Reference manual

Mey IVY is a sixteen-voice polysynth with an eight-track sequencer built into the same window. Every track owns a complete sound. Every step of every track can carry notes, a velocity, a condition, a nudge in time, a roll, and up to forty-eight parameter locks. Nothing is bolted on. The sequencer and the synthesiser are one instrument. The panel is a single screen with a fixed shape, so nothing moves when you change page. You always look in the same place for the same thing.

The panel

1 PAGE KEYS

Six pages: sound, sample, shape, move, play, effects. Press the page you are already on to walk its subpages.

2 CHIPS

The subpages of the page you are on. Click one to go straight there.

3 THE SCREEN

Eight cells, four across and two down, lettered A to H. The cell is the control.

4 KNOBS

The same eight controls under the screen, in the same order, for the hand that prefers a knob.

5 THE BAND

Sequencer switches, transport, the armed track, and the track's length, scale, swing and gate.

6 TRACK PADS

Eight pads. The lit one is armed: its sound is on the screen and its pattern is in the trig row.

7 TRIG ROW

Sixteen steps of the armed track. The page dots at the right say which sixteen.

8 PRESET FIELD

The name of the loaded sound. Click it for the browser, or step through with the arrows.

How a control works

Every value on the panel answers to the same five gestures. Learn them once and the whole instrument is open.

The legend for these sits in the top right of the window at all times, so you never have to remember them cold.

GESTURES

HELD KEYS

Your first five minutes

ONE

Load a kit

Click the preset name at the top of the window. Choose the TECHNO or DRUMS category and pick a name. A kit arrives with a sound on every track and a pattern already written.

TWO

Press play

The triangle in the band starts the sequencer on its own clock. In a host, the sequencer follows the host transport instead.

THREE

Pick a track

Click a track pad. The screen now shows that track's sound, and the trig row shows its pattern. Everything you turn belongs to that track alone.

FOUR

Change the pattern

Click a step to place a trig, click it again to take it away. Drag across the row to fill it. Nothing stops while you work.

FIVE

Lock a knob to a step

Tap P. Click a trig. Turn any knob. That value now belongs to that step alone. Tap P again to leave.

SIX

Throw the dice

Press RANDOM for a whole new pattern with locks. Hold F and press RANDOM to re-roll only the armed track.

The signal path

A voice is stereo from the oscillators on. Every source has its own pan and is placed before the filters, which run as a left and right pair. Width therefore comes from level alone: no delays and no phase tricks, so the mono sum of the output is exactly the mono mix.

The audio core runs at one, two or four times the host rate and is decimated per voice. The control side, meaning the envelopes, the LFOs, the matrix, the pitch and the cutoff, runs once per host sample.

Each voice also carries its own fixed tolerances, like the trimmers on one voice card of a hardware synth. The ANALOG amount on the mix page scales them, so voice three is not voice seven.

IN ORDER

The oscillators, the filters, the envelopes and the matrix belong to the track. The chorus, the EQ, the reverb, the delay and the sequencer settings belong to the instrument, so all eight tracks share them.

Oscillators

Four main oscillators in two pairs. The second of each pair can hard sync to the first: OSC 2 to OSC 1, OSC 4 to OSC 3. On those two the SYNC cell takes the place of FM, which moves to its own page.

Four analogue shapes and four wavetables. On the analogue shapes SHAPE is the pulse width; on the wavetables it is the frame you read.

The sawtooth is modelled as a counter into a resistor ladder, which is what a divide-down oscillator really is, so it carries the same fine grain on low notes that the hardware does.

WAVE

Saw, square, triangle, sine, then Vox, Bell, Organ and Digi.

OCT

Thirty-two, sixteen, eight or four foot.

DET

Detune in cents. Two oscillators a few cents apart is the oldest trick there is.

SHAPE

Pulse width, or the wavetable frame.

FM and key zones

FM 1 · 2 and FM 3 · 4

Each oscillator takes phase modulation from a source you choose: its pair partner, any of the four oscillators including itself, the sub, or the noise. Choosing itself is feedback.

RATIO multiplies the modulator's frequency. The integers give harmonic spectra; the half-integer ratios, a half, three halves, five halves and seven halves, give the classic inharmonic metal.

ZONE 1 · 2 and ZONE 3 · 4

Each oscillator answers only to the stretch of keyboard you give it, with a fade at either end. This is how one patch becomes a kit: a kick in the bottom octave, a hat at the top, and nothing in between.

The shipped zone is the whole keyboard with no fade, so a patch that never touches this plays as it always did.

Sub, H1 and noise

The sub is a square or a sine, one or two octaves below the note. It is where the weight of a bass or a kick comes from.

