The lab's manual

Getting started

1. Open the lab and press Play, or the space bar. A new lab plays its machines with patterns already written.
2. Turn a knob: drag it up or down, hold Shift for small steps, double-click it to put it back. With the keyboard, Tab to a knob and use the arrow keys.
3. Choose a machine's part (A to P) under its name to hear and see another pattern; one chosen while it plays starts at the next bar.
4. Write: light steps, play notes into a bass line, or draw in a piano roll, as the sections below say.
5. Keep it: everything is kept in your browser as you go. Save project (Ctrl+S, ⌘S) writes the whole lab to a file of your own.

Each machine is also found on its own page through the site's search, with what it is and how to play it under its console.

The machines

Fifteen kinds, each with a page of its own. Added from the rack's bar, up to four of a kind and sixteen in all.

Patterns, steps and parts

Every machine has sixteen parts, A to P, each played from its own sixteen steps or from a piano roll; Steps or Roll beside its parts says which. The letters under the machine's name choose the part it plays and shows. Give a part a name, and Save as new part copies it, steps, roll and all, to the first free part, so that a pattern you made is kept for the song. Solo lets only that machine be heard.

• Drum machines: a pad sounds its voice and chooses it; light the steps it plays on and the Accent row. With Rec on, pads struck while the pattern plays are written in.
• The 909's Engine: Model, which a new lab plays, works the original's circuits out sample by sample. Its hi-hats, crash and ride are six-bit samples of the lab's own making (never the original's), read at a 30 kHz clock, held between steps and shaped by an envelope and filters as the original shapes its own; the closed and open hats share one circuit, so each cuts the other, and a cymbal tuned up dies sooner. The bass drum's Tune sets how far its pitch falls from, its knob reading the pitch the fall starts at; it always comes to rest at 52 Hz. The clap is four hands in turn, 11 ms apart (Spread moves them), and a reverb after them. An accent, or a harder velocity, does more than turn a voice up: it fills out the kick, opens the snare's high noise and lifts the toms' skin. Classic is the lab's first 909, which a lab from before keeps; both are equally loud. TC Drums, the plugin, has the same model.
• Bass lines and leads (the TC-303, TC-101, TC Ladder, Pulse, Nord, TC Sampler and TC Flux): choose a step and play its note on the keyboard under the steps, or on the computer's keys A to K; Rest, Down, Up, Accent and Slide change it, and a slid step glides into the next.
• TC Flux writes its lines on steps from C3 and its chords in a piano roll or from the keys. Its sound is three oscillators an octave apart, each a PWM saw (a sawtooth with a flat stretch whose width the LFO keeps moving), a saw or a pulse, with a sub. Dive starts every note above and lets it fall onto it (turned left, a scoop up from below) in its Time; Glide slides between notes; Poly, Mono and Legato say how notes take its twelve voices; Gate puts the amplifier on the key. Its chorus widens it, fast for the rave lead of hard trance and hard house, slow for the pads of the early nineties. Its screen shows how far its pitch is from the note: most of its sound is that movement.
• The TC-8k holds a chord in each pattern and plays it as a pad, through the trance gate, or as an arpeggio; in Gate or Arp the keys you hold make the chord, at the lab's tempo even while it is stopped.
• The TC-8k's model engine (a new lab's) has the rest of its original's voice. Unison plays each note as two or three layers of the whole voice, alike or an octave apart, tuned up to 50 cents apart by its Detune and set apart by its Width; its small screen shows where each layer sounds. Oscillator 2 can be a square (as wide as PW says, PWM moving it with LFO 1), a triangle or noise, with Fine, Sync (its Range then changes the tone, not the pitch), Ring and X-mod. LFO 1 is each voice's own, started with its note, faded in, free or a note at the tempo; LFO 2 is one for all; both move the pitch, the filter and the level (LFO 1 the place, with Pan), and the pitch envelope sweeps each note in from above or below; To sends LFO 1's pitch and the envelope to both oscillators, to oscillator 2 alone or to X-mod. After the voice come the patch's own Tone (bass and treble), Delay (panning or mono, free or a note at the tempo; 3/16 is the trance echo) and Multi FX (choruses, flangers, a phaser, a jet, a twist, two freezes and a drive), as its original had them, with no reverb. Law beside Mix plays the seven saws by Szabo's measurements or by the silicon reading of 2025 (the middle saw always full), as loud as each other at Mix 75: listen to which you like. Each rests off, so a lab saved before sounds as it did; the classic engine has none of them and shows them dimmed.
• The Nord's model engine (a new lab's) has the Nord Lead's other hands. LFO 1 (triangle, saw, square, random steps or smooth random) moves both oscillators' pitch, oscillator 2's, the filter, the pulse width or FM; LFO 2, a triangle, moves the pitch, the level, the filter or oscillator 2's fine tune (slow and shallow, the drift of two analogue oscillators). Each runs free, or with Sync as a note at the lab's tempo in step with its bar: LFO 1 on PW with two squares is the hard-trance lead, LFO 2 on the filter at 1/8 a wah on the beat. Dist drives the filter's input up to +24 dB, a grit for leads and resonant stabs; Notch cuts just under the cutoff, with LP 12 the original's Notch + LP. The mod envelope has its Attack, goes To oscillator 2, FM or PW, and Inv turns it over (oscillator 2 rising up to its pitch). Unison has its Detune, and Auto glides only into a note played over one held. Each rests off, so a lab saved before sounds as it did; the classic engine shows them dimmed.

