When playing a sound using an AD envelope (like a harp or dulcimer), use nortron's notelength control(s) to affect how long your Ultrastep plays for. If you have Ultrasteps enabled on adjacent steps, each step will cut off the previous ultrastep and your notelength control will stretch/shrink the Ultrastep playback time.
Make sure you're in follow along edit mode (capslock), then hit the up or down arrow keys while playback is engaged. You'll see that the playback cursor for the focused channel moves up/down a step for each keystroke. You can hold down the arrow key for repeated moves or hold down option to "scrub" all channels.
First head over to the Input menu, choose "MIDI Input" and make sure you have a MIDI keyboard chosen for input. Now go to the Performance Menu and enable "MIDI Device", then Mono Arpeggiator mode. Now when you hold middle C on the keyboard Nortron will play your sequences at the programmed pitches. However, if C4 is held on the MIDI keyboard, Nortron will play with pitches transposed up one octave.
At this point Nortron is still playing back 1/4 notes which is pretty slow since arpeggiators are typically 16th notes, so let's fix that. ?By setting the Global Pulses to 3
and Local Pulses to 2 we reduce the number of required clock pulses by 1/2, twice, giving us the 16th notes we're after. ?Nortron is now acting as a Mondo-Arpeggiator with all the other
expressive controls still available! ?To further the fun, on your MIDI controller map some knobs to Notelength and Velocity, and some buttons to mutes, playback direction, or program
changes to change patterns! ?Tons of sequence manipulation without your hands ever having to leave the keyboard!
If you enable Playthrough under the Performance menu, any MIDI messages received from the MIDI Input device are passed through to the output of the focused channel. You can use this to directly play along with or solo over a Nortron song. Playthrough MIDI notes are processed through Pitch Quantization in case you want to make sure your solo is perfect.
Try setting your target synthesizer polyphony to 1,2 or 3 voices and then use 2, 3 or 4 channels of nortron to overdrive the target sequencer's voice(s). This results in new timing structures and often works best with a mono target and 2 or more channels driving it.
Drive two separate voices with different sequences, however use the same Ultrastep wave shape to modulate various voice settings. This creates a meta-relationship between non-related voices/synths patches and is a very musical application of Ultrasteps.
Drive two separate channels with different clock ratios (pulses), to create an interlocking sequence that only lines up every x repititions. Create voice assignment to taste. Think Brian Eno's Music for Airports.