New keyboards for your boards

Keys

Add Keys from the Add Control picker. The new control is a polyphonic keyboard bound to one of your instruments, laid out as a piano or a pad grid: Sequential, Fourths, Thirds, Fifths, Octave or Guitar. It comes in sizes up to 5x3, and one-row tiles pack their buttons into a compact block to leave more room for keys.

• Scales. Pick a root and scale, then choose what out-of-scale notes do: Highlight, Disable, Hide or Fold. Roots get a small marker dot.
• Latch and slide. With Latch on, touch or swipe across the pads to latch notes. Start a stroke on an unlit pad to turn pads on, or on a lit pad to turn them off. Hold mode keeps every pad you slide across and latches the last one when you let go.
• Velocity. Play lower on a pad for a higher velocity, the way a piano key responds differently near its edge. Set the range in Options.
• Patching. Keys has notes, gate, trigger and velocity outputs plus a transpose input. Play into a Recorder, drive a sequencer, or let Keys follow external harmony for its root and scale.

MIDI Learn

The Add Control sheet now opens on MIDI Learn when you call it up from the grid. Turn a knob on your synth and it shows up in the list. Tap it to add a fader, tap again to remove it. The sheet stays open, so you can grab several knobs in a row.

If your synth is in the midi.guide database, rows show the parameter's real name instead of a CC number, and NRPN and 14-bit CC are detected too. Learn knows which device a message came from, so two synths sharing a channel stay apart. And if the knob you moved is one stage of an envelope, Learn offers the whole envelope as a 2x2 control right under it.

Also in 1.7

• Popovers match your theme. Arpeggiator, Carma, Drum, Step Modulator, Phrase and the scale pickers follow the board theme instead of the system's light or dark mode.
• Instrument picker for pages. Duplicating a page to another instrument, or reassigning it, opens a picker sheet instead of nested menus.
• Smoother busy boards. Boards with XY pads or many sequencers are now much faster.
• Hot-plugged synths show up again. In 1.6, only devices connected at launch were found.
• Plus a bunch of fixes.

What's next

We're already cooking up the next version, but it's a bigger bite: more to reveal soon!