Step programs sit beside a machine's parts: its list and ‹ › put a program's steps into the part chosen, which stays the same part (Undo puts the steps back). The lab's own come first: acid and bass lines, trance arpeggios, gates, beats in a dozen styles, and the riffs and beats of trance[]control's remix kits. Save steps… keeps the part's steps in your browser under a name, Export and Open… take them as a .tcsteps file and back, and Share… puts them in the site's list under your name, which every machine reading such steps shows under The site's and the step programs lists. The TC-303, TC-101, TC Ladder, Nord, Pulse, TC Sampler and TC Flux read the same melodic steps, so a line moves from one to another; each drum machine, the TC-8k and the A3000 has its own.

The piano roll

A part written in a roll is notes on a grid, from a quarter down to a thirty-second or triplets, in a clip of 1 to 512 bars. Velocities are under the notes, and lanes for the machine's own knobs under those.

• Tools (1 to 4): ↖ Choose, the one to begin with (a double click puts a note or takes one away; drag a box round notes, Shift or Ctrl adds; drag the chosen together, their ends to make them longer, with Alt a copy), ✎ Draw (press and drag as long as the note), ⌫ Rub out (press or drag over notes) and ✂ Cut (a note in two on the grid). = and −, or Ctrl and the wheel, zoom; a machine's roll keeps its grid and zoom.
• Keys: the arrows move what is chosen, and Shift with them makes it longer or moves it an octave; Delete takes it out; Ctrl+A chooses all, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy, Ctrl+D puts it again right after itself, Escape lets go. A right-click on a note (or Shift+F10) gives its menu: copy, again, an octave up or down, take away.
• The Velocity knob sets the chosen notes' velocity, or what new notes get.
• Read MIDI takes a MIDI file's track (its controllers 74, 71, 1 and 72 become lanes, and its pitch bends a Pitch bend lane), Save MIDI writes the clip out with its Pitch bend lane as pitch bends, and with Rec on what you play while the lab runs is written in.
• Pitch bend: a lane on a synth's Pitch bend bends it through the clip. The middle is no bend, the top and bottom as far as its Bend says. A line down over a beat is a hoover's swoop; a quick rise into a note is a bent lead. The lane is followed to the tick, not stepped by sixteenths.

Sounds and banks

The display over a synth's knobs is its bank: the arrows and the list choose a sound, which sets the knobs and leaves the patterns alone, and a star means a knob has moved since. Save keeps the sound in your own bank, in this browser, and with the song: a mix you save carries it, and whoever opens the mix finds it in that synth's bank under This song's.

Export saves the sound as a file of its own (a .tcsound) to give to someone, and Open… opens such files again, listed under From the file. The TC-8k, the Nord, the Pulse and the CS also open the patches their originals saved, as SysEx files (.syx, or a .mid of SysEx); the bank's Open… says which instrument's, and what the lab's machine has no knob for is said under the bank. A file is read in your browser and never sent anywhere.

Share… puts the sound in the site's list for its synth, under its name and yours as its maker. Every synth's bank lists the shared sounds for it under The site's, and the sounds lists them all by synth, each to take as a file. Sharing goes through the same spam test as Talk, and a sound whose names look like the band's or carry contact details waits for the band.

