An Arpeggiator You Actually Play

This is the headline feature of 1.2, and it's a substantial new instrument inside the app. Two sizes, multitouch note pads, four poly modes including a full Canon engine, diatonic chord voicings, scale-quantized modulation, and external keyboard control. Plug in a controller, hold a chord, and the arp is already playing.

Two Sizes Designed to Be Touched

The Arpeggiator comes in two layouts. The 3x1 Standard fits a single row of scale-degree note pads with rhythm step toggles below, perfect when you want a focused single-octave melody. The 3x2 Deluxe stretches the pads across three octave rows, adds a Latch toggle, and gives you octave shift buttons that slide the viewport while preserving the notes you've already enabled.

Both sizes are multitouch. Drag a finger across the grid and notes toggle on as you go. In Deluxe, drag between the rows and the gesture continues across octaves seamlessly. There's also a Paint vs Toggle setting, so you can choose whether a swipe follows the first note's direction or flips each note independently.

It feels less like programming an arp and more like sketching one.

Canon Mode and Chord Voicings

The four poly modes are Bass, Chord, Octave Layer, and Canon. Bass and Octave Layer do what you'd expect. Chord and Canon are where it gets interesting.

Diatonic Chord Voicings. Pick a voicing type and every step plays a musically correct chord built from scale degrees. Five voicings ship in 1.2: 5th (Power), Open Triad (spread), Shell (jazz 3rd + 7th), Triad (close), and Power+Oct (wide). The chord tones play at a configurable reduced velocity (anywhere from 30% to 100%), which keeps the arpeggio melody clearly on top while the harmony fills the space below.

Canon Mode. Stagger voices and have them play the same arp sequence offset in time, exactly like a musical canon or round. You configure the number of voices, the step offset between them, octave spread, decay, optional delayed entry (so voices come in one at a time), gate stretch via a Sustain slider, and motion modes: Parallel, Retrograde, and Inversion. You can decide whether the sequence resets on each Arp length boundary or keeps phasing.

A single eight-note arp with three Canon voices in Inversion, light decay, and a long gate stretch suddenly sounds like a string quartet.

Play It From Your Keyboard

Pick a listen channel in the Arp settings, and your external keyboard takes over the note grid. Press a chord and those notes light up. Release a key and that note drops out. The first held note auto-starts playback, so the arp begins sounding without you ever touching the screen. And the key presses are quantized to your chosen scale, so only the right notes sound (unless you chose Chromatic scale).

With Latch on, the first press starts a phrase, more presses while keys are held add to it, and releases leave the grid intact so the arp keeps running until you start the next phrase. You can step away from the keyboard and the music keeps going.

The mod wheel brings the spice (not the Microfreak kind). With a listen channel set, CC 1 on that channel can drive Gate, Velocity, or Spread for live shaping. Hold a chord, push the wheel, and the phrase opens up two octaves, then collapse it to a single note with a flick down (see next paragraph).

Spread Modulation

Spread is a new, scale-quantized modulation that collapses notes toward the chord floor and expands them away from it, up to about two octaves. It pivots on the lowest held note rather than the chord midpoint, so the bottom of your phrase never drops below the key you played. It always feels musical because every position is scale-quantized.

Spread joins Gate and Velocity as a third on-control slider, with a Left/Right slot picker in the Options popover. Wire it to an LFO or assign it to the mod wheel and your phrase breathes in and out without you touching it.

Combined with Canon mode, Spread is genuinely new territory. We haven't heard arps do this before.

The Arp as a Patch Target

The Arpeggiator now shows up in the patch cable overlay alongside every other modulation target in Condukt, with per-parameter input jacks for Pitch, Spread, and Rhythm. XY Pads, LFOs, and the other sequencers can all route in.

This is the part that ties the new Arpeggiator into the rest of the app. It composes with everything Condukt already does.

A Wider LFO Range

While we were in there, we extended the LFO rate range for slower modulation. The floor drops to 0.1 BPM (a 10 minute cycle), and synced mode picks up 16/1 and 32/1 beat divisions. The slider and swipe gestures are now log-scaled, so the full range from sub-audio drift to fast modulation is reachable in a single sweep.

This pairs nicely with Spread on the Arp. Set a 32-bar LFO to drive Spread on a held chord, and the phrase slowly opens and closes over the course of a song.

Everything Else

• Use Instrument Color: a per-control toggle that inherits the SynthChannel's color instead of the control's own palette, with live updates when you change instruments
• Connected Instruments First: pickers now show your currently connected devices on top with disconnected ones grayed out, so you don't wade through every synth you've ever added to find the one in front of you
• Octaduck theme popover sheets render correctly in light mode
• Smaller fixes throughout

In Other News

A quick note on midi.guide: the community-maintained database behind Condukt just crossed 300 devices, and we wrote a short history to mark the milestone. The same database now powers commercial hardware from Oxi, Neuzeit, and Reliq, and every new definition added makes things better for everyone using it.

We're also at Superbooth in Berlin May 7-9. If you're attending, come find us (the jackets will be easy to spot). We'd love to meet the people behind the pull requests and bug reports, and see what you're building with Condukt.