, what it does, and every control on its strip with its default. They are listed in the order they run in by default, which is also the order they appear in the chain row. Nothing here is a preset and nothing is hidden behind a tier: a licensed plugin and a trial plugin have exactly the same thirteen slots.
What you'll learn
- What every slot in the rack does
- Every control on every strip, with its default value
- Which slots wait for a key, for a progression, or for a second take
- Which slots write their own voice, and which rewrite the line in place
Two conventions run through the whole rack.
A control the effect is not reading is hidden, rather than shown doing nothing. Motif's dials each belong to one transform, so switching transform changes which dials are on the strip.
Generated parts go on their own voice. The sung line is voice 0, harmony 1, chords 2, and so on, which is what lets your host route them separately and what the sung and made counts in the take bar are counting.
8.1 Motif
Inverts, reverses, stretches or answers the phrase you sang. Rewrites the lead voice.
Motif runs before Chords in the default order, because Chords fits a progression to the melody it is handed and Motif changes what that melody is.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Transform | None | None, Upside down, Backwards, Slower, Faster, Sequence, Fragment, Answer, Displace. |
| Stay in key | on | Inversion mirrors within the key rather than chromatically. A chromatic mirror only sounds right in twelve-tone music. Shown under Upside down. |
| Add after, don't replace | off | Append the transformed phrase rather than replacing the original. |
| Repeats | 1 | How many times the sequence repeats. Under Sequence. |
| Sequence by | +1 step | How far each repeat moves, in scale steps. This is the dial that decides whether a sequence sounds like development or like a loop. |
| Notes to keep | 2 | How much of the phrase the fragment keeps. Under Fragment. |
| How much slower / faster | 2x | The stretch factor. Under Slower and Faster respectively. |
| Answer from | The fifth | The fifth, the fourth, or the relative key. Under Answer. |
| Push by | 0.5 beats later | How far the phrase is displaced in time. Under Displace. |
8.2 Chords
Writes a progression from your melody, and puts it in the rack. Needs a key. Writes its own voice.
Covered in full in Chapter 6. Controls: Play the chords (on), Rate (1 bar), Colour (Support it), Spacing (Close together), Let them invert (on), Bottom note (C3), Level (70), Strike (Hold it).
This is the slot every harmony-aware effect downstream reads. Switching it on is what turns In Key from scale-lock into chord-aware correction, what gives Harmony a chord to land on, and what Arp arpeggiates.
8.3 In Key
Corrects the take against the key on the bar above, and leaves the notes you meant. Needs a key. Rewrites the lead voice. On by default.
Covered in full in Chapter 7. Controls: Strength (70%), Follow the chords (off), Keep passing notes (on), Keep notes you meant (on).
8.4 Bones
Keeps the notes that carry your tune, and writes a new line on them. Rewrites the lead voice.
Hum a verse and get its chorus: the same skeleton, a new rhythm, new figures between the bones. It reduces the phrase to the notes that are structural, scored against the chord underneath, then grows a new line on that skeleton out of your own hook, which is the bar of the take that carries the most (longest note, strongest beat, on the chord). Its rhythm and its interval shape are the only material the fills are made of, which is why the result sounds like the same writer rather than like a random walk with good manners.
Three rules it keeps: nothing written goes above the highest note you sang, the last bone of every phrase rings out with nothing after it, and the dials never make silence.
It runs after In Key by default, so the fills grow from corrected bones and the progression Chords fitted to the take still fits the variation.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | 40% | How much of the original survives as bones. |
| Fill | 60% | How much new material goes between them. |
| Leap | mostly steps | Squeeze the hook's intervals into steps, or stretch them into leaps. |
| Hold | 40% | How long the bones ring. |
| Lift | as sung | Move the result up or down, in scale steps, up to an octave either way. |
| Land on the tonic | off | Cadence the phrase home. |
| Offbeat | 30% | How much of the fill lands off the beat. |
| Roll | #1 | A different bar of the take as the hook. Roll again for another variation; the old one comes back when you roll back. |
| After the original | off | Append the variation rather than replacing the take. |
8.5 Harmony
A second line that stays right through the changes. Needs a key. Writes its own voice.
