Piano Roll

Compose melodies the way a DAW does — paint notes on a pitch×time grid, then play them out of the V/OCT and GATE jacks like any sequencer. The roll is effectively endless: scroll right as far as the music goes and drag the amber loop marker to set where it wraps. Where the Keyboard module is for playing, the Piano Roll is for writing.

It holds four tracks — four independent parts on one grid, each in its own color, each with its own V/OCT + GATE output pair. One shared transport plays them all together, so you can write a bass, a lead, and two counter-lines in a single module and voice each through its own patch.

Tracks

The four colored squares in the control bar pick the active track (the first is active by default). Whatever you draw lands on the active track and takes its color; click another square to switch. The other tracks stay on screen as dimmed context so you can line parts up, but only the active track is editable — select, move, resize, quantize and shift all act on it alone. Switch tracks to edit another. Each track plays out of its own V/O + GT output pair (1–4).

The editor

One tool does everything — no mode switching:

  • Paint — click an empty cell to create a note (it reuses your last note

length); keep the button held to stretch its length or slide its pitch.

  • Move — drag a note's body. A plain click selects only that note (any

previous selection clears), and dragging moves it.

  • Resize — grab either edge of a note to change where it starts or ends.
  • Select a group — Shift-click notes to add or remove them one at a time,

or Shift-drag an empty area to sweep a marquee. With two or more notes selected, a bounding box appears around them:

  • Drag anywhere inside the box to move the whole group — up/down in pitch and

left/right in time.

  • Click a single note inside the box (without dragging) to drill back down to

just that note; then you can resize it.

  • Shift-click inside or outside the box still adds/removes individual notes.
  • Click empty space away from the box to deselect everything (that first click

just clears the group — click again if you want to paint).

  • Select all — Ctrl+A while the cursor is over the roll selects every note on

the active track.

  • Deselect — Esc (over the roll) clears the selection; press it again to close

the panel.

  • Delete — press Delete (or Backspace) to remove the selection — or, with

nothing selected, the note under the cursor.

  • Copy / paste — Ctrl+C copies the selection; Ctrl+V pastes it right after

the last note, ready to drag into place. Paste again to keep appending.

  • Quantize — right-click the grid → Quantize ▸ a key (C…B) ▸ a scale.

Every note's pitch snaps to the nearest note in that scale (timing is left alone) — rough a melody in, then pull it into key. Acts on the selection when you have one, otherwise the whole active track.

  • Shift — right-click → Shift Left / Shift Right ▸ a musical amount

(1/16 up through 4 Bars) rotates the notes earlier or later in time, wrapping around the loop — a note pushed past the loop end reappears at the start. Same target rule: the selection if you have one, otherwise the whole active track.

  • MIDI files — right-click → Export MIDI… downloads the whole roll as a

standard multi-track .mid (one track per part, opens in any DAW); Import MIDI… loads one in, quantized to the 16th grid, mapping its tracks/channels onto the four tracks and resizing the loop to fit. One undo step either way.

Snap quantizes everything you do — from a bar down to 1/16 (one step).

Getting around: mouse-wheel over the grid zooms in and out around your cursor; drag the scrollbar down the right edge to move through the pitch range, or click its trough to jump. Wheel over the keys or the scrollbar scrolls too, and dragging the ruler pans sideways. The green playhead chases playback and follows along when it runs off the edge.

Previewing notes

Click a key in the piano column to hear that pitch. It plays on the active track, through that track's V/OCT and GATE outputs, so you audition the voice you are about to write for. The key lights in the track's colour while you hold it.

Drag up and down the keys and the note slides with you, holding one gate the whole way rather than retriggering on each key. Previewing leaves no trace in the patch and nothing to undo, and the sequence keeps running underneath, so you can try a pitch against a playing pattern and the track picks up where it left off when you let go.

Clock & transport

  • Clock: Ext (default) — each pulse at the CLK input advances one 16th.

