Performing

A sampler earns its keep in the half-second between your finger and the sound. Everything on this page is about shaping what happens in that half-second — and rip chopper applies all of it to the picture as well as the audio, because here the picture is part of the instrument.

Keyboard and MIDI

The 40-pad grid maps to your Mac keyboard’s four letter rows out of the box. Plug in a MIDI controller and pads map to notes; knobs and buttons can bind to app controls (tap tempo, looper gestures, bank switches) through the settings’ MIDI mapping panel.

Mappings layer the way you’d hope: global defaults, with per-project overrides when one project needs a different hand position.

Playback modes

Each pad plays its clip one of three ways:

• One-shot — press and it plays through. The bread and butter.
• Gate — sounds only while held. For long textures you want to punch in and out of.
• Loop — toggles on and repeats until toggled off. The backbone of live looping.

The envelope (ADSR)

Every pad has an attack–decay–sustain–release envelope. A slow attack turns a drum hit into a swell; a short release turns a wash into a stab. Two details worth knowing:

• Release actually happens. Stop a loop or let go of a gated pad and the sound tails out over the release time — a real exponential fade, not a click. (Choke cuts — retrigger, mute groups — stay fast and tight on purpose.)
• The envelope can drive the picture. Flip on Envelope → Opacity and the clip’s video fades in over the attack and out through the release, in lockstep with the audio. See Canvas & visuals.

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Volume, pan, EQ

Per-pad gain, stereo position, and a simple EQ. Edits apply live — to voices already playing, not just the next press — so you can ride a sound while it loops.

Speed and stretch

Two ways to change how fast a clip plays:

• Classic speed — everything changes together: faster means higher and shorter, like fingers on a record. The video keeps pace with the audio.
• Stretch — tempo changes, pitch doesn’t. Slow a phrase to half speed and it stays in key.

Classic is instant and characterful; stretch is cleaner and takes a moment to prepare in the background (the pad plays classic until the stretched version is ready).

Playing in time

The project has a tempo — type it, tap it, or adopt it from a source the app has analyzed (“this song is 92, make the project 92” is one click). With a tempo set:

• Tempo sync conforms a clip’s playback to the project tempo.
• Note repeat (RPT) retriggers a held pad on a musical division — instant hi-hat rolls, stutter edits.
• The metronome (MET) clicks you honest.
• The live looper and bar-aligned takes count themselves in against it.

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The feel

Under the hood there’s a polyphonic voice pool, per-voice video elements, and audio scheduled on a sample-accurate clock — none of which you need to know, except as a promise: pads speak when you press them. If something ever feels late, it’s a bug, not a philosophy.