Press one button and the sequencer fills with a groove that already works — the driving quarters of techno, the offbeat spring of house, the scattered chop of a breakbeat. That is Suggest, and there is no AI behind it: no model, no training data, nothing learned from other people’s music. Every groove is assembled on the spot by explicit music-theory rules — each style knows its skeleton and its fills, and the generator rolls ordinary dice inside those rules. Same rules every press, different performance every press.
The GENERATE panel
Set up the whole generative flow in one place, then fire it with one press. The GENERATE panel is a module running the full width of the Groove page’s top edge, and it stays put whichever tab is open below it. Left to right it holds its title chip, the Scale and Pattern selectors, the SPREAD slider, and the three actions — BEATS, NOTES and BOTH — with the three view tabs, Beats, Notes and Strength, pinned to the right-hand end of its header. The tabs choose what fills the page underneath and remember which view you left open, so a trip to another page and back puts you where you were. On the Strength tab the panel has nothing to generate, so its title reads Strength and it carries that view’s one setting, the STYLE browser, instead.
Scale and Pattern set the harmonic frame. Both selectors’ first entry is Auto, and both are sticky — no suggestion ever moves them. Scale on Auto lets every press roll a scale to suit the groove family it picked; the roll is reported back by tinting the in-scale keys on the Notes tab’s piano roll while the selector stays on Auto, free to roll differently next press. Pick a concrete scale and every suggestion works inside it. Pattern behaves the same way: on Auto, each suggestion rolls one of the eight concrete stability patterns to voice with; pick one and every suggestion biases its voicing by that pattern’s per-degree strength, length and octave preferences — the pattern’s opinion layered over the generator’s own harmonic weighting. With a concrete scale selected, the selectors also rewrite the pool directly, no suggestion needed — see Choosing notes (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer).
SPREAD is the one slider. It shapes the voicing: how many octaves the generated pool opens around the root, read out in octaves on the slider itself. There is no density control here — every press runs the generator at its full figure count, so a generated groove arrives busy and thinning it is something you do afterwards, either by dragging the grid or with the Notes tab’s Density slider in the PERFORM module (see Playing it live (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer)).
The selectors and the slider are inputs to a press, not live controls: nothing in the instrument changes until you press an action. Change one and the three actions take a soft accent to say a change is waiting; press any of them and the accent clears.
BEATS, NOTES and BOTH are the actions, each wearing a small wand: there is nothing to arm, you press and something is written. BEATS writes a fresh groove — beat chances, links, the strength map, swing and the performance settings. NOTES re-voices the note pool for whatever rhythm is already playing and touches nothing else. BOTH writes the two together, coherently — the voicing knows which groove it was written for. The Beats tab’s VARY, which shuffles what is already on the grid rather than conjuring a new pattern, keeps its own glyph for exactly that reason. The rest of this chapter is what each press actually writes.
One press writes a groove
Start a track from silence in one press, and audition another take with the next. Fire BEATS — or BOTH for rhythm and melody together — and the sequencer fills with a working groove. There is no style menu to set first: every press picks one of the sixteen groove families internally, so pressing again is how you audition another style as well as another take. What you can set first is the key: pick a scale in the panel, or leave the selector on Auto and let each press roll one to fit. Vary, which mutates what is already there instead of replacing it, sits in the row beneath the Beats grid between Undo and Clear All — it has its own section below.
These are actions, not parameters. Nothing here is a knob the preset stores; each press writes ordinary beat chances, links, strength values and notes into the same lanes you edit by hand, so everything Suggest produces can be inspected, reshaped or deleted step by step — see the sequencer chapter (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer) for what those lanes mean. The output has a deliberate shape: some notes are guaranteed, some always play but change their figure, and some come and go. That is the structure of real electronic music — a techno bar does not forget its downbeat — not a fog of middling probabilities.
The no-AI point matters in practice. Because the rules are written out rather than learned, the output is explainable — when a house groove lands its dependable hits on the offbeat eighths, that is a rule you can read below, not a statistical accident — and Suggest runs instantly, offline, on every machine, with no rights questions hanging over what it writes.
Suggest writes one bar for one line — the instrument is monophonic by design. It always composes a full 4/4 bar, because that is what the grid is. In a host running an odd meter the bar is masked rather than stretched, so a 3/4 or 6/8 project plays the first three quarters of what Suggest wrote and never reaches the last one — the fill zone, where the endings live — while 7/8 gets half of it. Nothing is lost or mangled; the groove simply ends early, and 4/4 is where you hear everything a press writes. See One bar, one page (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer). Variety across bars comes from the lanes themselves: what Suggest writes is not a fixed pattern but a field of chances that performs a little differently on every pass.
The region-budget model
Trust the downbeat. Whatever Suggest writes, the notes that define the groove play every single bar — the interesting question is how the rest is allowed to move. The generator thinks in regions, and each region makes a different promise:
Anchors always play. These are the skeleton — the defining hits of the style. They are written at full chance and protected from everything else, so the groove’s identity survives whatever the dice do elsewhere.
