Gate Step

Can someone remind me how the Gate Step option of the Jump step component works. I believe the idea was that tracks could be set not to get clocked by the sequencer and that Gate Steps would move those tracks along, but I can’t find any info on how you set a track to be “Gate Stepped” by another.

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Yeah, the manual is a bit vague on it:

Basically you set the step length to the “0” setting, which makes the sequencer stop for that track, and then use the gate step component on any other track(s). When the sequencer hits those steps with the gate step component, the “0” length track will advance by one step. I’m not sure how it works when multiple gate steps (ie. from multiple tracks) are hit at the same time, but I’m guessing it advances by 2?

It’s a good way to slow the master transpose steps right down, by tying the progression of it to say, a crash at the beginning of a bar. Coupled with stacking of step components, it means that you can also make it only advance every 8 bars or so.

It’s also really good for decoupling rhythm from melody, e.g. having a melody that is 8 steps long, but the rhythm for it only contains 7 notes, triggered by the gate step track, so each time the rhythm loops again it starts on a different note of the melody :smiley: one of my favourite compositional tricks!

edit: the “0” length tracks can also be advanced using the trig input of the oplab module. I’m tempted to grab one when they’re in stock for this feature alone!

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yea… conceptually i’m pretty familiar with this via eurorack sequencers, but thanks for posting the answer… i actually found it for myself later, but subsequently discovered it wouldn’t actually work in the way I was hoping for.

I wanted to have the arpeggiator track stay on steps (while continuing to… arpeggiate) and only advance by a gate step, but the arpeggiator won’t actually trigger notes while its holding that step like i thought it might :confused:

Does it work if you set the note length on the arp track to “drone mode”?

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ooh that is a good idea. just tried it out and unfortunately it seems to result in the notes from all the steps overlapping each other.

haha, damn!