Phaseburn One lives inside your DAW as an ordinary instrument plugin. Notes play the voice — one voice, because the instrument is monophonic by design. Pitch bend bends the sounding note, ±2 semitones by default; the Pitch Bend Range parameter — exposed to the host rather than drawn on the panel — widens that to as much as ±24 semitones, or ignores the wheel at 0. Control changes (CCs — the messages hardware knobs and faders send) can be mapped to the instrument’s controls through MIDI learn. Velocity and aftertouch — how hard you strike, then how hard you press — are modulation sources, covered in the modulation chapter (Chapter 4 — Modulation). The host’s clock and transport drive everything tempo-synced: LFO divisions, the sequencer’s bar lines, and the sequencer itself, which starts and stops with your DAW. This chapter covers the mapping and the clock, plus what to try when a particular host has other ideas.
MIDI learn
Put the filter cutoff under a real knob in ten seconds. Right-click the CUTOFF knob on the FX tab, choose MIDI Learn, then turn the hardware knob you want to own it. The first CC that arrives is captured, and the control follows your hand from then on.
To map a whole controller, repeat that gesture control by control. Mappings are one-to-one — a CC drives one control, a control listens to one CC — and learning a CC that is already in use, or re-learning a control, replaces the old pairing. There is no separate mapping panel: right-click a mapped control and the same context menu shows which CC it holds, right beside MIDI Forget.
The editor is where mappings are made, not where they run. CC handling lives in the audio engine itself, so once a knob is mapped you can close the editor and keep playing. And incoming CC moves are applied as genuine parameter changes through the host, so your DAW records them as automation on that parameter’s lane. The instrument brackets each run of CC movement in an automation touch gesture — recording punches in when your hand moves and out when it rests.
To unmap, right-click the control and choose MIDI Forget. To reset a control to its factory value without touching its mapping, the same menu offers Set to default. The same menu also carries Unlink modulation, which clears every modulation route currently aimed at that control in one gesture — the caption tells you how many it will clear before you commit, and it is greyed out when there are none. The routes’ amounts are left alone, so picking a destination again restores the depth the route had. There is no undo for it.
Input modes
Decide what your keys do while the sequencer runs: play the voice yourself, or hand the sequencer your harmony and let it do the playing. The MIDI Mode pair in the PERFORM module on the Groove page’s Notes tab chooses between two behaviors.
Passthrough is the default and does what the name says: incoming notes play the voice directly, like any synth plugin. It is also the mode for sequencing Phaseburn One from your DAW’s piano roll — clips play the voice, and flipping the SEQ switch off keeps the internal sequencer out of the way. Leave it on and both feed the same voice — Phaseburn One is monophonic by design, so external and sequenced notes compete and the most recent event wins. That collision is a real technique — stab notes over a running line and the line folds around them — but if it sounds like chaos, it is chaos you asked for: flip SEQ off or switch modes. The switch rides on the Groove nav tab itself, reachable and readable from any page, and it mutes only the internal note sequencer: the modulation sequencers and every tempo-synced division keep running. It belongs to the plugin instance and is recalled with your DAW project rather than with the preset, so a track you drive from the piano roll stays that way through preset changes and reopened sessions — see One bar, one page (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer).
Chord Follow takes your hands off the voice entirely. Held notes stop sounding and instead rewrite the note pool the sequencer draws from: each held note becomes a candidate, and how hard you struck it sets that note’s chance of being picked. The sequencer keeps its rhythm, its probabilities and its groove — you steer the harmony by holding chords, and the line moves when your hands do. Lifting your hands does not stop it: the last chord stays latched until you play the next one, so the line keeps moving between changes. Entering the mode before you have played anything leaves your own note pool running, and switching back to Passthrough always hands the sequencer your pool back, exactly as you left it. The Notes tab’s piano roll highlights the keys you are holding. This is the performing mode: one hand on chords, the sequencer playing, and every mapped CC still live. The sequencer chapter (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer) covers how the note pool turns candidates into lines.
Two more settings shape played notes. Velocity Lock, in the same PERFORM module, keeps the first note’s velocity through legato transitions. Note Priority decides which held note sounds when several arrive — the most recent, the lowest or the highest; it has no panel control, being exposed to the host rather than drawn on the window. Both come up again with glide in the oscillators chapter (Chapter 2 — Oscillators).