Varied parts always play, but change their figure. A varied part is a spot that always sounds, holding a small menu of figures — a single eighth note one bar, two linked sixteenths the next. Exactly one option fires every bar, never two piled on top of each other.
Loose parts play most bars and sometimes rest. This is the layer that makes a loop breathe — hits that are usually there, occasionally not.
Ornaments come and go. Ghosts — very quiet notes in the gaps — and pickups, the small notes that lead into a beat, surface only now and then, in whatever room the bar has left.
Fills burst at the end. A fill is a low-chance note that, when it wins, drags a chain of faster linked notes behind it — a sixteenth roll, a ramp of thirty-seconds into the next downbeat, or a ratchet: a double, buzz or drag of fine-grid hits hanging off a proper sixteenth. The chain only exists when its head plays, so fills arrive whole or not at all. Chains may switch grids mid-flight: a straight hit can smear into a triplet drag.
The bar also has a geography. The first quarter of a generated bar stays essentially stable — its hits play near-certainly, bar after bar — and the negotiable layers concentrate toward the bar’s tail, where the fill zone lives. The groove keeps its base and lets the ending do the moving, which is how a loop stays recognizable while never repeating exactly. Every press writes the full complement of that negotiable material — each family’s maximum figure count, its ornaments and its fills all at full weight — so a generated groove starts busy and you thin it toward the skeleton by hand. Anchors and varied parts are the part you cannot thin away by accident: they play no matter what.
Sixteen groove families
Every press writes in a style that means it. The generator carries sixteen groove families — Four-on-Floor (Techno, House, Acid, Minimal), Breaks (Breakbeat, Drum & Bass, Electro, 2-Step), Slow & Wide (Halftime, Synthwave, Ambient Pulse, Dub) and Patterns (Polyrhythm 3:4, Euclidean, Triplet Shuffle, Dotted) — and each press draws one at random, weighted toward the four-on-floor and broken-beat staples. There is no picker: you re-roll rather than choose, and the strength map, note lengths and performance settings each press writes tell you what kind of bar you landed on.
A family is not a stored pattern — it is a recipe. Each one defines its anchor skeleton (quarters for Techno, offbeat eighths for House, the heavy beat three for Halftime; Euclidean guarantees only the downbeat and scatters the rest of its evenly spread hits as varied and loose material), its own menu of figures and fills, and its own swing range — swing being the delay of every second subdivision that turns a straight grid into a shuffle. Techno stays nearly straight; House and 2-Step swing noticeably harder. The figure menus speak real rhythmic grammar: varied parts can favor dotted pushes and holds — the Dotted family cascades on true dotted slots — and Acid, Breakbeat, Drum & Bass and Electro carry the ratchet vocabulary of doubles, buzzes and drags on proper sixteenth heads. Length has grammar too: sub-led Drum & Bass lets its subs ring, acid accents lengthen, big-beat stomps hold their weight.
Many families flip a coin before writing a single note and let it shape the whole bar — a bar narrative. Techno comes out either as a driving on-beat pulse or as a roller whose dependable hits are the offbeat eighths between the kicks. House is deep offbeat bass or a harder-swung, ghost-dense variant; Breakbeat picks between choppy stutters, draggy triplet smears and a quarter-heavy stomp; Drum & Bass is sub-led and sparse, a dense rolling sixteenth web, or a jungle take with ratchet chops around both turnarounds; Halftime ranges from a long heavy downbeat to a wobble snaking off-triplets between its two anchors. Two presses of one family can land on genuinely different bars. A few families go further — House, Acid, Breakbeat, Electro, Drum & Bass, Triplet Shuffle and Techno’s driving pulse answer their first half in the second: the answer can mutate a hit, displace it by a sixteenth or break it into a ratchet, and on the triplet families it mirrors on the triplet grid — the call-and-response shape that makes a bar read as a phrase. Dub and Electro add one more idiom: tresillo chains, the 3-3-2 split that carries so much electronic bass music.
Two more things arrive with every generated groove. The Strength grid is stamped from the groove itself — anchors strongest, varied and loose hits in the middle, ghosts near the bottom, fill chains rising into their resolution — which is what lets note selection steer registers onto the groove’s accents (see Strength and dynamics (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer)); driving families also tilt the bar’s arc upward into the fill zone, while Dub, Halftime and Ambient Pulse stay heavy and level. And each family applies its own profile to the performance settings in the GLOBAL, LENGTH, VELOCITY and POSITION modules below the beat grid — note-length behavior, velocity response, position shifts — on BEATS and BOTH only; Vary never touches those settings. The character pass runs deeper than the sliders: velocity couples to note length, so long subs bloom and short ticks tuck in; Acid, Electro and the shuffling families get a touch of micro-timing humanize and House its jackin’ drag, while the machine-tight families deliberately stay quantized.
