STEPPER v1.7

Hi!

This update is quite exciting, a lot of new fun stuff to play around!

First of all you will notice some slight changes to the UI:

• The white frame is gone to make some space and elements have been shuffled a bit
• The different channels have now icons instead of Ch1, Ch2, etc.
• Non active cursors are now displayed with a dither effect instead of a grey color to make it easier to tell what you are editing at the moment.
• Empty patterns are now shown as dotted boxes instead of solid ones.
• The right column has been updated to accommodate the new scale mode feature and two extra banks.
• The help mode is turned on by default.

As for new features, I already mentioned empty patterns. Well now you can clear an entire pattern with SELECT + L + R. This command is reversible until the pattern is modified to avoid accidental losses.

The two new banks are quite nice, more save space is never bad! Additionally, banks can now be queued just as patterns can. If pattern chains are active, queuing a bank with a pattern chain will begin playing it. It's a good way of building more complex songs or mini-sets.

The scale mode is a big new feature!

You can select different scales and root notes, and new notes entered will play in key. But that's not all! Transposing notes will also respect the scale, so transposing an entire channel can generate different melodic variations and it's great to jam around. The currently included scales are:

• Chromatic
• Major
• Minor
• Pentatonic major
• Pentatonic minor
• Blues
• Dorian
• Phrygian
• Lydian
• Mixolydian
• Locrian
• Persian
• Hungarian minor
• Iwato
• In-Sen
• Hirajoshi

The settings page was given a new look and gained a few extra options!

The global mute and bpm options can be quite handy when performing live, and the autosave toggle allows tweaking parameters and switching banks without fear of destroying your programmed patterns. Just remember to manually save with SEL+START when you are ready, and remember that after switching to a different bank, all the current modifications you did in your patterns will not persist unless saved.

Pattern chains have also been improved, and the often requested feature to toggle them on/off has been added, but we didn't stopped there, we also added a randomizer mode that will fill up the slots with non empty patterns, and a convenience clearing option.

All this work couldn't have been possible alone, I've been working more and more with Catbeats https://www.instagram.com/catbeatsofficial/ to improve STEPPER and with testing and demoing the new features. The settings page and scale mode was designed by them, as well as a number of other UI tweaks and ideas. Check out their instagram for some dope lofi beats and a lot of nice STEPPER vids!

Really wanna thank everyone that has left some nice words for the work we have been doing so far, it really motivates us to make cool music tools and toys. Stay tuned, we have a lot more nice things planned for the future!

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Bad Diode