The TC-101 and the TC Ladder start from a sound with Start from; TC Stomp's pads start from the lab's designs, or play a sample of yours (Load a sample… under the pads); the TC Sampler from its own five sounds or yours. TC Flux has a bank as the other synths have, of fifteen of the lab's own: rave leads and stabs, hard-house basses, pads, arpeggios and plucks; its sound files open in TC Flux only, as it is after no one instrument.

The arranger

With Song on, each machine plays the regions on its track and rests between them; with Patterns on, every machine loops its own pattern instead. A region plays one of the machine's parts round for as long as it is: A–P are its parts, each on its steps or in a piano roll.

• Tools: ↖ Choose, the one to begin with (a press chooses a region, a box over tracks and bars chooses several, Shift adds), ✎ Draw (regions of the part chosen; drag along a track for a longer one), ⌫ Rub out and ✂ Cut (a region in two at a bar).
• A double click (or Enter) opens a region; on an empty bar it puts a region of the part chosen there. While a region is open, the region you choose opens in its place.
• Drag a region to move it, with Alt or Ctrl to copy it; pull its end to play its part again, its start to cut in. A region put over another cuts it back.
• With a region chosen, the arrows move it, Shift with them makes it longer or shorter, Ctrl+D repeats it, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy it to the bar Play starts at, and Delete takes it out. 1 to 4 choose the tools; = and − make the bars wider or narrower and 0 fits them to the width again (or Zoom: Fit, 1×, 2×, 4×). A right-click (or Shift+F10) gives a menu: on a region open, copy, again, cut in two at that bar, loop its bars, make its part its own, delete; on an empty bar put a region or paste there, or play from it; on a track's name go to its machine, solo or mute it. Ctrl and the wheel, or a trackpad's pinch, zoom the tracks.
• A MIDI file dropped on a machine's track becomes a clip in its first free part, named after the file, and a region of it lands where it was dropped.
• Opened, a region shows its part in the dock under the tracks, in the track's colour: at its left name its part, choose what it plays, repeat it, make its part its own (Make unique), or copy it as a new clip; at its right write in its roll, or in its steps as on its machine's panel (a drum machine's grid, a synth's steps and keyboard, the TC-8k's chord and gate, the A3000's slices, the loop player's sound and gate), which then take the machine's keys and MIDI. The arrangement scrolls on its own over it; pull the line between them for more room to either. Only opening puts its machine on its part and gives it the keys. Escape (or ×) closes it. A jump to a panel elsewhere leaves ↩ Back on the rack's bar.
• A lane moves one knob through the song: press on it to put a point, drag a point, double-click it away (a right-click sets it at the top, the middle or the bottom, or takes it or every point away). Read a MIDI song gives each of a file's tracks to a machine. The bar numbers set where Play starts, and Loop plays a region's bars round.

Audio tracks

+ Audio track (up to sixteen) plays sound in the song beside the machines, each with a channel and lanes of its own. Press a track's name to open it: read a sound file in, or record a take from a microphone, an audio interface, or the master or a channel of the lab, while the song plays.

Drag a clip to move it (Alt or Ctrl copies), pull its ends to trim it (on sixteenths, or freely with Shift). Opened, a clip can be renamed, turned up or down, looped, split at the playhead, repeated, saved as WAV or taken out. A track is kept in bars or in seconds. The sound stays in this browser: a saved mix leaves audio tracks out.

Pre-verb, in an opened clip, makes the studios' old reverse reverb: the clip's start played backwards through the reverb, its tail turned round, so a swell of a beat to four bars rises into the clip's first hit. It goes on a track of its own beside the clip, to move, trim or take out.

The mixer

Each channel as a desk has it: Gain (±24 dB), Ø (polarity), Mono, Width (to 200 %), an EQ shown as a curve, a one-knob filter (a low-pass to the left, a high-pass to the right), Comp (a compressor of its own), four sends to the aux buses, Pan, Mute and Solo, a side of the crossfader, and the fader in dB beside its meter of LEDs (the line is -12 dBFS, where a kick is set before the rest).