Vary and undo
Keep what works, change what does not, and walk back out of a press that went the wrong way. Vary sits in the row beneath the Beats grid, between Undo and Clear All. Vary mutates the current groove without touching its identity: anchors are never altered, and the stable head of the bar — the first quarter that plays near-certainly — is left alone too, so the mutation concentrates where the groove already varies. It re-rolls which figure each varied part favors, nudges the weights of loose parts and ornaments within their window’s headroom, re-rolls fills zone by zone — a mid-bar turnaround stays a mid-bar turnaround — sprinkles in up to a couple of fresh ghosts, drifts the swing slightly and re-stamps the Strength grid so it tracks the mutated regions. The result is the same groove with a different temperament — the button to lean on when a loop is right but stale.
Undo is what makes leaning on it safe. It steps back through the last ten presses that rewrote the grid — BEATS, BOTH, Vary, Clear All and beat links — and each step restores the whole picture at once: beat chances, links, the Strength grid, the swing and the base Length. That last one is worth knowing, because every Suggest action resets the base Length slider in the GLOBAL module to its default; if you had shortened or stretched the notes, undoing brings your value back with the groove. The button greys out when there is nothing left to step back to, and the history is dropped whenever the pattern is replaced from outside the grid — a preset load, an INIT — so Undo can never pull an older groove into the patch you just opened. Press Vary until a bar lands, then step back to the one you liked.
Vary works on patterns you drew yourself. If the beats in the lanes no longer match the last thing Suggest generated — edited, or built from scratch — it first reads the pattern back into regions: slots at full chance are treated as anchors, a cluster of alternatives at one start time as a varied part, everything else as loose material or ornament, with your existing beat links preserved. Your solid hits stay solid; only the negotiable layer mutates. On a hand-made pattern the Strength grid is only jittered, never re-stamped, so a map you drew survives Vary intact.
Note voicing
Give the groove a bassline that lands on its accents and sparkle that stays out of the way. Note voicing is the pitch half of the generator: BOTH writes it together with a fresh rhythm, and NOTES writes a voicing for whatever rhythm is already playing — two of the three actions in the panel, shaped by the SPREAD slider beside them.
The generator builds a pool of pitches spanning three registers, weighted by harmonic function. The root is always in the pool — guaranteed, so the line has a home. A bass register an octave down carries the root at high chance with a decisive preference for the groove’s strong cells, often bringing the fifth below along with it. The middle octave holds the scale degrees: roots and fifths dependable, thirds and sevenths as color, passing tones kept weak. A sparse high register — the root an octave up, often joined by one color tone — appears rarely and prefers the weak cells. With the Strength grid stamped from the groove’s regions, the registers land where they should: bass owns the accents, sparkle falls on the ghosts and pickups between them. The voicing also knows its family: Drum & Bass, Halftime and Dub anchor real sub-bass weight, Acid and Electro carry the octave-bounce, House and 2-Step stack root-fifth-octave stabs, Ambient Pulse and Synthwave spread wide — and chord tones gravitate to the accents while passing tones fall to the ghosts.
Voicing respects the scale selected in the Scale selector. Leave it on Auto — the first entry, meaning any scale — and every Suggest rolls one to suit the groove family: Acid leans Phrygian and minor, Ambient Pulse leans Lydian and pentatonic. The rolled scale is shown rather than written — it tints the in-scale keys on the Notes tab’s roll while the selector stays on Auto, so the next press is free to roll differently. Pick a scale yourself and Suggest works inside it without ever touching your selection. The Pattern selector layers its own opinion on top: on Auto each voicing rolls a concrete stability pattern; picked deliberately, it pulls the voicing’s strength and length preferences toward the pattern’s per-degree tastes and favors its preferred registers — either way the selection never moves. Scales, patterns and the note lanes themselves are covered in Choosing notes (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer).
BOTH goes one step past pitches: it also programs the ARPEGGIO module to match the family — how often the phrase engine takes a note over, how intricate the figures it plays run and how many notes they may reach — and the family’s octave-randomization idiom, like Acid’s upward snap on weak sixteenths or Electro’s both-ways register flip; families without an idiom are set neutral, so stale settings from an earlier suggestion never linger. Acid comes out livelier than Ambient Pulse. There is no style name handed over — the phrase engine rolls its own vocabulary each bar, so the intricacy is the whole character control (see Style patterns (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer)). NOTES stays a pure re-voice — pitches only, phrase settings untouched.
SPREAD sets how wide the voicing is drawn before the press: the raw voicing spans from an octave below the root to two octaves above, and SPREAD folds those registers tighter around the root or opens them further out. It shapes what the next press writes — to re-voice a pool you already have, without re-rolling it, use the Notes tab’s Register slider instead (see Playing it live (Chapter 7 — The Sequencer)).