TETSUO

TETSUO is a chaotic percussion machine. No samples, no library. One voice built out of a pitched body with noise dragged through it, a resonant filter that saturates the harder you lean on it, a bitcrusher, and a waveshaper that runs from a bit of weight to total structural failure.

The sequencer is sixteen unseen slots and STEPS knob decides how many of them fire, adding and taking away hits one at a time in a fixed order, so you can strip a pattern to the bone and build it back and the same beats come home. The SKIP control works against you on purpose, stealing hits at random while it plays, so it never quite settles. MUTATE modulates the pitch at random, setting fire to voices on every turn.

You do not program TETSUO so much as negotiate with it. The strip along the top is how you attempt to hold onto anything. Sixty four steps, four turns of pattern, carved into as many as eight sections.

Select a section. Find a sound. Hit RECORD, and that section keeps every knob position. Change it, record the next, then hit PLAY and it walks left to right dropping each snapshot in as it reaches it, looping. Drag the dividers to give a section longer or cut it short. It keeps settings, not audio, so the engine is playing live the entire way through. Sections save with your presets and your session.

Fifteen factory presets to start from, and your own saved alongside them. A preset stores the knobs and the whole arrangement together.

Tap the round gauge in the middle for presets, settings and the manual.

AUv3 plugin and standalone app. Follows host tempo and transport, twelve automatable parameters, full MIDI control, factory and user presets, and a manual built into the app.