MPE Insight User Guide

Keyboard

A piano display of 88, 61, 49 or 25 keys (set via Keyboard Range in Global Settings), showing all active notes in real time. Each active key is highlighted in the colour of its MPE channel. Pressure is shown as fill intensity, and a Pitch Bend ring around each key visualises the current deviation in cents.

Keyboard Play Mode: Click or touch any key to send real MPE notes out. Horizontal position controls Pitch Bend; vertical position controls Pressure (upward) or CC74 Timbre (downward).

Pixel Grid: An eighth style, a from-above LED grid in three layouts: Piano (a dotted key silhouette, black keys read darker at rest), Fingerboard (equal-width semitone columns, no key shapes) and Accordion (the chromatic button accordion's field: three rows, a minor third per step along a row, neighbouring rows a semitone apart, so an interval spans the same distance in every key and an octave is four columns). Two combinable switches, Glow Trail and Splash (fires above an adjustable velocity threshold), plus its own Density (LED count) and Pixel Size controls, separate from the global Size slider.

Settings: Eight visual designs (Classic, Glass, Neon, Minimal, Dark, Fingerboard, Motion, Pixel Grid) with per-design colours (Fingerboard stripe, Motion wave pair, Pixel Grid unlit/lit LED) · pressure colour mapping (Low → High or Static, with adjustable intensity) · Fill Level (pressure fills the key from the bottom up like a meter) · Hand split (a separate colour pair for the left hand below an adjustable split point) · Brightness Ring for CC74 (min / max colours or static, intensity and size) · Transparent BG. The bend ring around each key reads the instrument's own range automatically, see Bend range.

CASCADE · Note Rain

A piano-roll-style note-rain visualiser that sits above the Keyboard display. Three note sources feed the same canvas: Live MPE: notes are born at the strike line and travel away from it (rising or falling), pitch bend drifts each note sideways and channel pressure blends its colour; any .mid file played by the global 🎞 MIDI File player in the toolbar, arriving exactly like live input; and CASCADE's own Play a Picture, which turns a picture, a drawing or plain text into a note rain, no keys needed.

Play a Picture: Three tabs: Image (threshold, detail, invert, original colours, keep aspect, with an Auto button that tunes the threshold for you), Draw (a small sketch pad with colour palette) and Text (typed words become falling glyphs, case and line breaks are kept). Image and drawing pixels map to notes through a scale (Chromatic, Major, Minor, pentatonics, Blues, modes …), root note and tempo. ▶ Play bakes the source into CASCADE's own scrolling transport (play / pause / stop / seek / loop), and ⭳ Export .mid saves the generated notes as a Standard MIDI File, all notes on channel 1, nothing dropped even for dense text, ready for your DAW or synth.

Render modes: Eight independent layers, freely combinable, Bars (classic solid bars / ribbons), Particles (dissolve into a drifting particle cloud), Lightning (notes as crackling electric bolts), Code Rain (falling code-rain glyph columns), Plasma (breathing energy columns), Waveform (an oscilloscope trace whose wavelength follows pitch and amplitude follows pressure, CC74 adding harmonic bite), Vines (growing tendrils that thicken with pressure as leaves unfurl along the note) and Stars (constellations of star nodes that weave webs between chords and twinkle with pressure, with an adjustable star shape). Four Render-Mode sliders (Opacity · Roundness · Amount · Size) act on every active layer at once.

Settings: Flow direction (up / down) and speed · note gradient (driven by Pressure or Velocity) with CC74-timbre and glow colour · hand split (a separate gradient per hand from a split point) · note texture fills (noise, lines, diamond, glass, chrome, outline or a custom image) · pitch-bend shift, its bend range on Auto by default with fixed values available as a display zoom for making small bends legible (see Bend range) · octave gridlines · a beat and bar grid locked to the incoming MIDI clock (from a DAW or the MIDI File player, so you can see whether a note landed on the beat) · optional sustain pedal note length, where a pedalled note keeps drawing until the pedal lifts instead of ending with the key · impact effects on landing (glow flash, sparks, ripple, fountain, firework, flames, water geyser, rain, lightning, vortex), ten independent layers that combine as freely as the render modes do, with Amount and Size acting on every armed one at once, and an Own color switch that gives every armed layer one shared colour instead of the colour of the note that set it off · a glow bar along the strike edge with six motion styles (Aurora drift, Wave, Flames, Weed, Bubbles, Sparks) · atmosphere layers: background colour or image with Transparent BG, background FX (motes, aurora, nebula, fireflies, starfield, light rays), note trails (comet, stardust, ribbon, bubbles, embers) and keyboard fog · playful game modes (retro block grid, alien shooter) · post-effects such as bloom, god rays and smear.

PB / Mod

Displays the Master Pitch Bend and Mod Wheel from the MIDI Master Channel (channel 1). Two display modes: Classic (two vertical sliders) and Radial (circular dial). Both sliders are colour-configurable. This is the one display that never converts: the wheel shows the raw master pitch-bend position, so full deflection is full deflection whatever range the instrument reports (see Bend range).

