AvailableMIDI & Modulation

Steps

A step sequencer and arpeggiator on one grid.

@maru shared this module so you can play it in your DAW, remix it or put it on your site.

What it does

A step sequencer and arpeggiator on one grid. Hold a chord and Steps plays its notes in turn, while a sixteen-slot pattern of accents, ghost notes and rests decides which steps fire and how hard. It makes no sound itself: put an instrument after it.

The idea

An arpeggiator fires on every step. Steps consults its pattern first, and each slot answers with a velocity: a tall slot is an accent, a short one a ghost note, an empty one a rest. Which note plays is still the arpeggiator's choice. The sequencer decides when and how hard, the arpeggiator decides which.

Each slot's velocity is multiplied by how hard you hold the note, so playing softly makes the whole pattern softer without flattening its accents.

Guide and controls

How it works.

The module is the arpeggiator's architecture with one more table in the middle, and the split is identical: a pure core answers (held notes, step index, params) with a note or a rest, and a scheduler commits whatever the core says to the AudioContext clock through a lookahead window. Every musical claim, the walk orders, the velocity multiplication, the swing displacement, the rests, is a plain function checked in the test suite rather than by ear.

Swing is applied at scheduling time as an onset displacement: odd slots are delayed by the kit's musical-time maths, whose tests pin the exact triplet identity at two-thirds. The gate is clamped against the shortest surviving gap so a swung step can never overlap the note after it.

It hooks note handling exactly as the arpeggiator does: a keypress while the sequencer runs is swallowed and held, and the scheduler re-enters the engine's own noteOn with an absolute time, so the sound comes from whichever voice is mounted. It emits MIDI, not audio.

What would you make with Steps?

Describe what you want to make. Build it with the Studio agent.

Goes well with.

Prototype

A 32-step Matrix, with ties, ratchets and a curve lane.

Building block

Walk held notes through a rhythmic pattern.

Prototype

Generate a voiced chord from one note.

Prototype

A compact subtractive synth for learning the signal path.