H1 is not a second oscillator. It is the first harmonic of the sub, read from the sub's own phase, which costs one sine per voice and no extra state. Bring it up to put a body back over a sub that has gone too deep to hear.

NOISE has its own level and pan. Short and filtered it is a click or a snare; long and open it is air.

RESET decides whether the oscillators start from a known phase at every note. On, the attack is identical every time, which is what a hard kick needs. Off, the start wanders, which is what a pad wants.

SUB · H1

NOISE

The sampler

A sample is a source like any other. It arrives before the filters, with its own level and pan, and everything downstream treats it as it treats an oscillator.

The SOURCE page is what you want first: whether the sample plays, how loud, where, whether it follows the key, where it starts, and how much bandwidth it keeps.

The WAVE page draws the file and holds the root note, the loop, the crossfade and the slices.

KEY MAP is how a kit is built by hand: one file for each stretch of the keyboard, each with its own root, gain and pan. ZONE VEL adds a velocity range and a tuning to each zone, so a soft hit and a hard hit can be two different files.

Filters

Two filters, each with four modes: a twenty-four decibel low pass, a twelve and a six decibel band pass, and a twelve decibel high pass.

BLEND mixes them. At nought you hear filter A alone, at one hundred filter B alone, and anywhere between you hear both. ROUTE decides whether they sit side by side or one after the other.

DRIVE is inside the filter, not after it. It is the saturation that makes a resonant low pass bark rather than whistle, and it is where a hard kick gets its edge.

ENV is how far the filter envelope moves the cutoff, and it is signed, so the envelope can close a filter as well as open it.

EACH FILTER

TOGETHER

Envelopes

Three envelopes, all four stage. The filter envelope and the amp envelope share one page, drawn one above the other, so you can see the two shapes against each other while you work.

Envelope three is free. It has no wiring of its own: it exists to be a source in the modulation matrix, which is where you send it.

Times are in seconds, from one millisecond to ten seconds. A kick lives in the first thirty milliseconds of its decay; a pad lives in the last several seconds of its release.

LFOs and the matrix

Two LFOs. Each has a rate, a depth, a destination of its own, and a sync switch: free running in hertz, or locked to the host in divisions from a thirty-second to sixteen bars. LFO 1 also has a delay, so it can fade in after the note rather than arrive with it.

The matrix is twelve free slots, two to a page. Each is a source, a destination and an amount. That is the whole idea.

ELEVEN SOURCES

OFF · LFO 1 · LFO 2 · ENV FILTER · ENV AMP · VELOCITY · AFTERTOUCH · MOD WHEEL · KEY · RANDOM · ENV 3

FORTY-SEVEN DESTINATIONS

Pitch, of everything or of one oscillator. Shape. The level and pan of every source. Both cutoffs and both resonances. The blend. The amp. Each LFO's own rate and depth. Both drives. Each oscillator's FM amount. And, unusually, the effects: the reverb's decay, level, size and modulation, the delay's time, feedback and mix, and the EQ.

Performance and mix

PERFORM is what your hands do to the sound: how far velocity opens the amp and the filter, what aftertouch reaches, the bend range, and the morph time.

MORPH is the one that surprises people. Set it above zero and loading a preset glides into the new sound over that time rather than jumping. It glides the armed track's sound.

MIX is the voice as a whole: its pan, the stereo spread across the sixteen voices, the analogue amount that scales each voice's tolerances, the chorus, the master volume, and the accuracy.

ACC is oversampling: one, two or four times. Leave it low while you write and raise it when you print.

PERFORM

MIX

Effects

The effects sit after the voice sum, so all eight tracks share them.

EQ

A high pass, a low shelf, a sweepable mid with its own Q, a high shelf, and a drive. The drive is the reason the EQ is first: it is a colour, not a repair.

Space

Four rooms: Chamber, Broadcast, Wide and Luxe. Decay, pre-delay, size, character, early reflections, and a second page for the modulation, the detune, the low cut and the separate decay of the low and high bands.

Delay

Mono or stereo, two times with their own feedback, free or synced, with a tone control and a ping pong amount.

FX MIX

One page for the balance of the whole section. WET is the dry and wet of the reverb and delay together; the amounts beside it say what is in that wet signal. ROUTE puts the two in parallel, the delay into the reverb, or the reverb into the delay.

Eight tracks

Every track has its own steps, its own length, its own scale, and its own complete sound. Arm a track and the whole panel follows it.

A track can be up to one hundred and twenty-eight steps long, shown sixteen at a time. The dots at the right of the band say how many pages this track reaches and which one you are looking at.

Because each track has its own length, tracks of sixteen and twelve and seven run against each other and only meet again after a long time. That is polymeter, and it is free here: just set the lengths.

SCALE is that track's resolution: eighth notes, sixteenths or thirty-seconds. LEN is its length in steps.

Placing trigs

Click an empty step and a trig appears. Click a trig that is already there and it goes away. Drag across the row and it fills every step you pass, but never clears one, so a slip of the hand cannot undo your work.

A new trig takes the last note you played in. Hit a key or a pad first and the steps you tap afterwards all land on that note, which is how a drum part gets written without typing a pitch.

The wheel over a trig moves its note by a semitone, by an octave with shift, and its velocity with alt. A whole chord moves together.

Notes and velocity under the mouse

Two keys let you set a step without leaving the row.

Put the mouse over a trig and hold N. Now drag up or down: the note follows the mouse, and the screen tells you which note you have landed on. Let go of N and the row goes back to normal.

V is the same grip for velocity.

While either key is down the trig row takes no mouse input at all. That is deliberate: without it, the click that reaches for a trig would also place or clear it, which would be two edits from one press.

Either order works. Hold the key and then move onto a trig, or rest on a trig and then hold the key.

THE SAME GRIP AS P

N and V act only on a step that already has a trig. They never create one and never delete one.

The step page

Everything a single step carries, on one screen. Choose the step in the first cell, or click it in the trig row, and the other seven cells follow it.

LENGTH is in steps, so a value above one runs the note into the steps that follow. SLIDE is what a TB-303 means by it: the pitch glides in from whatever was sounding, and the envelopes do not retrigger. Those two together are the sound, not the glide on its own.

ACCENT plays the step at full velocity regardless of what its velocity says.

Parameter locks

A lock is a value that belongs to one step instead of to the patch. It is the difference between a pattern that repeats and a pattern that moves.

Tap P, or click LOCK in the band. Click a trig: it is now held, and the header of the screen says which step. Turn any knob or drag any cell. That value now belongs to that step alone, and the knob shows it in the lock colour.

Tap P again to leave. A long hold works too: hold P, make the edit, let go.

Each step carries up to forty-eight locks. A voice started by a locked step takes its own copy of the whole parameter set, so the lock lives exactly as long as the note, and the next note is unaffected.

A step with locks but no note is a lock trig: it applies its locks to whatever is already sounding without starting anything.

IN ORDER

With the lock off, pressing a trig that is already there takes it away. With the lock on, pressing it only chooses it, so nothing is ever deleted while you are locking.

WITH F HELD

Conditions and micro timing

A condition decides whether a step plays at all this time round. There are two kinds and both have to pass.

CHANCE is a straight percentage. At fifty, the step plays about half the times the pattern comes round.

EVERY and OF are the other kind: play on the first of every three rounds, or the third of every four. This is how a sixteen-step pattern stops sounding like sixteen steps.

MICRO moves the step early or late by twenty-fourths of a step. Fine enough to feel, coarse enough that the groove is the same every time you play it.

Set a chance on two tracks and neither repeats; set EVERY on a third and the whole thing takes several bars to come back round to itself.

Retrig

A step that fires itself again inside its own length. A roll, without a second track and without a shorter scale.

RATE is the interval between hits, as a fraction of a step: a whole step, a half, a third, a quarter, a sixth, an eighth, a twelfth or a sixteenth. Thirds and sixths are where the triplet rolls live.

HITS is how many, counting the first.

DECAY is decibels per hit. A negative number is a roll that fades out; a positive one is a roll that builds.

Each hit ends one sample before the next begins, so a roll is clean even at the highest rate, and a hit that falls past the end of the audio block is carried into the next one rather than dropped.

STEP RETRIG

Turning RATE up from off gives the step four hits, because one hit is not a roll.

Three ways to record

The record key walks three modes, in the order you meet them. The screen says which one you are in, and STOP always puts you back in the first.

ONE

Grid

The default. You place trigs by hand, with the mouse, whether the sequencer is running or not. Nothing you play is written.

This is where locks, conditions and retrig are set, and where most patterns are actually built.

TWO

Live

Play it in while it runs. What you play on the keyboard lands on the nearest step of the armed track, with the velocity you played it at.

The pattern keeps playing while you record, so you can build a part in layers over several rounds.

THREE

Step

Walk the pattern a step at a time. A note fills the lit step and the cursor moves on, so a line is typed in rather than played.

The cursor starts at the step you had selected, or at the first step if none.

Patterns and banks

One hundred and twenty-eight patterns, in eight banks of sixteen, named A01 to H16. A pattern holds all eight tracks and the kit that plays them.

Press PTN and the trig row becomes the sixteen patterns of the current bank. Click one. If nothing is playing it switches at once; if the sequencer is running it switches when the current pattern comes round, so a change never lands in the middle of a bar.

BANK in the band chooses which sixteen you are looking at.

The lit slot is the pattern you are playing. A slot with a badge is the one that will take over next.