Expression Overview

One module, five ways to see the same expression data. Expression Overview tracks up to 10 signal sources, by default Pitch Bend, CC74 Brightness, Velocity, Pressure and Release Velocity, each in its own freely chosen colour. The Mode selector switches between two time-based views (Lines, 3D Box) that plot every source over a configurable window, and three current-moment views (Radar, Landscape 3D, Rack) that show where each source sits right now. Radar and Landscape 3D were the separate "Expression Breakdown" module in earlier versions; they now live here as modes.

Lines draws a flat chart of the last 5-30 seconds (default 10): bipolar signals such as Pitch Bend are centred on a dashed zero line, unipolar ones grow from the bottom edge. 3D Box lifts the same history into a slowly swaying perspective box, time runs along the box, each source gets its own depth lane, and every signal leaves a glowing trajectory whose bright endpoint marks the live value.

Radar spans a spider mesh across the sources (at least 3): a filled polygon updates in real time, its colour mixed from the most active axes, and each axis label shows the signed value while the shape uses the magnitude.

Landscape 3D turns the same values into a static 3D terrain: every source owns a fixed anchor point on the mesh, and its live value raises a smooth mound there, Pitch Bend can also dig below the surface. Mounds widen as they grow and blend softly where they overlap, glowing peak dots carry each source's name and value, and a spectral height ramp colours valley to summit, with fast attack and slow release, so hits land instantly and fade gently. A slow camera sway adds parallax while the terrain itself stays put.

Rack drops the curves entirely and draws each source as the piece of studio gear you already read it by. A value you set gets a control, a value that happens gets a meter, and every row lets you overrule that: Auto, Knob, Meter or Bar, the bar new in this release, so a source you want to read at a glance can be a bar even where the automatic would have drawn a knob: Pitch Bend and CC10 Pan appear as knobs with a centre detent, resting straight up and swinging either way, while Pressure, Velocity, Release Velocity and both Aftertouches appear as channel-strip meters filling from the bottom, each with a peak mark that holds for a moment and then falls, so a single strike stays readable instead of flashing past. CC74, the Mod Wheel and any other CC are positions too, so they get knobs. The elements arrange themselves into a grid that fits the panel and drop their readouts, then their names, as the module gets smaller. Unlike Radar and Landscape 3D this mode works from a single source.

Pitch Bend always reads in real semitones (e.g. +2.00 st). With several channels bending at once the scale follows whichever one is contributing the largest swing, at the range that channel itself reported (see Bend range), so nothing has to be set by hand here.

Settings: Mode · sources (add / remove / recolour, up to 10, Radar and Landscape 3D need at least 3) · Time Window (5-30 s, Lines / 3D Box, greyed out in the current-moment modes) · Glow · Transparent BG · MIDI channel filter.

MIDI Stream Log

A real-time table of all incoming MIDI events (up to 250 entries, newest first). Columns: timestamp (with milliseconds) · message type · channel · note · value · raw hex bytes. Each message type is colour-coded, Note On green, Pitch Bend blue, CC orange, and so on. The most recent entry briefly flashes on arrival. The module's toolbar offers ⌫ Clear and ⭳ Export, which saves the visible rows as a .csv table in chronological order (oldest first, the opposite of the newest-first table on screen); both respect the module's MIDI channel filter (the master channel 1 always passes). Transparent BG is available here too.

Four views share the module, picked with the View menu at the top of the settings (the toolbar names the one that is showing). Events is that table. Notes is a voice ledger, Channels is a per-channel breakdown, and Stats is the numbers. Each Log instance remembers its own view, so two Logs side by side can show two different views of the same stream, each with its own channel filter; the view is part of a saved stand, like every other module setting. Eight presets come in pairs, one per view: the plain panel, and the same view as a chrome-less overlay floating over the visual modules. ⌫ Clear and ⭳ Export belong to Events and ↺ Reset belongs to Stats; each greys out on the views where it has nothing to do.

Message colours. Eight message types, one colour each, edited in the settings under Message Colours: click a swatch and pick, the way Expression Overview's sources work. One palette serves all four views, so recolouring Pitch Bend moves the Events rows, the Channels band, the Stats line and the ledger together. Each Log instance keeps its own palette and it travels with a saved stand. CC74 starts on the same orange as the other controllers, so nothing looks different until you decide the timbre axis deserves its own colour, which is one click. ↺ Reset colours puts the whole palette back.

Events, the detail line. Click any row and the strip below the table writes that one message out in full: the decoded fields and the raw bytes side by side. A pitch bend reads as its signed value, its 14-bit number, its normalised position and its deflection in semitones at the range that channel reported, so the number the app is drawing with is visible next to the bytes that produced it. The selection follows the message, not the row it was on, so it survives the table filling up around it. With Transparent BG on, the table stops taking clicks and the strip says so.