• Press a channel's name or its curve to open it in focus beside it (to its right on a wide screen, under its row of strips on a narrower one): its EQ on a screen with handles to drag, scopes of its sound, every knob and a long fader; ‹ and › go to the channel before or after, and the same press, × or Escape closes it. A right-click on a strip opens or closes its focus, sets its EQ flat, mutes or solos it, or goes to its machine.
• The aux buses, A to D, play what is sent through their effect (a delay, a room, a hall or an effect unit) and back through their returns; Pre takes the sends before the faders.
• The master has a strip of its own, its dynamics and its fader, its loudness under it (LUFS, the last three seconds); in focus it has a loudness screen of its own: momentary, short-term and integrated, and the last 30 seconds, with Reset to count the integrated afresh. On a very wide screen it stands open at the mixer's right end as a master section, beside a channel in focus. A drum machine's Outs gives each voice a channel of its own. Slim shows each channel's fader alone.
• + Bus adds up to four buses, sub-groups with a strip of their own; Out sends a channel after its fader to the master or a bus. The insert slots at a channel's head are effects it goes through first, each with its wet/dry; an audio track, a bus and the master have them too, so an effect can play a loop on a track, a group, or the whole mix. Comp's Key lets a compressor listen to another instrument, to pump with a kick, and each aux return has its own EQ and compressor.

Effects and dynamics

The Drive overdrives, distorts, fuzzes or takes bits away; its Low cut keeps the lows out of the driven sound alone (off, then 20 to 400 Hz), so that with Mix down a kick keeps its weight while the drive bites above it. The Mod FX is a chorus, a flanger or a phaser; the Delay repeats on the beat, each repeat darker, ping-pong if you like. Add them from the rack's bar, put one into a channel from its front (or into an insert slot), or patch it on the back between any machine and any channel; or choose it as an aux's effect, where a delay or a reverb is the effect alone.

The Reverb is Mk II, a cinematic reverb for trance (a lab from before keeps its classic room or hall, and Mk II on its front switches): a room, a hall, a vast space, a plate, or a rise that swells up behind each sound. Size, Decay (on into ∞, in seconds or in bars) and Pre-delay (free or on the beat); Bloom, how slowly it builds, and above 60 % a swell; Air, Motion, Width with the bass kept in the middle; Clear, the tail ducked while the sound plays; Freeze, taken on the beat. Its moves: Climb (an octave, a fifth or both, laid under the tail), Wash, Pump on the beat, the eighth or a drum machine's kicks, Throw held down, Drop on the next bar line. More opens its fine page (Echo, Stop, Gate, the decay map, Freeze's ramps, what Clear listens to, Climb's interval, the texture and the filters), and its presets are named after what trance does with a reverb.

Dynamics is the master's compressor and limiter, their gain reduction lit; its screen draws the curve and the gain taken away over the last seconds, and its duck lets a bass drum pump every channel but its own drum machine's. The screen also reads the loudness of what comes out, as broadcast and streaming measure it (LUFS, by ITU-R BS.1770): M the last 400 ms, S the last three seconds, I the whole song since Play, quiet stretches left out as the standard leaves them out. Streaming services turn a song down to about −14 LUFS; club masters are louder.

Bass mono, on the master's input, sums the lows of left and right below 80 to 200 Hz, as modern masters keep the bass in mono, and leaves the highs as wide as they are: a split whose two halves add up to the whole again. It is off until you turn it on.

Moves: builds, drops and rolls

Moves plays the tricks of a trance arrangement on whatever goes through it, one pad each: hold a pad and its move plays, let go and it lands. Every move starts on the song's grid and comes back to the dry on it, so it always falls in time. Add it from the rack's bar and put it in an insert slot: on the master for the whole mix, on a bus, on an audio track's loop, or on a machine's channel.

