Note Controller

The Note Controller pitches each hit to a note from a scale, chosen by a control value between 0 and 1. Play soft for the lowest note and hard for the highest, walk up a scale from the center of the drum to the edge, or let an LFO or a random modulator turn your playing into melodies.

The notes you pick on the keyboard are spread evenly across the 0–1 control range. Each hit plays the note closest to the current control value, on every module inside the controller.

Setting up the Note Controller

1. Drag a Note Controller in from the library, and drag one or more samples or modules into its Modules List.
2. Pick what drives the notes with mod type, for example Velocity.
3. Click keys on the keyboard to choose the notes, or pick a scale from preset. Set the root note and how many octaves to cover.

Control input

The control value comes from the controller's built-in control input, set up on the top row. It works exactly like the Hit Controller's.

Control	What it does
mod type	What drives the control value: Velocity, Timbre, Speed, Envelope, LFO, Midi Control, or Rand | step. When the controller listens to a hi-hat, Pedal is offered too.
Mod type settings	Each mod type shows its own settings, such as the input range and which surface and zones to listen to for Velocity, or the timbre pads for Timbre. They work exactly like the same modulator in an assignment.
Reverse (⇅)	Flips the control range, so for example hard hits play the lowest note.
gate	Shown for Velocity, Timbre, and Speed. On (the default), a hit the control input filters out plays nothing: a pad outside its selection, or a value outside its range. Off, every hit plays, using the latest control value.
Power	Turns the control input off. The control slider then keeps its last value, and you can set it by hand or assign something else to it.

note

A play that carries no hit information, like a Metro tick or a bare play message over OSC, has no velocity, timbre, or speed to read. It's never gated: it plays whichever note the control slider currently points at.

Control slider

The control slider sits just above the notes, so its marker points at the note it selects. It follows the control input while that's on. Drag it to set the value by hand, or right-click it to assign anything else in the session to it.

Notes

Control	What it does
Weights	One segment per active note, above the keyboard. Drag the borders to give a note a bigger share of the control range, so it plays more often.
Keyboard	Click keys to add or remove notes.
root	The tonal center. The keyboard starts here.
octaves	Repeats the chosen notes over the next 1–11 octaves.
preset	Major or Minor fills the keyboard with that scale. Editing the keyboard switches it to Custom.

tip

You can use the MIDI Notes Generator to send the notes of a Note Controller to a hardware MIDI Output (and then out of the software to play a synth).