Instead of stacking a fixed interval that goes sour the moment the chord turns minor, it picks the note that is a third or a sixth away in the key, and, with Land on chord tones on, moves it onto the chord underneath.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Interval | A third below | A sixth below, a third below, a third above, a sixth above. |
| Motion | With the tune | Parallel, or contrary (against it). |
| Land on chord tones | on | Snap each harmony note to the chord underneath. Needs Chords. |
| Skip notes under | 1/16 | Do not harmonise anything shorter than this, so passing notes stay single. |
| Level | 80% | How loud the harmony sits under the lead. |
| Play the line I sang too | on | The take's own sung switch, reachable from here because "hear just the harmony" is what you want the moment a second line appears. |
8.6 Arp
Runs the chords the rack wrote as a figure. Needs Chords. Writes its own voice.
An arpeggiator arpeggiates a held chord, and the chord track is the held chord, so this slot does nothing at all until Chords is ahead of it. Switching Arp on switches Chords on and silences its bed, and it silences the sung line too, because an arp plays the idea itself rather than under it. Both are one switch away on this strip.
The figure restarts on each chord change.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Up | Up, Down, Up and down, Down and up, Outside in, Inside out, Random, Strum. |
| Rate | 1/16 | Step length. Hidden under Strum, which is one rake per sung note. |
| Octaves | 1 | How many octaves the figure spans. |
| Register | under the tune | Move the whole figure up or down in octaves. |
| Length | 80% | Gate: how much of each step sounds. |
| Level | 80 | Velocity. A generated figure has no dynamics of its own to read. |
| Roll | #1 | A different random figure, and the old one back when you roll back. Under Random. |
| Only while I'm singing | off | The voice gates the arp: it runs while you sing and rests when you rest. |
| Follow my feel | off | The voice times it, so the figure plays your phrasing rather than the clock's. The strip head says what it found. |
| Play the chords too | off | Chords' own bed switch, reached from here because this is where you notice it. |
| Play the line I sang too | off | The take's sung switch. This is the way back to the line the slot silenced. |
8.7 Euclid
Turns a note into a rhythm. Rewrites the lead voice by default.
Hum one long note and get an evenly-spread pulse, already in the key and in the chord. Euclidean rhythms distribute a number of pulses as evenly as possible across a number of steps, which is where a great many folk and dance patterns come from.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Steps | 8 | Length of the pattern. |
| Pulses | 3 | How many of those steps sound. |
| Rotate | 0 | Turn the pattern, so it starts somewhere else. |
| Rate | 1/16 | Step length. |
| Length | 90% | Gate. |
| Replace what came before | on | On, the pulse replaces everything upstream. Off, it plays beside it. |
| Walk up the chord | off | Each pulse steps through the chord rather than repeating one pitch. |
| Follow my feel | off | Time the pulse to your phrasing. |
| Play the chords too | off | Chords' bed switch. Offered only while the pulse plays beside what came before. |
Replace what came before defaults to on, and Euclid runs over every note in the rack, so switching this slot on with the default settings replaces the sung line, the chords and the harmony with a bare pulse. That is the intended behaviour of the effect, and the switch is right there to say otherwise.
8.8 Echo
Note delay that keeps its repeats in the harmony. Writes its own voice.
Repeats climb by scale steps rather than semitones, and each repeat snaps to the chord it lands on rather than to the chord the original was in.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Repeats | 3 | How many echoes, up to 8. |
| Time | 1/8 | Delay between repeats. |
| Decay | 70% | How fast the repeats fall away in level. |
| Keep repeats in the chord | on | Snap each repeat to the chord it lands on. Needs Chords. |
| Climb per repeat | none | Move each repeat up or down. Reads as scale steps or semitones depending on the switch below. |
| Climb in the key | on | Whether the climb is diatonic. Only a question once there is a climb. |
| Play the line I sang too | on | The take's sung switch, so the repeats can be auditioned alone. |
8.9 Register
Folds a part into a range. Rewrites in place.