• The moves: Build climbs while held (its roll speeding up rung by rung, the high-pass, a noise and a hall rising, the pitch climbing) and let go lands into Drop on the bar; Drop cuts the gap before the next bar line, a noise falling through it if you like, and comes back on the one with a sub boom; Gate is the trance gate on the bar; Wash rises into a hall and lands on the bar, the tail cut; Roll repeats the slice from the grid point it was pressed on; Break takes out the lows, the middle or the highs; Filter sweeps to Sweep to and back; Throw sends from the next eighth into an echo or the hall, which rings on; Tape slows to a stop; Half plays the first half of each beat, two beats or bar at half speed; Hover holds the moment in the air; Sweep is a flanger's jet. Land brings everything back on the next beat (or bar, or at once).
• Playing them: a pad's height is how hard: the top the loudest, the bottom gentle. The Roll pads choose its division (move along them while rolling for a roll-up). Choose a move's pad to see its Length (what a tap plays) and its landing: at once, on the next beat, on the next bar, its whole length, or held until pressed again. Its face has four pages: Pads (the pads, the chosen move, Build, the filter, the gate), Shape (the drawn shapes and the band split, below), Lane and Fine (Build's climb, the space and Throw, Drop and Boom, Pump and the key, the colour, the LFOs). Its knobs turn while a move or an LFO moves them.
• How long a build is: Climb over (on the Pads page, beside Build) is how many bars Build takes from dry to its top while its pad is held; it then holds at the top until let go, and drops on the next bar line. The screen counts it: "Build bar 3 of 8". By hand plays the same climb from a knob, for a lane of the song to draw.
• Modifiers, held with a move: Reverse and Rebound play Roll's repeats backwards or back and forth, Pan sends them left and right, Rise climbs them in pitch, Shuffle draws them from the bar before, Hack crushes, Smack punches the starts of the hits, Wobble sweeps the low-pass on the beat, ×½ and ×2 halve or double a move's length, Triplet makes Roll a triplet, and Boom booms the landing of each move let go.
• The lane holds moves on the steps you light, one, two or four bars round and round with the song: click or drag along a row, its bars as pages. Keep take writes in what you just played over the lane's bars, each press on its nearest sixteenth. Vary changes it bar by bar (a move left out now and then, a roll made faster or backwards, a fill at the end of every fourth bar), the same way each time for the same Seed. Its Library puts worked examples on it: a fill at the end of four bars, a snare lift into the one, gates, throws, a tape stop, a half-time bar, a drop every four, a stutter edit, and chaos (an accelerating roll, a siren build, a chaos shuffle, a meltdown), each with the knobs it needs. Press Play, hear it, then change its steps.
• Sixteen lanes, and a track in the arrangement: a Moves unit has lanes A to P, as a machine has parts; Part on the Lane page chooses the one shown and played, and an example from the library names its lane. In Arrange each Moves unit has a track under the machines': draw regions on it with the part chosen in New regions play, and each plays that lane round and round on the song's bars, its moves pressed and let go on their steps. Move, copy, stretch, cut and choose them as a machine's regions; press one to open its lane under the tracks, to name it, change its steps or the lane it plays. In song mode a unit with regions on its track plays them, and its own lane rests.
• The LFOs: two, each moving one thing (the filter, the resonance, the pan, the space or echo send, Hack, Smack, Roll's rate, the gate's rate, Wobble's rate, Rise or Pump) over a cycle on the tempo, a sixteenth to sixteen bars, in a shape (sine, triangle, ramps, square, random), round with the song or once from the first move pressed. LFO 2 can move LFO 1's rate or depth: a ramp over four bars on LFO 1's rate makes a roll swung by LFO 1 speed up all through a build. LFOs with moves (on unless turned off) keeps them still while nothing plays.
• Pump and the key: Pump ducks the sound on the beat, the eighth or the key's hits. The key is a drum machine's kicks themselves, or any channel's sound (its lows or all of it, Sense how loud a hit must be), and it can open the gate a step on each hit instead of the gate's pattern.
• Drawn shapes (the Shape page): a pump and a trance gate are the same thing, a level that rises and falls with the tempo, only shaped differently. So Pump and the gate can each play a shape you draw instead of the classic dip or the sixteen steps: a level from silence to full over an eighth, a quarter, a half, one, two or four bars, round and round from the bar (or, with Pump on the key or the gate opened by the key, from each of the key's hits, holding its last point after). Choose Pump or Gate, then Drawn (any edit turns it on). Click to put a point in and drag it, on the grid (Grid sets how fine; hold Shift to place it anywhere); drag the dot in a segment's middle, or turn the wheel over the segment, to bend it; double-click a point to take it away, or a dot to straighten it; right-click for a menu (full level, halfway, silence, take it away, straighten, flip, backwards, start again). With the editor chosen, the keys: Tab or the arrows left and right choose a point, up and down move it (Shift finer), Shift with left and right move it along, Delete takes it away, Insert or + puts one in, [ and ] bend the segment after it, 0 straightens it. Behind the curve: what the key (the kick) and the sound did over the shape's length last time round, so the duck can be drawn to the kick, and a line where it is now. Ready shapes to start from: Pump on the beat, Deep pump with a slow return, Light pump, Eighth pump, Hard duck under the kick, Rolling bass with the first sixteenth out (and with only the sub out), Half-bar swell, Swell into the bar, Trance gate (hard and with soft tails), Offbeat eighths, Eighths plucked, Dotted eighths, Stutter end and Tremolo sixteenths. Drawn, Pump is how much of the shape plays (100 % all of it); a step in a shape is smoothed over 2 ms (the gate's over its Smooth), so it never clicks.
• The band split (on the Shape page) gives each band its own share of Pump's dip and of the gate's: two bands (the lows and the rest) or three (the lows, the middle and the top), split where you choose (the lows up to 60 to 300 Hz, the top from 1 to 6 kHz) with the same crossovers as Break, so the bands sum flat. 100 % takes all of the dip, 0 leaves the band untouched: the sub ducked hard under the kick and the middle lightly keeps the bass heard between the kicks. It works with the classic pump and the steps too; the preset Sub Pump, Mids Light sets it up. With nothing dipping, the split is out of the sound.
• Other ways to play it: with its Keys on, the computer's keys play the moves (A Build, S Drop, D Gate, F Wash, G Roll, H Break, J Filter; W, E, T, Y and U the others) and a MIDI keyboard its whole key map: from C2 Roll's divisions, from C3 the moves, from C4 the modifiers, C5 Land, the velocity as how hard. Played by gives the moves to another machine's piano roll, its notes on the same map; and a song's lane on one of its Hold knobs plays that move while the lane is over half.
• Its presets are named after what trance producers do: Sixteen-Bar Build, Eight-Bar Snare Lift, Cut Before the One, Short Drop, Gated Pad, Half-Depth Pad Gate, Last-Word Echo, Crash Drift, Wash to the One, Bass Out Fill, Vocal Stutter Edit, Kick Pump Return and Sub Pump, Mids Light. Each sets its own move's knobs and leaves the lane and the rest. Its screen shows what comes out, the bar and the gate's steps, the key and Pump, and each move playing with the time to its landing.

