OIKONTROL

AKAI FIRE / PLAY & SEQUENCE

Live input and sequencing

Melodic, harmonic and drum input give you three ways to play live. Six sequencing modes cover drum patterns, polyphonic steps, generated melodies, nested rhythms, contrapuntal phrases and editing across multiple clips.

Shared root, scale and octave settings keep live note input and melodic sequencing in the same musical context, with scales aligned with those in Bitwig.

Most of the sequencers let you shape velocity, pressure, timbre and pitch expression per note, and apply fresh variations across a phrase.

AKAI FIRE / DRUM XOX

Drum XOX

Start with a familiar drum step sequencer, then shape the groove as it plays. Hold steps to nudge their timing, add accents and fills, or rotate the pattern with live control gestures.

Edit recurrence and per-note expression, or use Euclidean pattern controls. Drum Pads adds a 64-pad layout, fixed velocity zones and a bongo layout with position-based pressure.

AKAI FIRE / NOTE

Note and harmonic input

The 16×4 grid offers chromatic and in-key layouts. Encoders control pitch bend, Pitch Gliss, modulation and timbre, with another page for aftertouch, breath and pitch expression. Sustain, sostenuto, note repeat and held notes have dedicated buttons.

Harmonic mode lays out a grid of harmonic shapes that you can play individually or combine to create chords and phrases. Choose one to three notes per pad, spread them across octaves, and switch between Close, Open and Drop 2 voicings. Keep two columns for single bass notes while the rest of the grid plays chords.

AKAI FIRE / POLY STEP

Poly Step

Select individual notes or chords on the pads, chromatically or within a scale. Latch a chord and add or remove individual notes. Hold existing steps and play a new grip to change their pitches without replacing their other note settings.

For starting points, chord banks include quartal, suspended, cluster and modal voicings. Keep the exact interval shape or map it through the current scale. Edit note length, recurrence, repeats and expression per step. Root, scale and octave are shared with live note input and the melodic generator.

AKAI FIRE / MELO GEN

Melo Gen

Choose a pool of notes, then let five generators with different characteristics draw from those notes to create phrases. Explore basslines, motifs and melodic hooks, then adjust density, tension and legato. Keep an idea you like and reshape it, or edit the generated notes directly. Acid produces root-led hooks with accents and slides. Rolling builds repeating bass cells. Octave works with register jumps; Motif develops short repeating figures; Call/Resp follows a phrase with a transformed answer.

Fixed seeds make the generated results reproducible.

AKAI FIRE / NESTED RHYTHM

Nested Rhythm

Subdivide phrase spans into tuplets, then subdivide selected cells again into ratchets. Both support divisions from 2 to 16. Density removes hits; Cluster concentrates them into a smaller part of the phrase. You can edit individual generated hits for recurrence and expression.

The design draws on Clarence Barlow's metric indispensability: some pulse positions do more to establish a metre than others. That informs which hits survive as density falls. Euclidean sequencing is available separately in Drum XOX; Nested Rhythm deals with hierarchical subdivisions and phrase structure.

AKAI FIRE / FUGUE

Fugue: one melody, several voices

Fugue derives up to three supporting lines from a source melody. Slow one down for a bass part, shift another up the scale, reverse its direction or delay its entrance. Adjust each voice from the encoders to hear related phrases emerge, from simple harmonies to overlapping canons.

The source melody lives on MIDI channel 1, with the derived voices on channels 2–4. Fugue draws on Bach-style contrapuntal transformations, with independent speed, entry time, direction and scale-degree offset for each supporting line.

AKAI FIRE / PERFORM

Clip launching and recording

Launch clips in a vertical or horizontal layout, trigger scenes, or jump across a larger set with Birds-Eye navigation. Record into a chosen slot or the next free slot. Recording can stop at a fixed length, run manually, or round the resulting loop to a whole bar when you stop.

Mix pages handle track selection, mute, solo and arm. Device pages select and bypass devices, open plugin windows and switch remote pages.

NOVATION / LAUNCH CONTROL XL MK2

Launch Control XL Mk2

I like Bitwig's factory templates for the Launch Control XL, but wanted to keep the user templates available for direct MIDI mapping in synths. The bundled Bitwig script disables them.

Oikontrol keeps the factory templates and makes the user templates available too. It adds a Drum Machine template with pad selection and audition, chain levels on the faders, and drum-device parameters on the knobs. There's also a template for accessing several device remote pages at once.

The arpeggiator template adapts Richie Hawtin and Eric Ahrens' rhbitwig controls for performing with Bitwig's Arpeggiator.