Drive it from a BPM Clock (or divide/multiply for other feels); RST rewinds to the top.

  • Clock: Int — the module free-runs at the BPM knob while Run is on.

RST still rewinds.

  • Clock: Song — the roll follows the automation timeline. Its position is

read from the timeline's playhead (one step per 16th, wrapped at the pattern length), so it needs no clock cables and cannot drift. Press play in the Automation dock or on a Song Clock and the roll plays. Press stop and it goes silent. Rewind, drag the playhead, or let the loop wrap, and the roll moves to the matching step at once. The tempo is the timeline's BPM. The Run button and the CLK input do nothing in this mode, and ⏮ or a pulse into RST rewinds the whole song, the same as Song Clock's reset.

Following the playhead

The small chase button in the top-left corner of the editor keeps the view on the playhead while the roll plays. It is on by default. Panning or wheel-scrolling the ruler, or zooming the grid, switches it off. Editing notes does not, so you can keep painting while the view moves. Press the button again to snap back to the playhead and resume following. The setting is not saved with the patch.

Controls

  • Snap — grid quantize: 1/16 1/8 1/4 1/2 Bar Off.
  • Tracks — four colored squares; the lit one is the active track you're editing.
  • Clock — Ext (CLK jack), Int (the internal transport), or Song (the automation timeline).
  • ▶ Run / BPM — the internal transport: Run starts it at the BPM box's tempo. BPM is editable only in Int, where that tempo is the one in force. In Song it dims and shows the timeline's tempo instead; in Ext it dims holding your own setting, since the CLK cable is the clock there.

Inputs & outputs

  • CLK — the clock in Ext mode: one pulse = one 16th step (drives all four tracks). Ignored in Int and Song.
  • RST — rewind to the beginning (all tracks). In Song mode this rewinds the whole song instead.
  • REC V/O / REC GT — the recording input pair. Patch any pitch+gate source

here, arm REC, and what you play lands in the roll. See Recording below.

  • V/O 1–4 — each track's pitch output: the sounding note on that track (C4 = 0V).
  • GT 1–4 — each track's gate: high (10V) while that track's note sounds, with a

clean retrigger between back-to-back notes. Each track is mono — overlapping notes on the same track take last-note priority.

Recording

Patch a pitch source into REC V/O and its gate into REC GT, arm the REC switch, and start the transport — every note you play is written into the roll on the active track. It is an overdub: the existing notes keep playing while you add to them, so you build a part in passes.

Everything is hard-quantized to the 16th grid. A note's start snaps to the nearest step — play slightly early or slightly late and it still lands where you meant — and its length is how long you held it, rounded to whole steps, minimum one. Recorded notes are ordinary notes: edit, move, resize or delete them exactly like drawn ones, and one press of undo removes the last one.

While you hold a note you'll see it drawn in red, growing from its snapped start to the playhead, so you can watch what you're about to commit.

A few behaviours worth knowing:

  • Anything can be the source. A Keyboard, MIDI-CV from a hardware controller,

the Arpeggiator, a VX-303 line, a quantized LFO — if it makes pitch and a gate, it can be recorded.

  • Held-gate sources still work. If a source never drops its gate between notes

(an arpeggiator at full gate length, a slid line), a change of pitch splits the recording into separate notes rather than one long smear.

  • The transport has to be running. Recording follows the same clock the roll

plays on, in every mode. Stopping mid-note discards that note rather than guessing how long you meant to hold it.

  • Switching the active track mid-take moves where new notes land, which is the

fast way to lay down four parts against each other.

Tips

  • Patch V/OCT → Oscillator and GATE → ADSR → VCA for the classic voice; the

retrigger gap keeps repeated notes articulate.

  • Long held pads and fast runs coexist happily — notes can be any length from one

step to whole bars.

  • Recording from a Keyboard or MIDI-CV straight into the roll is coming in a later

update — for now the grid is the instrument.