Jacquard - Music App

A sequencer with no tracks. Music is woven on a plane instead, a few steps at a time, and no two laps of it need come out alike.

Jacquard is an experimental tile-based music sequencer. Instead of arranging notes on conventional tracks, you build sequences by placing and stacking tiles on a two-dimensional grid. Notes, parameter locks, gates, and branches can be combined to create patterns that evolve and change as they repeat.

At its simplest it works like a step sequencer: place note tiles along a lane and they play in turn. Stack them vertically and they sound together as a chord. Then the other tiles go into the stack, and the pattern stops standing still.

TILES ON A PLANE

• Note - a letter, an octave, and a length in steps
• Absolute and Relative Lock - set or shift sound parameters for one step only
• Cycle Gate - let a note through only on the laps you name, a period from 2 to 32
• Chance Gate - let it through at a percentage
• Jump and Jump Target - fly to another lane, for branches and alternative routes
• Order matters: a stack is read top to bottom, so a gate placed partway down a chord divides it, and a lock colours everything read after it

LANES THAT RUN THEIR OWN WAY Eight channels, each with a sound of its own, and as many lanes as you like in each. Every lane has its own step length, from 1/1 down to 1/64, and its own length in steps - so polyrhythms are just two lanes of different lengths running over one tempo. Dedicate a lane to accents or parameter changes and it colours the lanes below it.

A TWO-OPERATOR FM VOICE Every channel is one FM patch: a carrier and a modulator, with envelopes on amplitude, on modulation depth, and on pitch. Fifteen parameters in all - and every one of them is exactly what a parameter lock can reach, so a single step can take hold of anything about a channel. Twenty-four voices are shared across the whole score, with unison thickening a part without spending a second voice.

EFFECTS AND MIX

• One reverb and one tempo-synced delay for the whole piece, with per-note send amounts that locks can reach
• Solo and mute on all eight channels at once
• A scale keyboard that snaps notes to the key you choose, without rewriting a single tile
• A limiter on the output, threshold, attack and release

PLAY IT WITH YOUR HANDS Twelve Live FX buttons act only while they are held, on whatever the sequence is about to play: both sends, stab and sustain, octave up and down, falls and rises, and four rolls that catch what just played and repeat it in place. Nothing is written to the score, so nothing is undone. On a touch screen you can hold one per finger.

Loading a score while another is playing does not cut it off. The change waits for the master lane to come round, and from that instant the new score runs - no gap, no overlap, and the mix and the Live FX keep working the whole time.