Notes, the voice ledger. One row per sounding voice, in the order the keys were struck: status, note, channel, velocity, pressure, bend in semitones, CC74 and a running duration. This is not a second reading of the wire, it is what the app believes: the same voice list Keyboard, Grand Staff, CASCADE and FORGE draw from, so a note that looks wrong on screen can be checked as a number here. A finished note stays for three seconds, greyed, with its release velocity if the controller sent one, which is the only way a staccato run is readable at all. Bend is written with two decimals, so a quarter-tone reads +0.50 and a sixteenth-tone is still distinct from it.

Channels. Sixteen rows, one per MIDI channel, always in channel order: a bar showing how much traffic that channel carried since the last reset, measured against the busiest channel, then what it is holding right now, note, bend, pressure and CC74. The bar is split into coloured bands, so its length says how much and its bands say of what: notes, pitch bend, pressure (channel and poly aftertouch together) and CC74, with everything else in a fifth, quiet band. On an MPE zone that is the whole picture at a glance, a channel carrying notes and little else looks nothing like one carrying a note under a wall of pressure. The colours are the same ones the Events table uses for those message types, and a key sits under the table. A channel that is quiet, or that the channel filter is holding back, is greyed rather than removed.

Stats. Two blocks, kept apart because they measure different things. Now is the live spread across everything sounding: how many notes, over which channels, and the lowest to highest note, velocity, pressure, bend and timbre among them. It carries the weight of the two, since it is the answer most of the time, and in silence it reads as empty rather than freezing on the last value. Since reset, set apart below it, is the running total: how many messages of each kind, split by type and colour-coded like the Events table, plus the spans each value has travelled, with bend given both in semitones and as the raw 14-bit pair. ↺ Reset zeroes those totals for this Log only; it is a separate account from Clear, which empties the Events rows.

Two things an instrument says about itself get their own line here, because they change how every module draws: Bend Range (RPN 0, see Bend range) and MPE Zone (the MPE Configuration Message). Many controllers announce both only when they power up or when their zone changes, so the line appears on connect rather than while you play, and this is the one place to check that it arrived at all.

Grand Staff

Four display modes share one engraving engine, switch with the Mode buttons at the top of the settings. Now shows only the currently held notes, Time lets played notes scroll across the staves like a timeline, Flow turns them into expressive MPE ribbons, and Weave leaves notation behind for a harmonic field.

Classic notation on treble and bass clef staves. All currently held notes are shown with accidentals matching the selected key signature. An optional Pitch Bend Hook draws a curved arc from each notehead, up for positive bend, down for negative, scaled to the bend depth. Chord detection recognises triads, 6th/7th chords, sus/add chords, altered dominants (♭9/♯9/♯11/♯5/♭13), quartal voicings, polychords and 9th/11th/13th extensions from the currently held notes and labels them lead-sheet style, including slash-chord inversions (e.g. "C/E"). Anything with a real 7th is named by construction rather than looked up in a list, so an ordinary jazz voicing that no table anticipated still gets its proper name: C-E-B♭-A♭-D♭-F♯ reads C7♭9♯11♭13.

Time: the scrolling take on notation (the former Note Timeline module lives on here): every played note travels across the staves, so phrases stay readable after the moment has passed. Noteheads keep the pressure colour mapping (Low → High, or Static), an optional CC74 / Timbre colour blends in as a note brightens, and Hand split gives the left hand its own colour pair below a configurable split point.

Flow, notation becomes ribbons: each note draws a band at its pitch whose length is the duration, whose thickness follows velocity and pressure, and whose curve traces the pitch bend. True legato merges into one continuous line, an adaptive phrase break starts a new ribbon when a silence is long relative to your playing speed, and a voice-split threshold keeps two-handed playing in separate voices. Colours per voice (each melodic line keeps its colour) or by scale degree, with eight palettes from Spectrum to Beige, plus a soft glow halo and a gap bridge across small non-legato gaps.

Weave, harmony as a field: the staves disappear and pitch becomes a position on an interval field instead of a height on a line. One step to the right is a fifth, the two diagonals are the major and the minor third. Because the directions are fixed intervals, a chord turns into a shape: every major triad is the same upward triangle and every minor triad the same downward one, in every key, so quality reads before a single note has been named. Transposing moves that shape rather than redrawing it, and voice leading becomes distance, a cadence stays in one small area while a modulation visibly walks away from it. Each pitch class recurs across the field, and Field width decides how much of that repetition you see: fully zoomed in there is exactly one figure, centred, and pulling back scales the copies in one at a time until the whole field is a wallpaper of the same shape. Pitch bend climbs the field vertically, its trail as long as the interval it travels, whole octaves folded away (a node is a pitch class, so a bend of exactly an octave has arrived back where it started and a slow full sweep breathes out and back once per octave). An adjustable afterglow keeps released chords burning so the harmonic path of a whole phrase stays visible. Two looks share all of it. Instrument draws the field the way an instrument face is drawn: the lattice itself in hairlines, hard-edged marks lit from a single direction, the lowest note carrying a collar so inversions read on a field that has no octaves, colour reserved for what sounds right now while the recent past drains toward grey, and the chord name set small on the panel's own margin. Glow keeps the softer luminous rendering. Key gravity weighs the resting field toward the current key: at zero every position weighs the same, turned up the key's own notes grow and brighten, foreign ones sink away and the tonic becomes a marked anchor. Field width sets how much of the field fits across the panel, counted in steps, so the same setting means the same thing in a narrow tile and a wide one. Labels appear only on what actually sounds, as scale degrees (1, ♭3, 5) or as note names, and step aside once the field gets too dense to read them. They are spelled, not looked up: the route a note took across the field is a spelling, so a raised fifth and a flattened sixth stay apart even though they are the same key, and the label can never contradict the chord symbol above it.

