The Nord

• Play starts the sequencer, and so does the space bar. A pattern chosen while it plays starts at the next bar.
• Knobs turn when dragged up or down; hold Shift for small steps, double-click to put one back. With the keyboard: Tab to a knob, then the arrow keys. While the lab plays, a knob an LFO, a duck or the song moves turns with it, and a mark on its ring stays where you set it; a knob the song's lane holds is framed in green.
• Undo: Ctrl+Z takes back the last change to the lab, a run of changes without a pause being one step, and Ctrl+Shift+Z (or Ctrl+Y) puts it back; ↶ and ↷ on the rack's bar do the same. A right-click on a region, a note, a lane's point, a track's name or a channel gives what can be done to it. ? shows every key.
• Parts: every machine has sixteen, A–P, each played from its own steps or from a piano roll; the letters under its name choose the one it plays and shows. Give it a name, and Save as new part copies it, steps, roll and all, to the first free part and goes on there, so a pattern you made is kept to use in the song. Solo lets only that machine be heard: with Patterns on, it loops the part you are writing.
• Piano roll: Steps or Roll beside a machine's parts says how that part is written. In the roll, a double click on the grid puts a note there (with ✎, press and drag to draw one as long as the drag); press a note to choose it, drag it to move it or its end to lengthen it, double-click it away; with a note chosen, the arrow keys move it and Shift with them lengthens it. The grid is a quarter down to a thirty-second, or triplets; a clip is 1 to 512 bars, and in the song a region as long as its clip plays it through once. Velocities are under the notes, lanes for the machine's own knobs under those. Read MIDI takes a MIDI file's track (its controllers 74, 71, 1 and 72 become lanes, its pitch bends a Pitch bend lane), Save MIDI writes the clip out with its bend, and with Rec on, what you play while the lab runs is written in.
• Pitch bend: every synth and the TC Sampler bends, every note sounding and every new one, as a keyboard's wheel does. Bend on its panel says how far, 1 to 24 semitones up and down (2 to start). A MIDI keyboard's wheel bends the machine touched last. In a roll, a Pitch bend lane bends it through the clip, the middle no bend; draw a swoop down for a hoover. An LFO on Pitch bend, at a small depth, is vibrato.
• Sounds: 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; 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, to play and Keep among their own. Export and Open… take a sound as a file of its own (and open the originals' SysEx files); Share… puts it in the site's list for its synth, which every bank shows under The site's and the sounds page lists.
• Step programs: beside a machine's parts, a list of programs to put into the part chosen (‹ › go through them; Undo puts the steps back): the lab's own, with the riffs and beats of the band's remix kits, yours, and the site's. Save steps… keeps yours in this browser, Export and Open… take them as a file, and Share… puts them on the step programs.
• The Nord: its steps are written like a TC-303's, from C4. Sync restarts the second oscillator with the first, so that turning Osc 2 or the Sweep changes its tone rather than its pitch; FM bends the first by the second, Ring multiplies them. Glide slides every note into the next. Spread sets a note's Unison voices apart in the stereo field (in Poly, the notes of a chord too). On the model engine: LFO 1 and LFO 2 move the pulse width, the filter, the pitch, FM, the level or oscillator 2's fine tune, free or in step with the lab's bar (Sync); Dist drives the filter, Notch cuts just under the cutoff; the mod envelope has an attack, goes to oscillator 2, FM or PW, and Inv turns it over; Detune spreads Unison, and Auto glides only between notes played legato. Each rests off.
• WAV records whole bars of what plays, from the start of a bar, and saves them as a WAV file that loops.
• MIDI: 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 TC-303 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, and the pitch wheel bends it; Start and Stop start and stop the lab.

Every sound is made in your browser as it plays, from the lab's own arithmetic, the band's remix kit and what you load yourself, which is never sent anywhere. What you make is kept in this browser and follows you from machine to machine. The band's studio had machines of these kinds from its first synthesizer in 1997 on; each machine's page says which, and what was made with them. Everything else is in the manual.