Polite Disorder

TIME, IN DETAIL

• Patterns up to four bars, on grids from 1/8 to 1/128 and triplets from 1/4T to 1/128T
• Up to eight hits in one step, each with its own level, chance, repeats and nudge
• Fold out a voice’s lanes and draw its accents, chance and nudge across every hit
• Give any voice its own loop length or clock: half time, double time, or three steps in the space of two
• Rolls with their level and pitch drawn by hand, and triplet pickups suggested where they fit
• Drift that pulls a voice early or late over a few bars, then brings it back in time
• Swing for the whole kit or for one voice, and fills that change later repeats
• Four patterns, A to D, switched on the next bar

SHAPE EVERY VOICE

• Oscillator, noise, eight filter types, a resonator to strike, three envelopes that can HOLD and step in time, two LFOs and voices that modulate each other
• v8 and v9: the sounds of two vintage drum machines, v8’s 16 sounds and v9’s eleven, each made the way its machine made it
• FOLD, MODAL and CLOUD: wavefolded zaps, struck bars and bells, and clouds of tiny grains
• Shape every hit: a harder or softer start, a fuller or quieter tail, a clean stop and a small room of its own
• Give every hit its own note, in the key and scale you choose, and play any voice from a keyboard
• MONO and glide for a sub that slides between notes, and choke groups, so the closed hat cuts the open one
• Let velocity and chance move any control, so no two hits are quite the same
• An effect chain on every voice, in any order you like
• Movement drawn under each voice’s own steps, stepped or gliding
• A field you play with one finger: right for grit, up for rooms and echoes
• An output channel with colour, compression that can listen to any one voice, and a limiter
• Import or record your own samples and use them as a voice’s main sound or as up to four layers

START ANYWHERE

• 120 kits, 18 groups, from fractured and polymetric to dusty tape, EBM, glitch and IDM. SHOW AND TELL is the quick tour.
• GENERATE builds a new kit around your pattern, or reworks one voice, one lane or the whole pattern
• Hold FILL or REPEAT as it plays, or WRITE the pads in live. REPEAT can skip, reverse, slip an octave and wear down
• DEVINE sends the whole kit alien, every sound moving as it plays, as far and as fast as you like. FREEZE it, then KEEP what you hear
• SONG puts your patterns, kits and variations in a row, each cutting or blending into the next
• VISUAL turns the kit into a show you play with your hands. Tilt the iPhone or iPad to pour the room.

LISTEN

• Headphone 3D: every hit placed around you on ordinary headphones, using measurements of a dummy head’s ears
• Head tracking on AirPods Pro, AirPods Max and other head-tracking headphones: the sound stays put as you turn
• Classic stereo for speakers
• Quality: Standard runs every voice at twice the sample rate, Studio at four times, for cleaner highs

KEEP IT

• Save a project with all four patterns, every sound and sample, and open it again
• Export one to 16 bars as a WAV, tails included, or as stems: a WAV for each voice, wet or dry

IN YOUR MUSIC APPS

Use Polite Disorder as an AUv3 instrument in music apps such as GarageBand. Patterns follow the host’s tempo and transport. Trigger the six voices with MIDI notes from C1 (note 36) up, or play them melodically in Notes mode, one voice on each of channels 2 to 7. Hosts that support multiple outputs can receive each voice separately.