Settings: Mode (Now / Time / Flow / Weave) · key signature (all major and minor keys) · note name labels · Pitch Bend Hook · chord detection with label colour · note colours (pressure Low / High, Static, Hand split with own colour pair and split point) · CC74 / Timbre colour (Time mode) · Flow: phrase break, voice split, gap bridge, colour mode (Voice / Scale (key)) and palette, halo · Weave: look (Instrument / Glow), field width, afterglow, key gravity, triad fill, labels · Glow · Transparent BG · MIDI channel filter.

Grand Staff's engraving also powers the lead-sheet export: record a take and render it as a complete paginated notation sheet, chord symbols included, saved as one PNG.

Aura

A generative real-time visualiser that maps MPE expression data to one of twenty-four rendering styles, grouped into four families, Elements, Rings & Radial, Flow & Organic and Scenes. In every style, size, width and twist are independently routed to the MPE dimension of your choice. A Scenes highlight is Orrery: notes orbit a central ring by pitch class, with octaves as orbital depth, pressure, bend and timbre animate each note's glow, size and trail, and the rotation direction is switchable.

Styles

Elements

Rings & Radial

Flow & Organic

Scenes

Elements are GPU shader fields: Silk Flames is a flowing WebGL flame-silk field that ignites per note and reacts to pitch, and Photo Swarm turns a photo of your own into a GPU particle cloud that scatters per pitch column and heals back (with no photo it runs neutral in the background colour). In Flow & Organic, Filament is the one style that keeps what you played: a note plants a glowing seed at its pitch, and for exactly as long as you hold it a thread grows out of that seed, wanders, forks and fuses with whatever it touches, so a phrase grows into a single lit net instead of a scatter of shapes. The whole structure travels the entire time, which is why the frame never runs out of room: new growth appears at one end, the other thins into out-of-focus points and is gone. Base Speed steers that journey and is the character switch of the style: forward the net recedes and dissolves in the distance, backward it comes at you and dissolves as it sweeps past, at zero it stands still and simply piles up. Strike a note a good interval away from what is already standing and it starts its own colony instead of joining the old one, so wide leaps build separate bodies. Attack and Decay are lengths here rather than brightnesses: a long Attack has the thread creep out of its seed and pick up speed, a long Decay has it keep inching onward after you let go. The Width source is the master ignition, so pushing CC74 up lights every node that is still standing and the whole net comes back out of the dark, not just the growing tips. And Note Rotation winds the body around instead of nudging it: low notes turn it one way, high notes the other, and it stays where you turned it. In Scenes, Tonewheel is a pitch-clock dial where notes ignite on the ring and drift back into a depth tunnel, and Glass Spiral winds the block field into a spiral seen from an elevated camera: low notes stand on the wide outer rim, high notes in the tight core, and every slab is lit glass.

Signal sources (per parameter)

Each of the three dynamic parameters (Size · Width · Twist) can be independently routed to: Pressure · CC74 Timbre · Velocity · or Pitch Bend (bipolar). Glow is a fixed amount, and Attack / Decay shape how fast every routed parameter rises and falls. Wherever a style places a note on a key axis, its Pitch Bend Range is Auto by default, with fixed values available as a display zoom (see Bend range).

Aura Presets

Two built-in presets for every style, with the MPE Insight signature at the top of the list. Each is a starting point rather than a finished look: change anything and save your own alongside them. The pair belonging to a style differs in more than colour. Presets set the style, colour pair, segment count, envelope, signal routing, and background colour simultaneously, so a handful deliberately drive a knob from a different signal where that fits the picture better, for example a strike-driven look running Size from Velocity, which also keeps it working on a keyboard without aftertouch. Custom configurations go into the per-instance Aura Snapshot list, which has no upper limit and simply starts with five empty rows.

FORGE · Depth Shader

A live WebGL shader driven by the same MPE data every other module reads. Feed it an image or video, the webcam, or the live picture of other modules, the shader reacts to your playing in real time: pitch bend, pressure and CC74 shift, warp and animate the picture. FORGE runs as a single instance (one GL context, one source chain).

