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The AUTO player

AUTO is a self-playing note generator built into the resonator. Turn it on and it starts feeding itself notes from the current scale. Leave it running on its own, play over it on the performance ribbon.

Turning it on

The AUTO chip sits at the bottom left of the visual in both Play and Studio. Tap it to start or stop a generative pattern; the chip pulses in time with each step it plays. Long-press it to open its settings.

AUTO keeps running when you switch between Play and Studio. As an AUv3 instrument it keeps running even if a host temporarily closes the plugin window, because the pattern clock lives in the audio engine itself, not the interface.

The three patterns

A segmented picker in AUTO's settings chooses how it generates notes:

  • Turing, the default. A looping shift register of scale degrees (8 steps by default): each step either survives from the last loop or gets rewritten, so the pattern drifts and occasionally repeats without looping exactly. A LOOP slider sets how likely a step is to survive (0 to 100%, default 85%); push it toward 100% and the pattern locks into a fixed loop. Think of the slider as setting how ever-changing or how repetitive the sequence is. A New loop button reseeds the whole register for a fresh pattern.
  • Arp steps up, down, up-down, or randomly through a triad built on the current scale degrees. A Direction picker appears only in this mode.
  • Drift is a weighted random walk across scale degrees, favoring small steps over big jumps.

Arp and Drift both expose a PROB slider (0 to 100%, default 100%) that sets the chance any given step plays a note versus staying silent. It is a good way to create rhythmic variation.

Tempo

A SYNC · tempo toggle switches AUTO between two clock sources:

  • Synced (the default): a RATE slider steps through sixteen musical divisions, from 4 whole notes down to a 32nd, in strict duration order, with dotted and triplet values interleaved where they fall between the plain divisions:

    4/1 · 2/1 · 1/1 · 1/2· · 1/2 · 1/4· · 1/2t · 1/4 · 1/8· · 1/4t · 1/8 · 1/16· · 1/8t · 1/16 · 1/16t · 1/32

    The default is 1/4· (dotted quarter). Standalone, a BPM stepper sets the tempo directly, from 20 to 300. Inside a host, this row shows "HOST · n"; the host's own tempo drives it, and you can't override it from the plugin. - Free: RATE becomes a straight time slider, 0.25 to 4 seconds per step, unrelated to any tempo.

Automating AUTO's tempo from a host

Sync on/off, the division, and the free-running rate are all AU parameters a host can automate or record. See the AUv3 parameter reference. Whether AUTO is on is not automatable: that state resets on every load, so a saved sound never starts playing itself the moment you open it.

Movement

MOVEMENT sits below AUTO in the settings sheet: a slow, independent drift applied to five knob values at once (brightness, cloud texture, cloud spread, drone level, and drone detune). Each one wanders on its own multi-second cycle, so the combined motion never quite repeats. It's a toggle plus a DEPTH slider (0 to 100%, default 25%) that scales how far it wanders. Turn Movement off and every drifting value snaps back to exactly where you left it; nothing is left mid-drift.

Two knobs in Play's resonator card, Bright and Layer, show a faint gold halo while Movement is active, so you can see which controls are being nudged.

Where to go next

  • The performance ribbon: AUTO shares its key/scale with the ribbon.
  • Tuning: how a microtonal tuning changes the note ladder AUTO draws from.
  • AUv3: which AUTO fields are host-automatable.