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Clock

Alongside all of its lilting gestures and invitations for direct in-the-moment touch, Atrium holds a simple, reliable sense of metronomic time.

Usage

Control the clock rate, and its cute little metronome, with the tempo knob. The range swings from 40bpm up to 640bpm. There's a small region at the counter-clockwise end where the clock is stopped entirely.

Note the line on the panel, to the left of tempo. If you can see the inner line, you're in the "deadzone", which freezes the clock.

Without any existing mappings, Atrium's clock has two purposes:

  1. Control recording & playback speed of gestures.
  2. Drive the arpeggiator embedded in the Scale Editor.

Beyond this, there are no pre-determined routings — it's up to the player to decide! To help kickstart your imagination, some favourite maps include:

  • Plucking sustain while cycling through drone snapshots
  • Advancing sequences like lens, or toggling loop
  • Adding bursts of binary modulation jumps to the timbral controls

And, of course, the clock can be mapped to another modulation source. Control loops (eg. mapping clock to lens while freqs increases tempo in return) can yield predictably unpredictable results. However, since the clock is a core component of gesture's playback, changes to tempo are not currently able to be recorded as part of a gesture.

The clock can be overriden, or exported, via MIDI which is described in the dedicated MIDI section.

tap-tempo

To set the tempo by feel, you can tap the tap key next to the tempo knob. Four consecutive taps with a roughly consistent tempo will set a new BPM.

Once tap-tempo has taken over, the tempo knob will shift to control divisions and multiplications of the tapped tempo. You'll see both lights at the tempo edges illuminate to indicate you've arrived. The ratios, counter-clockwise (slower) to clockwise (faster), are:

  • 1/4
  • 1/3
  • 1/2
  • 2/3
  • 1 (at noon)
  • 3/2
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4

The lights at tempo's limits will shift their balance left-to-right as you select different ratios. While hard to read in the absolute, they will give you a sense of the range, and each step is visible as you rotate.

To clear tap-tempo, hold clear and press the tap key. This will return you to the normal tempo state which may have changed dramatically if you altered the clock ratio!