SET·77
v0.4 · lanes, scenes and a room under two hands
next bar
scenes · hold n and a slot to keep the whole deck, or press KEEP and then a slot
the room
the bed under the deck, grown out of the kick this set is playing rather than laid over it. while one plays the next is growing, and they cross-fade on a phrase line, so it never repeats and never switches. made of TEXTURE or of VOICES, which is a crowd saying the words in the field, each from a mouth of its own.
a word is said once by a mouth and kept, so a room that has already said your words costs nothing to grow again, and typing a new word makes that one word wait rather than all of them. the room that is playing keeps playing while a mouth learns. the mouths marked with a dot are people rather than the chip: piper voices running here in the page, models and runtime served from this site, so they work with the network unplugged once one has been used. the first word of a voice waits for its model, which is tens of megabytes once and cached after. LIBRITTS is the one to reach for if you want a crowd: every word takes a different mouth out of nine hundred.
the industrial pad at the foot of the deck reads the hand rather than the place: drag slowly and the deck opens and starts to ring, flick and it is crushed for as long as the jerk lasts, stop dead and the sound you just made is held standing until you move again, rub back and forth and it grinds in the band you are rubbing in.
PUSH fills it and dirties it, ` throws it all the way while held. DUCK is the kick pushing everything else out of its way on every hit. GLUE presses and clips the whole deck into one record. RECORD takes what leaves the deck, SAVE writes it as a file.
every lane: bank, voice, fx
the deck is played blind; this is where you look. bank and voice are what a lane is made of, style and density draw its bar and land on the next bar line, the rest is mix and answers at once. FLOOR is where a lane stops so the kick keeps the bottom. SONG turns a dropped record into a loop in time with the deck: tell it the tempo the record was made at and FROM walks through it a bar at a time.
FX is the lane with no bank: its material is what the deck itself just played. i takes the last piece, o walks the treatment, and the roll row sets how long the piece is rather than how fast it repeats.
the box
press connect and the browser will ask for your controllers. whatever the box says shows up in the line below, knob by knob, so a controller that is plugged in and a controller that is heard stop looking the same. nothing is bound to the deck yet.
what it actually played
eight bars of the deck's own output, measured against what the records do: where the floor sits, how long it holds, how much of the top is moving. it listens to what came out rather than to what was asked for.
playing it
the whole instrument, laid out the way the keyboard is: one column per part of it a hand sits on. printed from the same table the deck answers to, so it cannot promise a key that moved.
two hands
press anything · this line says what it does
hold ' and every control on the deck puts its own keys on itself. hold a lane key and only that lane answers. nothing here is a switch you can walk away from except a cut, which stays until the same key ends it, and that is said in red in the head for as long as it lasts.
every key
this table is not written down: it is printed from the same table the deck is played from, so a key that answers to something and a key that says what it answers to can never drift apart. the caps are coloured the way the drawn keyboard colours them, and where a row says TAP: STAYS that key latches, which means a press under a quarter of a second keeps it going with nobody holding it and the same key ends it.
your sounds
the three buttons for this folder live in the header, above the deck, where a hand looking for them does not have to scroll past the instrument first.
nothing yet
every sound you bring has a lane, written on the chip beside its name. drop files on the deck, or point this at a folder once and the browser keeps it, and the deck listens to each one and sends it where it belongs: a kick to KICK, a hat to HATS, a record to FX, brought to the level of that lane on the way in. the deck can be wrong, so one tap on the chip names it as the next lane, and that name is kept against the file for every visit after. a folder named after a lane, or a file with a lane in its own name, is believed without listening. the list follows the aim and the files dropped this visit stay on top. click a name to send it to its lane, or press y to walk the list without leaving the keys. it lands on the bar line like everything else.
a record longer than eight seconds goes to FX and loops eight bars from its first beat, played faster or slower until its tempo is the deck's, which moves its pitch with it, the way a turntable does. if its tempo wanders the status line says so before the set does. drop several records and each one waits in the list: click another and it takes over on the next bar.
DEAL A ROUND gives every lane a sound of its own in one press, matching by the folder a file sits in or by what its own name says, whichever it can find. press it again and it walks on through the folder rather than handing back the same five files. FILL FIVE SCENES writes all five slots at once, each with different sounds and a bar of its own, and touches nothing that is playing: a whole set sketched before you start, which you then play against rather than build from nothing.
lane
the same card as at the foot of the page, moved here rather than copied: a second copy of a control is a control that disagrees with itself by the end of the night. press the name of a sound on any lane to open that lane here.