Sources: Drop an image or video anywhere on the module, or pick a source in the settings: a file, the webcam (with camera selection), or the Module Feed: CASCADE, AURA, Grand Staff, Expression and Keyboard can each be routed through the FORGE effect chain, alone or several at once. Multiple feeds composite with a selectable Feed Blend: Screen and Lighten add light, Stack and Multiply luma-key each layer (dark areas turn transparent), Difference inverts overlaps. While a module feeds FORGE, its own tile hides itself, and a file or the webcam can sit underneath the whole feed as a Base Layer.

Real depth: On first load FORGE uses AI to estimate a depth map of the image (Depth Anything V2, Apache-2.0) and builds real parallax and relief from it, instead of a flat filter. If the model or a backend is unavailable (e.g. fully offline), the shader falls back automatically to a luminance pseudo-depth, so the module always works, just with flatter parallax when offline.

Effects: Parallax · normal-map relief · heat shimmer · flow · kaleidoscope · Infinity Spiral · glitch · mosaic · chromatic aberration · False Color palettes · point cloud · strobe · feedback trails · Retro Pixel VHS · cell screens · zoom · rotation · tunnel warp · camera shake, each effect independently switchable between off, MPE-driven and a constant value.

Global & mapping: Sensitivity shapes how your pressure reads: to the left you have to lean in before much happens, to the right a light touch already carries. Full press always arrives at full, whatever it is set to. Every disc effect carries its own Size slider, the radius of the disc it plays inside. Pitch → Position decides where a note lands on the image: Circle, Horizontal, Vertical, Center (the whole keyboard on one middle disc), Random (a fixed scatter, one place per key), Color key (nearest matching colour) or Hue key. The 88 / 12 pair beside it sets how finely that mapping reads the keyboard: 88 gives every key its own place, 12 lets all octaves share one, so a note name always lands in the same spot however you voice it. Every effect can also leave that global choice and run its own mapping, from the small menu on its own OFF / MPE / CONST button. A Depth Preview toggle shows the estimated depth-map thumbnail.

Envelopes: Pressure, Pitch and CC74 each have their own Attack and Release times, so the shader can snap instantly or ease in and fade out smoothly after every note, from tight, percussive reactions to slow, breathing swells.

Effect parameters: Each effect has its own toggle, OFF, MPE (driven by your playing inside the Size disc at the note's pitch) or CONST (a constant value over the whole image), plus its own sliders: its own Size (the disc radius around each note), Parallax (Depth, Motion, Drift), Heat shimmer, Flow and Chroma (Strength, Motion), Kaleidoscope (Segments, Motion), Infinity Spiral (Twist, Rings, Motion), Glitch (Strength, Rate, Density, each strike tears inside its note's disc), Mosaic (Blocks, pressure carries the block size from the start ring to the slider, so it can build up or heal away), False Color (Mix, Solarize, Hue, pitch bend can spin the palette live), Normal Light (Strength, colour, plus a diffuse Fill and its own Motion and Orbit), Strobe (Intensity, Speed, colour, plus a Backlight mode that fires the God-Ray pass instead of a flat flash) and Feedback Trails (Decay). Every Motion slider is a true time control: at zero the movement stops and the effect settles into one defined resting state, so the same slider position always gives the same picture, and where the two directions look different (Parallax, Normal Light, Heat, Flow, Kaleidoscope, Infinity Spiral, the Ripple, the VHS tracking bar) the slider runs both ways, left of centre playing the same movement backwards.

Point Cloud: A second render path, WebGL2 only: instead of the flat picture, FORGE plots a grid of points across the image and pushes each one toward or away from the camera by the depth map, so the Virtual Camera flies through a real point cloud instead of a flat plane. Shape switches between hard Dots, soft Splats and Glyphs, Size sets how large each point is, Density thins or fills the grid, and Depth sets how strongly the depth map pushes points out. In Glyphs mode each point stamps a character instead of a dot, picked from a ramp so that brighter points carry denser characters, kept in the point's own colour, for a live ASCII look you can fly through. The character set is a field you can edit, and the ramp re-sorts itself by density from whatever you type. In MPE mode, played notes push the points inside their disc toward the camera: presence brings them in and lets them fall back on release, pressure holds them out further the harder you press, slide opens the cone wider, and pitch bend moves it sideways. Under a global Color or Hue mapping the cloud selects its points by brightness or by hue instead of by place, exactly as the flat effect rows do. CONST mode runs the camera and depth alone, with no note pushing anything. The Depth of Field and Motion Blur post passes and the camera's own Relief slider are not available while Point Cloud is on (their rows grey out): they read scene brightness as distance, and the cloud already carries its own real depth. Camera Ground tilt, Heading and Lens distortion all work with it. Spin turns the whole cloud about its own centre on a free axis: Speed sets rate and direction, Axis slides from a vertical turntable axis through the diagonals to a horizontal tumble, and Lean tips that axis out of the picture plane toward you until the cloud spins about its own line of sight. In MPE mode the spin winds while you play and settles back upright in silence; CONST turns steadily. Point Cloud has its own section in the panel now.

Virtual Camera: Using the AI depth map, the Virtual Camera moves a real 3D camera through the image instead of applying a flat filter. Relief sets how strongly depth separates near from far. Ground lays the image down into a plane that recedes to a horizon, so parallel lines converge and near content really is larger than far; with it, Depth of Field and Fog stop reading brightness and start reading actual distance. Heading turns that ground under the camera, letting content run diagonally into the distance. The rest of the rig is grouped by what it does. Position moves the camera itself: Truck X/Y slide it sideways and up, Dolly drives it toward or away. View turns it on the spot: Yaw left and right, Tilt up and down, Roll tipping the horizon. Optics holds FOV (telephoto ↔ wide) and Lens (pincushion ↔ barrel/fisheye), and camera-motion Blur sits below. The distinction between the two groups is worth knowing, because it is the one thing that makes these sliders feel duplicated. Moving the camera and turning it only look different when there is depth in the picture: a real move shifts near content further than far content, which is parallax, while a turn shifts everything equally. With Relief and Ground both at 0 the image has no near and far at all, so Truck X and Yaw genuinely produce the same result, and so do Truck Y and a gentle Tilt. Raise Relief or lay the plane down with Ground, and they separate immediately. Likewise Truck Y against Dolly: one keeps the distance and changes the angle you look down at, the other keeps the angle and changes the distance. Three different rotations exist, and they are easy to mix up. Roll tips the camera head, so the horizon tilts with it. Heading turns the ground plane itself, so the horizon stays level and the content swings around underneath. Spin, over in the Whole Frame group among the Distort FX, is not a camera at all: it rotates the finished picture around its centre like a turntable. Move Amt sets how strongly the chosen Move preset plays on top of your framing. How far your playing moves the camera is not a separate number: it is the journey on each row, from the small start ring where it begins to the handle where it ends, so every axis says its own reach and you can read it off the panel. Reset Pose returns the framing to neutral, Ground and Heading included. With the Conductor running it keeps drifting those two on from there, which is what that target is for: close the range rings on the Ground and Heading sliders if you want the floor to stay flat. A cinematic DoF post-pass adds bokeh blur off the focal plane, its Focus slider is auto in the centre (focus follows your playing), far to the left, near to the right, and Fog fades distant content into atmosphere; both work in every camera mode. ● REC records up to 60 seconds of your own slider moves, Ground and Heading included, as a seamlessly looping Custom move preset. While a take is running the Conductor lets go of the camera and its bands go quiet, so the recording holds your move rather than its drift; it picks the camera back up the moment you stop.

Virtual Camera move presets: The Move dropdown offers around twenty cinematic camera paths in two groups. Fly in & home presets (Slow Push In, Orbit, Drift, Handheld, Crane, Dolly Zoom, Smash Zoom, Free Fall, Whip Pan, Quake) perform the move while you play and fly the camera back home on release. Continuous presets (Figure-8 Glide, Carousel, Endless Wander, Pendulum, Pull & Repel, Corkscrew Drill, Vortex Pull, Surge, Slingshot, Kite) wind forward like a loop while you play, release freezes the camera in place, and the next note continues the move from there, and the manual sliders below stay live as a trim on top of the preset. A move you recorded yourself always plays back at the tempo you recorded it.

Camera & post-process: CC74 Rings is what the slide axis does to the picture: lean into CC74 and the frame is pulled toward the note you are playing, with waves running outward on that pull. One bipolar slider carries the whole effect, and its two sides are two different pictures: to the right it pulls in and the waves run out, to the left it pushes away and they run in, and the centre is off. Splash is the strike's own ring in the picture: every note you play sends one wavefront out from its place, shoving the picture aside as it crosses and thinning as it grows. Strength sets how hard it shoves, Speed how fast it travels, and both reach a real zero. It is MPE only, because a splash needs something to throw it, and once thrown a wavefront always completes its journey: letting the key go, or playing on top, never cuts it short. These rings are drawn in the image; the rings on the sliders themselves are a different thing entirely, see Conductor and Start point below. Simpler whole-frame transforms live with the Distort FX, in a group called Whole Frame: Zoom, Spin (speed and direction, a turntable rotation of the finished frame rather than a camera move), Tunnel warp and Shake. Shake is played, not looped: every strike throws the frame off centre and a spring brings it back, low notes throwing it left and high notes right, and the harder you strike the further it goes. Strength sets the weight of a hit, Motion how much movement each one releases, from a single short nudge up to a long ring-out. Play nothing and the picture stands perfectly still, unless you set its start ring away from zero, in which case that is where it rests and a gentle tremble carries on by itself (its CONST mode keeps a steady idle tremble too, for a look that runs without playing). They bend the finished picture without a camera behind them, which is why they sit with the other distortions rather than with the Virtual Camera. Four post-process passes run last, on the finished frame: Bloom (Threshold, Intensity, Radius) blooms the bright areas, God Rays (Intensity, Length, Decay) casts volumetric light shafts, and Retro Pixel VHS puts the finished picture through an analog tape and CRT chain: Scanlines with a rolling tracking bar whose Roll slider sets its speed and direction, Dot Glow (the image resolves into a grid of glowing phosphor points), Chroma Tear (RGB offset, in MPE mode every strike bursts a harder tear), Grain with its own Grain Speed, and a Duotone tint with its own colour. Cells breaks the finished frame into a grid and redraws each cell by its own brightness, in one of three looks: ASCII stamps a character whose density follows the brightness, in the cell's own colour, Halftone lays down a rotated dot screen whose dots grow with the brightness, and Dither steps the frame down to a few colour levels in an ordered dot pattern. Cell Size sets how coarse the grid is and Contrast shapes the brightness ramp, and like every pass it runs off, at a constant value, or answering your playing, where harder playing breaks the picture further into cells. Every FORGE setup can be stored in the module's preset and snapshot slots, and FORGE respects the same MIDI channel filter as the other modules.