A sung take lands wherever your voice lives, which is not always where the part belongs.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest | C3 | Bottom of the range. |
| Highest | C6 | Top of the range. |
| Out of range | Fold | Fold moves an offending note by whole octaves and keeps the shape of the line. Flatten clamps it against the ceiling, which is what a bass part wants and a melody never does. |
There is no octave slider here. The octave belongs to the header, and it runs after the whole chain: see Chapter 10.
8.10 Chance
Rolls a die per note, or per phrase. Rewrites in place.
Seeded, so a take renders identically twice and the roll number brings a figure back.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | 85% | The chance any given note survives. |
| Whole phrases | off | Roll once per phrase so a whole figure either happens or does not. |
| Phrase length | 1 beat | How long a phrase is, for that purpose. |
| Never drop what I sang | off | Only thin out the generated parts. |
| Roll | #1 | A different set of dice, reproducibly. |
8.11 Feel
Swing, humanize and quantize, as dials. Rewrites in place.
A sung take is mostly phrasing, so the question is never "quantize or not", it is how much grid you want. Most takes want about 40%. Feel runs late in the chain so that generated parts do not inherit a grid you never played.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Tighten | 0% | Quantize amount. 100% is machine-tight. |
| Grid | 1/16 | What it tightens toward. |
| Swing | 50% | 50% is straight; higher delays the off-beats. |
| Loosen | 0.000 | Humanize: random timing spread, seeded. |
| Accent the swing | 0 | Extra velocity on the swung off-beats. Only offered above 50% swing, since there are none at 50. |
| Tighten note ends too | off | Quantize note-offs as well as note-ons. Only offered above 0% tighten. |
| Push | on the beat | Move everything slightly ahead of or behind the beat. |
| Join the notes up | off | Legato: extend each note to the next. |
8.12 Expression
How much of your actual singing reaches the synth. Rewrites in place.
Expression is last in the chain because it reads the sung pitch curve after every transform has finished moving it. At 0% the notes are flat. Turn it up and the scoop into the note and the fall off the end are written out as per-note pitch bend.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Keep my singing | 0% | How much of the curve is written. |
| Bend range | 2 st | Match this to your synth's pitch bend range. The MPE export uses 48. |
| Ignore wobble under | 0.05 st | Below this, the curve is treated as steady. |
| Skip the attack | 10% | Ignore the first part of each note, where a pitch tracker is least sure. |
Notes that were never sung, including everything Euclid and Arp generate, have no curve to read and stay flat. That is deliberate: a sixteenth should not inherit a whole note's bend.
8.13 Morph
Walks one dial from this take to another one. Needs a second take. Rewrites the lead voice.
Sing a verse, flip to a new take, sing the chorus, and Morph walks between them. Halfway is a real line between the two, not both at once.
It walks toward the other take as you would hear it, rendered through its own rack, so take 2 with an Arp on it is the arpeggio, and one dial walks from your line into that. Both sides enter the walk as one pool, sung and made together, so a monophonic sung melody walking into a monophonic arpeggio is one note at a time the whole way. Where one side stacks, a sung note walks into the chord tone nearest it: a sung C on a downbeat is C at the foot of the dial, C D at a quarter, C E G at the top.
It sits last in the default order, so this take's own parts exist by the time it runs.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Towards take | #1 | Which of the kept takes to walk toward, numbered as the take bar numbers them. |
| Morph | 50% | The dial. 0% is this take, 100% is the other one. |
| Keep | 40% | How much of this take's own material survives the walk. |
To keep an in-between position and work on it further, flatten the take. See Chapter 5.
Chapter 9 covers what changes when you move these around.