Keyboard and MIDI map

Everything bound, in one place. ? in the app shows the same map without leaving it.

Notes

An Ableton-style layout across the bottom two rows:

black:    w  e     t  y  u     o  p
white:  a  s  d  f  g  h  j  k  l  ;  '

Global

In EVOLVE

The rack canvas

Inside the rack

Tab reaches the rack as a single stop, then:

The bank

Tab reaches the bank as a single stop, then:

The node bank

The search matches by sound as well as by name: grit, vowel, sidechain, wander.

Gestures

In PERFORM

A focused control (reach it with Tab):

With the mouse: drag up or down, shift for fine, double-click to centre, long-press to hear it, a short tap on Wander to hold it. See PERFORM.

MIDI

Plug in a keyboard and it works, with no configuration. Plug in a controller with knobs and they work too.

Web MIDI works in Chromium browsers and in Firefox, which asks once whether to add a site permission for it. Safari has none; there the computer keyboard and the on-screen keys still play. When MIDI is not available the dock reads midi ?, and the panel says why and offers connect midi to ask again.

With Auracle open in more than one tab, MIDI plays the tab you used last. The others read midi ○ and play nothing from MIDI until you click in one.

The MIDI panel

Click midi in the dock (it reads midi ● when a device is connected). The panel lists PERFORM's eight controls, what drives each, and two buttons per row:

• learn: the next CC you move is bound to this control. Any CC it replaces is unbound.
• clear: unbind this control.

Below the rows: a switch for auto-mapping (first knobs you turn claim free controls), the bend range, and the incoming clock tempo.

Knobs you just turn

With auto-mapping on, the first eight distinct CCs you move claim PERFORM's controls in the order you move them: Bright, Snap, Motion, Body, Grit, Space, Blend, Wander. Each claim is announced (mapped: CC 74 → Bright). The mod wheel and the sustain pedal are left out, because they already mean something.

The controls are measured when PERFORM first shows a patch, so a mapped knob moves nothing on a patch PERFORM has not measured yet. Open PERFORM once and the knobs work from any view.

Endless encoders

A relative encoder is recognised from what it sends, with nothing to set. An ordinary pot only sends when its value changes, so it rarely sends the same number twice in a row. An encoder sends the same small tick over and over. Once a CC has sent a few values that repeat like that and sit where encoder ticks sit, it is followed relatively and the note lane says so (CC 21 is an endless encoder). Both common encodings are recognised: two's complement and offset-around-64. One tick moves a control 1% of its travel.

When in doubt it treats a CC as an ordinary pot. A pot mistaken for an encoder would be unusable; an encoder mistaken for a pot is only jumpy.

Soft takeover

An ordinary pot does nothing until it passes through the control's current position. Then it takes over. This is often called pickup.

It matters more here than on most instruments, because the controls move without the pot. Wander drifts the sound and re-centres the controls, and you can turn a control with the mouse or the keys. Without pickup, the first nudge of a pot left at three o'clock would snap a control that is now at nine. Whenever a control moves by the mouse, the keys or Wander, the pots bound to it have to pick it up again.

The mod wheel works the same way. With Motion at its centre, the wheel takes over as it passes its halfway point; below that it makes the sound stiller, above it more restless. Channel pressure is not picked up: it only ever brightens from the centre, and letting go (pressure back to zero) returns Bright to the centre.

Clock

MIDI clock sets the tempo, which is what the arpeggiator follows. The tempo is a least-squares fit over the last two beats of clock ticks, so a single late tick moves it by a fraction of its lateness rather than all of it. It needs one full beat of ticks before it reads anything, updates when it moves by more than 0.4 BPM, and stays within 30–300 BPM. A gap of more than a second is read as a stop rather than a very slow tempo.

Start is a restart: a running arpeggio begins again from its first note if a chord is held, and with SYNC on the step sequencers go back to their first step. From a Start until a Stop, the clock also pulls the synced sequencers back onto its beat once a beat. Stop silences nothing, and continue is ignored.

Per device

The mapping, the auto-mapping switch and the bend range are remembered for each device, or combination of devices, in this browser. Plug the same controller in tomorrow and its knobs mean what they meant today.

Performance controls

Not keyboard-bound, but this is where people look for them: