Workshop Journal · Chapter 14
The accent
A pattern that played every note exactly the same finally stops doing that — the first note keeps full strength, DENSE decides how many quieter ones join it, DEC decides how much room they have, and a note played by hand stops borrowing the sequencer’s last one
16 Aug 2026
Every note struck the same
v2.21.4 · per-note dynamics in STEP · no new control
In STEP a deck played every note at the same level and for the same length. Pitch moved, placement moved, nothing else did — which is why a busy pattern sounded like a machine running rather than like somebody playing.
There is no new knob for it, and there was never going to be one: the panel is full. The signal was already in the box. A pattern has an order — which note is there when almost nothing is, and which ones only turn up once you open it — and that order is now the dynamic.
So the first note is the anchor and strikes at full strength. Every note DENSE adds after it arrives a little softer and a little shorter than the one before. Close DENSE back down to a single note and it is loud again. The animation appears as the pattern fills in, which is where the ear goes looking for it.
DEC decides how much of that there is. The accent may only shorten a note as far as DEC has opened it: at DEC 0 it cannot touch the ring at all, at DEC 1 the quietest note of a full pattern rings about a third as long. The knob still says how long a note is. The accent only ever subtracts from it.
FLOW gets none of this, deliberately. A FLOW deck is a drone, and per-note dynamics there would put movement in the one place the design wants stillness.
One thing fell out along the way. A note played by hand used to inherit whatever the sequencer had last pushed into the engine, so a press could land at roughly forty per cent for no reason anybody could see. A hand-played note is an anchor by definition, and now it strikes like one.
Both depths sit at 30 %, both picked by ear on the first try, and both deliberately the same number — so that the first evening of proper listening has to say out loud which of the two wants to be different. The take above is that evening starting.
Download — v2.21.4 grab your platform’s .vcvplugin and drop it into Rack’s plugins-<os> folder · put a deck in STEP and open DENSE · all versions