Squeeze: three bands, peaks down, tails up

Squeeze is the dense, even sound of today's trance: a saw bass that never drops out between its notes, a lead that sits up front, drums with their room brought up, a mix held together. It splits what goes through it into three bands and keeps each one in a window: what rises over the window's Top is pressed down, what falls under its Bottom is lifted up, so the peaks come down and the quiet tails come up, from both ends at once. Add it from the rack's bar and put it wherever effects go: into a channel, into an insert slot of an audio track, a bus or the master, or on an aux for a parallel squeeze.

• Depth is the whole squeeze on one knob, from untouched to all of it; Time makes all three bands faster (tighter, grittier) or slower (smoother), together.
• Low X and High X are where the bands meet (30 to 480 Hz, and 625 Hz to 10 kHz); the three add up to the sound as it came, so with Depth at nothing it is untouched.
• Each band has Down (how hard it presses over its Top, up to 50:1), Up (how hard it lifts under its Bottom, up to 5:1, at most 24 dB, and less again in near-silence so hiss stays down) and its own Gain. Its Top and Bottom are the two lines on its column of the screen: drag them up and down, or click the screen and choose one with the left and right arrow keys, then move it with up and down. A double click puts one back.
• The screen shows each band's level coming in (the dim bar), where its gain takes it (the bright bar, an arrow up or down), its gain in decibels, and the last four seconds of each band's gain on the right.
• Match, on at first, keeps what comes out at the loudness that came in (measured as streaming services measure loudness, over three seconds), so turning Depth up makes it denser, not just louder; the band Gains stay as you set them. The screen says how much louder it comes out, Match on or off. Mixblends it under the dry, taken from the same split so it never combs; In drives it harder, Out sets what leaves.
• Its presets are named for what they do: Saw Bass, Rolling Bass, Lead Up Front, Supersaw Wall, Pluck Snap, Pad Lift, Drum Bus, Hats Smooth, Master Glue, Club Master and The Heavy One. Each sets every knob. It has no latency.

The master has it too: the Multiband group of Dynamics is the multiband stage of the all-in-one mastering processors of the period, after the master's EQ and bass mono and before its compressor and limiter. Bands switches it in, starting as Master Glue; Depth and Mix are at hand, and Open shows its screen and every knob. Until you switch it on it is not in the sound at all, so a lab from before sounds as it did.