Patterns travel with the project and with a saved preset, so a finished set of sixteen arrives complete when you load it back.

Mute mode

Press MUTE and the trig row becomes eight track switches. Click one to drop that track out, click it again to bring it back.

This is the arrangement. A sixteen-bar section is often one pattern with three tracks going in and out.

Mutes take effect immediately, because that is what a mute is for. Nothing is queued and nothing waits for the turn.

MUTE and PTN are the same row, so turning one on turns the other off.

A track can also be muted from its own pad: right click the pad and choose mute. The result is the same switch.

Random

One key writes a whole pattern: notes, velocities, lengths, accents, slides, conditions, micro timing, retrigs and parameter locks.

It is not white noise. Each track's place in the pattern gives it a job, and that is what keeps a throw listenable. Track one is the pulse: sixteen steps, on the beat, an octave down where a kick lives. Tracks two to four are parts, somewhere between sparse and busy, with lengths that run against the pulse. The last tracks are mostly silence with something in it.

Hold F and press RANDOM to re-roll only the armed track, so one part can be thrown again without losing the seven that are working.

Every throw is one undo away. The track pad's menu holds it.

WHAT A LOCK MAY TOUCH

Random locks are allowed onto the parameters that move and kept off the ones that change what the sound is. A lock on a filter mode or an LFO destination would make a pattern of accidents rather than a pattern.

CUTOFF · RES · DRIVE · ENV · BLEND · DECAY · RELEASE · SHAPE · DETUNE · LEVEL · SUB · NOISE · FM · RATIO · PAN · SPREAD · SAMPLE START · BANDWIDTH · LFO RATE · LFO DEPTH

The bank

Two hundred and thirty-eight factory sounds, in categories down the left of the browser. Click the preset name at the top of the window to open it, or step through the bank with the arrows either side.

Type in the field at the top to search. The categories and the search work together, so you can look for a name inside one category.

Many of the presets are not single sounds but kits: a sound on every track and a pattern of at least sixty-four steps already written. Load one, press play, and you are inside a piece of music rather than in front of an empty grid.

NINETEEN CATEGORIES

A sound on every track

Every track owns a complete sound. Building a kit is therefore a matter of putting one sound on each of the eight tracks.

Arm the track you want. Open the browser. Press TO TRK, which now reads the number of the armed track. The button lights green: the browser is in to-track mode.

Now click a name. The sound goes to that track and nowhere else. The rest of the instrument does not change, and neither do the other seven tracks.

Arm the next track, click the next name, and keep going. Press TO TRK again to leave the mode and go back to loading whole presets.

A track's sound can also be copied straight from another track. Right click a pad, copy the sound, then right click another pad and paste it.

Saving your own

There are two things you can save, and it is worth knowing which you want.

A sound

SAVE SOUND writes the armed track's sound alone: its oscillators, zones, filters, envelopes, LFOs, matrix, sampler and glide. It goes to the Sounds folder, and it is what you load onto a track later with TO TRK.

A preset

SAVE and SAVE AS write the whole instrument: the sound on every one of the eight tracks, every pattern you have written, and the shared effects. That is a kit, and it is what the factory kits are.

An asterisk next to the preset name means there are changes you have not saved. Pressing the save key next to it takes you straight to the save rather than into the browser, because the asterisk is the reason you are pressing it.

WHAT BELONGS TO WHAT

This split is why a kit works. Eight tracks can be eight completely different instruments, and they still share one reverb and one EQ, as they would through one desk.

Every key and gesture

ON ANY VALUE

HELD KEYS

PAGE KEYS

ON A TRIG

TRANSPORT

ON A TRACK PAD

Pages and subpages

Every parameter in the instrument is on one of these. Press the page key again to walk its subpages, or click the chip.

SOUND

OSC 1 · OSC 2 · OSC 3 · OSC 4 · FM 1 - 2 · FM 3 - 4 · ZONE 1 - 2 · ZONE 3 - 4 · SUB - H1 · NOISE

SAMPLE

SOURCE · WAVE · KEY MAP · ZONE VEL

SHAPE

FILTER A · FILTER B · ENV FILTER - AMP · ENV 3

MOVE

LFO 1 · LFO 2 · MATRIX 1-2 · MATRIX 3-4 · MATRIX 5-6 · MATRIX 7-8 · MATRIX 9-10 · MATRIX 11-12

PLAY

PERFORM · MIX · SEQUENCER · STEP · STEP COND · STEP RETRIG

FX

EQ · EQ HIGH · SPACE 1 · SPACE 2 · DELAY 1 · DELAY 2 · FX MIX

Specifications

VOICE

SEQUENCER

THE PLUG-IN

Something not working?

Write to info@wearemey.com and describe what you did, what you expected and what happened instead. That is usually enough to find it.