Kleio Generative Instrument

Kleio is a generative instrument and synthesizer in one: it plays evolving patterns of melody and rhythm, and you decide how far chaos might alter them.

What can I do with Kleio? You can:
- Start jamming in seconds: pick a pattern, a scale and a sound, press play, and Kleio plays the melody over a bass line and sparse chords.
- Roll a new sound with the dice: pick a few words (a mood, a sound, a tone, how much space and motion) and Kleio builds a sound that fits them. Roll again until you love it.
- Choose from 45 written patterns: long arpeggios through chord progressions, melodies (Ode to Joy among them), Euclidean rhythms, clave, isorhythms, Balkan odd meters in 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13, and experiments from Fibonacci to Morse.
- Play in 31 scales and modes, from pentatonics and church modes to Phrygian dominant, Hirajoshi, Pelog and Persian.
- Bend the melody with one knob: turn up PITCH and its notes start mutating, one at a time, while the rest stays recognisable.
- Reshape the rhythm: REPEAT for ratchets, REST for gaps, STEP for a phrase that grows note by note and shrinks back. Turn them all to zero and the written pattern returns.
- Sculpt the sound: brightness and decay in one gesture.
- Slow the music to a quarter or speed it up fourfold with the TIME ribbon, and lock it there.
- Let the harmony move by itself: AUTO HARMONY walks through the chords of the scale, every round of the pattern or every few bars, and now and then turns the melody backwards or upside down. FREEZE holds the chord you love.
- Shift the melody's octave, fire bursts, pause it, or switch to a triplet feel.
- Shape the bass: sine, triangle or square, a soft or sharp attack, one of eight bass figures (from a steady pulse to walking lines and Euclidean rhythms) that follow the chords, at full, half or quarter speed, in three octaves.
- Shape the chords: struck or swelling, short stabs or a long wash, narrow or wide, from a dark low pad to a bright, airy one, with inversions that keep them moving.
- Play Kleio from a keyboard, on screen or over MIDI: every key sets the key and the octave, and the melody starts on the note you play.
- Select and shape your sound from four engines: Glass, a modal resonator; Marimba, from soft wooden mallets to ringing metal; Pluck, a string that is bright at the bridge and round in the middle; Analog, two oscillators, pulse width, noise, a resonant ladder filter and a filter envelope.
- Make every note hit a little different with random knobs for every sound.
- Set the sound in motion with 4 LFOs: slow swells or fast wobbles on 27 targets, from brightness and rhythm to grains and shimmer.
- Dress it in granular clouds or tempo-synced stutter, a ping-pong delay that runs away into dub, shimmering reverb, chorus, stereo width and tape-like wear.
- Use it as an AUv3 instrument in your DAW or as a standalone app, following the host's tempo and transport.
- Drive your other synths over MIDI: melody, chords and bass on channels 1, 2 and 3.
- Keep the music playing in the background and with the screen locked.
- Start from 40 factory presets, save your own, mark favourites, share them between the app and the plugin, and export or import them.