Clock and transport
Press play in your DAW and the sequencer plays; stop, and it stops. The host transport is the instrument’s transport, with nothing to arm on the window, and a transport start plays from the top: beginning playback hard-resets the sequencer to beat 1 of bar 1 — the step modulators and synced LFOs restart with it — rather than picking up wherever the playhead happens to sit, so every take opens the same way. A take launched mid-bar falls into line with the DAW’s bar lines at the first loop wrap or relocate. Host Sync defaults on, with no panel switch of its own — like pitch-bend range, it is exposed to the host rather than drawn on the window — and while it is on the sequencer phase-locks to the host timeline as it plays: it continuously derives its position from the host’s, bar-anchored so its downbeat sits on the DAW’s downbeat.
Phase-lock is what makes loop-based work behave. Loop four bars and every wrap snaps the sequencer back into step. Relocate the playhead and it follows. Change tempo — even a ramp — and the playhead and pending notes rescale rather than drift. When the host jumps far enough to matter, the sounding note is released cleanly first — a relocate never leaves a note hanging. And because a Phaseburn bar is probabilistic, every wrap rolls the dice again: the loop plays a fresh variation of itself each pass, by design — record several and keep the take. The sequencer chapter (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer) covers what gets re-rolled.
The bar follows the host’s meter, and it can only shrink. A Phaseburn bar is a 4/4 grid, so an odd meter masks its tail off instead of stretching it — a sixteenth stays a sixteenth. 3/4 and 6/8 play the first three quarter notes and wrap, 7/8 three and a half; 5/4 and 12/8 clamp back to a full bar. The Beats grid draws that cut — a dimmed panel over the masked region, a cut line, an OUT OF BAR caption. GENERATE still composes a full 4/4 bar, so in an odd meter the tail of what it writes is never reached.
The lock reaches past the sequencer. When it re-seeks, tempo-synced LFOs and the step modulators re-phase too, so synced modulation lands in a bounce where it sat in the room. Step modulators in retrigger mode keep their note-driven phase.
Turn Host Sync off from the host’s own automation lane and the sequencer runs free instead, on its own clock, with the host-exposed Sequencer Enable parameter as its transport: it pauses and resumes the bar in place rather than restarting it from the top. The host’s transport no longer starts or stops it, and loop wraps and relocates no longer pull it back — useful when you want the pattern to drift against the arrangement rather than obey it.
When something misbehaves
Phaseburn One is v0.1.0 — early access, free through the beta period — and the plugin–host boundary is exactly where young software meets the most variety. Hosts differ in how they report transport position, when they record automation, and which MIDI they forward to an instrument. We test against a range of hosts but have not met every configuration, and this chapter’s features are the most host-dependent in the instrument. Before anything else, walk this list:
The sequencer plays nothing. It runs off the host transport, so the DAW has to be rolling — there is no start switch on the window to look for. Then check the SEQ switch on the Groove tab: off mutes the internal note sequencer, and because that switch is saved with the project, a session someone else set up can arrive with it off.
The sequencer feels offset or ignores the loop. Confirm Host Sync hasn’t been automated off — it defaults on, with no panel switch to check. Phase-lock operates while the host transport is actually running — a stopped host gives the sequencer nothing to lock to. If the pattern stops short instead, that is the meter: the grid is a 4/4 bar and an odd host signature masks its tail.
Notes double-fire while the sequencer plays. That is Passthrough doing its job: played and sequenced notes share the one voice. Switch to Chord Follow, or stop playing along.
A mapped knob does nothing. The editor is not required — mappings run in the engine — so suspect the route: confirm your host forwards CC messages to the instrument’s track. Some hosts filter CCs or capture them for their own mapping layers before a plugin ever sees them.
Hardware moves are not recorded. The instrument presents CC movement as parameter gestures; whether the host writes them depends on the track’s automation mode. Arm the track and pick a mode that records.
A note hangs after a relocate. Host Sync releases the sounding note on every material jump, so a hanging note is a bug rather than a setting — catch it and we want the steps.
Anything that survives this list is something we want to hear about. Report it through the contact form with your host and its version, your operating system, and steps to reproduce. Per-host quirks are precisely what the open beta exists to find, and fixes ship in updated builds.