Living World: The image grows a world of its own, every style draws its palette and material from the source picture instead of a canned pattern. Four styles: Organic Growth (a grown reaction-diffusion culture; your playing seeds it at the note's position), Fractal Tunnel (an enclosed corridor ride), Fractal Open Space (free flight through floating folded formations; Density sets how many cells hold one) and Ink Bloom (an amber macro fluid-art blob that is its own light source). Pattern, Flow, Growth and Blend shape the behaviour, and ↺ Reseed World restarts the world from the current image.

Conductor: Autonomous slow drift on top of your sliders, so the look keeps living between notes. Switch it on and every slider it can reach grows a pair of range rings, one for each end of the range that knob may drift in. The panel has just two marks and they read the same everywhere: an outer range ring is a point you set, the green dot is the value right now. Closed, the two rings sit on the value as one, with the dot inside it, so a dot in its ring means the image is on your handle and a dot anywhere else means something else is moving it: a Move preset, or the play envelope on a camera in MPE mode. Drag the left ring to move the value as always; pull the right one outwards and the pair opens: the groove between them is the range, and the green line inside it shows what the drift can reach at this moment. Once open, either ring sets the reach and the line itself moves the value. Pull a ring back onto the value, or double-click one, and the pair closes again. Where a range runs into the end of its travel it slides inwards instead of getting narrower, so a knob at the very bottom of its slider still drifts its full width. The range always sits around your own value, so nothing jumps when the drift settles: at rest the picture is exactly what your sliders say. Intensity sets every open range at once, Cycle sets the pace, from a lazy ~5-minute sweep down to 0.4 s (the readout switches to BPM at musical rates). Its Sync button hands that pace to the transport tempo instead: the same slider then snaps to musical divisions, 1/16 up to 4 bars, and the readout names the division and the tempo it is riding. Or hand the timing to Silence: the drift holds still while you play and re-rolls in every pause. Because the drift breathes with your playing energy, the band widens as you dig in and settles back in the rests, and the live tick on the slider shows what is being rendered right now. The whole Virtual Camera is included: position, view, optics, Ground and Heading all take a range, so the Conductor can operate the camera the way it operates an effect. On a camera in MPE mode every row starts on its own handle, so the framing you dial in is the framing you see, in silence and while you play; pull a ring off the handle and that axis becomes a journey your playing travels, drift included. CONST mode drifts on its own. The Conductor drifts camera values, never the camera PATH: which move runs is the Move dropdown's answer alone.

Start point (MPE): In MPE mode a slider is the destination and your playing performs the trip to it. That trip begins at the parameter's neutral, which is why playing can only ever add a look, never clear one. It does not have to. Move the pointer over a camera, Bloom, God Rays, Living World, Glitch Strength, Strobe Intensity, Hue, Mosaic Blocks, Zoom Speed, Shake Strength, Tunnel Warp or Point Cloud Spin and Axis row in MPE mode and the small start ring appears where the journey begins. Drag it anywhere on the travel, including past the slider's own handle, and the move runs the other way: start wide and play your way in, start fogged and clear the air as you dig in, hold the camera off centre and let a phrase bring it home. A groove under the track draws the trip and the green bar inside it fills as you play, so you can see how far your playing is actually getting. Mosaic is the one row where every note travels its own trip inside its own disc, so a soft note stays blocky while a hard one right beside it comes clean; its bar reads the note pressing hardest. Double-click the start ring to hand the start back to the neutral. With the Conductor's range rings open on the same knob, its drift is capped to the stretch you drew, so every phrase reaches a different distance along the trip and none of them leaves it.

