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3.3. Using the Arpeggiator
An arpeggio is a chord of which you repeatedly play the individual notes. It's what you hear
when you hold a chord on a guitar and pluck the strings from top to bottom or the other
way around. A major part of learning to play the guitar is figuring out how to play different
fingerpicking/arpeggio styles. The arpeggiators on the KeyStep Pro do all these things for
you. Each KeyStep Pro track, except Track 1, has an arpeggiator.
To play an arpeggio, activate a track (try Track 2), press the Arp button then hold down a
chord. Now press the 'Play' button and your arpeggio will start. It's rather tiresome to hold
keys down, especially if what you really want is to change your arpeggio, or if you want to
tweak parameters on your modular system or synth that is connected to the KeyStep Pro.
Pressing HOLD lets you lift your fingers off the keys without stopping the arpeggio. What's
more, once HOLD is active and if you keep at least one key pressed down, you can add
notes to the arpeggio; just press one or more keys and the note(s) and its/their velocity will
be added to the arpeggio. You can add up to 16 notes to an arpeggio.
Again, there's a lot to discover here, so try some of these:
•
SHIFT + Arp to change the 'strum' pattern of your arpeggio
•
SHIFT + Time Division (1/4th, 1/8th, 1/16th, 1/32th)
•
SHIFT + Scale. Selecting another scale will instantly change the tonal focus of
your arpeggio.
And there's even more: the Gate, Velocity and Randomness encoders! Tweaking the Gate
knob will lengthen or shorten the gate time, Velocity will add or subtract (surprise!) velocity,
and Randomness will inject random notes into your arpeggio. Press the Play/Pause button
again to pause the arpeggio pattern; press it once more to resume playback from where
you stopped.
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Arturia - User Manual Keystep Pro - Basic Operations
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