Modulators and cables

Each LFO moves one knob of the rack at a rate counted in bars and beats: choose the device, then its knob. Its screen shows its wave at its depth, where it is while the lab plays, and what it moves. There are four, and room for four more. On a synth's Pitch bend an LFO bends it: at full depth as far as its Bend says, either way; a sine at a small depth, a beat or less, is vibrato.

Back, or Tab with the pointer over the rack, turns the rack round. There each machine's output is patched into a mixer channel, the bass drums' triggers into the channels they duck, and the LFOs into what they move. Pull a cable from one jack to another, or press one jack and then the other; a cable pulled out of an input hangs loose until it goes in again.

The rack: more machines

Add, in the rack's bar, puts another machine of a kind in the rack, up to four of a kind and sixteen in all, each with a channel in the mixer and a track in the arranger. In its head, press its name to give it one of your own; the arrows move it up or down; × takes it out with its track, parts, lanes and cables, asked first, and Undo puts it back. The round button folds a machine to its top strip. A phone plays eight at once; the ones after them wait, marked "Waits".

The transport

Play starts and stops the lab (or the space bar); Tempo sets the BPM (138 to start) and Swing pushes every other sixteenth late. Time sets the time signature (a bar of 3/4 or 6/8 plays twelve of a pattern's sixteen steps), and Click is the metronome, never in a recording. The DSP meter shows how hard the audio works and the voices sounding; Audio sets the sample rate, the buffer and the WAV files' bit depth. Full screen fills the screen (Escape brings it back; where the browser lets the lab keep Escape for its own menus and panels, as Chrome does, hold it), and Install, where the browser offers it, makes the lab an app that opens without a network once it has been used. On a wide screen Arrange and the mixer stretch across it, Arrange's bars filling its width and the mixer's strips keeping a desk's width, and the other units stand in racks side by side, each at about a plugin window's width: two from about 1810 pixels, five on a 49-inch screen. A unit stays in its rack while you work; folding one away evens the racks out again.

Undo (Ctrl+Z, or ↶ on the rack's bar) takes back the last change to the lab, whatever it was: a knob turned, a region moved, notes written, a machine put in or taken out; a run of changes without a pause is one step. Redo (Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y, or ↷) puts it back. It reaches back over this visit, up to two hundred steps. ? (or the ? on the rack's bar) shows every key on one sheet.

Saving, sharing and recording

• WAV records whole bars of what plays, from the start of a bar, and saves them as a WAV file that loops. Project holds your song's title, artist and credits, which go into every WAV file as its tags.
• Save project (Ctrl+S, ⌘S) saves the whole lab as a .trance file, with your audio tracks' sounds, the A3000's loop, your own pads, the TC Sampler's own sound and TC Stomp's samples; Open project brings it back, here or in another browser. New song starts from nothing, and Undo brings back what was there.
• A mix saved from the lab is the lab's for others to play, vote on and comment on, in the mixes; it carries your own sounds with it, but not your audio tracks.

MIDI and the computer's keys

In browsers that have it, the MIDI button lets a keyboard play the machines. Channel 10 strikes the drums by General MIDI's drum notes; the other channels play the machine touched last, and a bass line note struck hard is written with an accent. Controllers 74, 71, 1 and 72 turn the cutoff, resonance, envelope and decay of the machine touched last, where it has them; Start and Stop start and stop the lab.

The pitch wheel bends the machine touched last: the TC-303, TC-8k, Nord, Pulse, TC-101, TC Ladder, CS, TC Sampler or TC Flux. Every note sounding bends, and every new one starts bent, as on a keyboard synth. Bend, on each of their panels, says how far the wheel goes: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 12 or 24 semitones up and down, 2 to start. The wheel adds to a Pitch bend lane or LFO.

Without a keyboard, the computer's keys A to K play the bass line, chord or lead touched last, and the space bar starts and stops.

A Moves unit with its Keys on takes the keys and MIDI instead: the computer's keys its moves, a MIDI keyboard its key map (see Moves).

Where your work is kept

Every sound is made in your browser as it plays. What you make is kept in this browser and follows you from machine to machine; a sound or a loop you load is read in the browser and never sent anywhere. Only what you choose to publish leaves it: a mix you save, for others to play, and a sound or a step program you share.