DRIFT · MPE Processor

DRIFT is a live MPE processor that sits between your controller and your synth. It turns an ordinary MIDI keyboard into an expressive MPE instrument: one note per key goes in, a randomized, humanized MPE stream comes out, spread across the member channels with its own pressure, pitch and timbre motion per note. Every module, and every synth downstream, then reacts as if the part had been played on an expressive controller. While switched on, DRIFT replaces plain MIDI Thru on the enabled outputs. The master Intensity knob scales every randomization at once. Two modes decide how it reacts: Independent keeps the randomization running constantly, regardless of how you play, while Follow scales it with your own expression (pressure, pitch bend, CC74), subtle when you play plainly, wide when you dig in. A plain, non-MPE keyboard sends no such expression, so Follow stays near its minimum there and Independent is the mode to use. Selecting a DRIFT preset also sets the ⏻ power switch: presets meant to be heard arm DRIFT, all others switch it off, so the switch always matches the picked entry.

Modulation: Four independent per-voice LFOs, one per MPE dimension, Pitch, Timbre (CC74), Pressure and Pan (CC10), each with its own shape, depth and rate, and its own colour in the voice-lane display. Eight shapes are available: Drift (organic), Sine, Triangle, Saw Up, Saw Down, Square, S&H Random and Static (per note). Because every voice runs its own LFO phase, MPE's 15 member channels never move in lockstep, giving a chorused, organic feel even from a single sustained note. Pitch depth is in cents, up to 200 of them, so two full semitones; the others are a percentage. On a plain keyboard DRIFT generates pressure and timbre from nothing; on an MPE controller it layers on top of what you already send. All depths scale with the master Intensity.

Notes: On top of the modulation, DRIFT can generate whole new notes. Octave Layers stack octave copies above and/or below every played note, each its own MPE voice with its own drift and a settable relative velocity, but each layer costs one of the 15 member channels per note. Chord Machine turns a single key into a full chord: the played note becomes the root and each interval gets its own voice (also with its own relative velocity). Scale Lock snaps every generated note into a chosen key and scale, so the Chord Machine becomes diatonic and Note Spread and Bend Quantize follow the same scale. Note Spread displaces each played note to a nearby degree for instant width (snapped to the scale when Scale Lock is on), with a Max displacement control. Bend Quantize pulls continuous glides onto scale notes (100% = hard snap, lower keeps some of the slide) while leaving plain held notes untouched. Humanize adds subtle per-hit velocity variation and a few milliseconds of random timing so no two notes are identical.

Arpeggiator: With the ARP engaged, held keys become a step pattern instead of sounding directly, and every step still runs through the full randomization chain (drift, pan, spread, even the Chord Machine for rhythmic chords). Direction can be Up, Down, Up & Down, Random, As Played or Chord, extended over 1-4 octaves. Chord is a distribution rather than a direction: it plays the whole held chord on every step instead of one note at a time, and because each step builds new voices, every hit re-rolls its own detune, LFO phase, velocity and timing offset, so the same chord breathes differently on every beat. There the octave range rotates the chord one octave per step instead of stacking it, keeping the voice count flat; every note still takes one of the 15 MPE channels, so a wide chord together with the Chord Machine can run past them. Free runs it at the Internal Clock tempo set in the toolbar's tempo pill; Sync locks the divisions (1/4, 1/8, 1/8T …) to the transport clock, MIDI Clock when one is present, otherwise the Internal Clock. Gate sets note length as a fraction of the step; Latch keeps the pattern playing after you release the keys, with the next key press starting a new chord.

MPE Output: DRIFT sends to the enabled MIDI outputs, and what listens there has to be an MPE-capable receiver: a synth, or a DAW track switched to MPE mode. Send MPE Setup transmits the MPE Configuration Message (15 member channels) plus the pitch-bend range to those outputs, it is sent automatically every time DRIFT is switched on, and the range must match what the receiving synth uses on its member channels (MPE standard is 48), or the drift depth will be wrong. The 👁 In / Out monitor decides what every visual module displays while DRIFT is active: the raw input you play, or DRIFT's processed output: the actual randomized MPE stream the synth receives, including chord voices, arp steps and channel allocation. The monitor changes what you see, not what is sent. With output monitoring, the toolbar's ● Rec captures DRIFT's output instead of the input, so you can export the humanized, arpeggiated or chorded MPE performance as a .mid file for your DAW. DRIFT also has its own glow and Transparent BG for the voice-lane visualiser.

Visuals only: DRIFT engages as soon as a MIDI output is enabled, or, with the monitor set to 👁 Out, entirely without one: the status then reads visuals only · no MIDI out, and DRIFT re-voices a plain keyboard or a single-channel DAW track across the member channels purely for the on-screen modules, no synth required. While it runs, thin ghost ticks on the sliders show what is effectively being sent: the toolbar Intensity tick appears in Follow mode (how far your expression scales the randomization below its maximum), and each modulation depth slider carries a tick in its parameter colour.