Playing MIGR8 live: pads, patterns and the grid

Most slice-and-stutter plugins give you a pattern and leave it there. MIGR8 has a pattern too, but it's built to be played over.

The grid: three lanes that drift

The grid has sixteen steps and three lanes: SLICE, STUTTER and FILTER. Each lane can have its own length. Set STUTTER to 12 steps and FILTER to 10 while SLICE runs 16, and the lanes slide against each other, lining back up only every so often. That's how a short pattern can sound like it's evolving for minutes.

Shift-click to tie steps together and a move stretches across them: a ramp that speeds up over a whole beat, a filter that sweeps across four steps. Give a step a probability below 100% and it only fires some of the time. Turn LOCK on and those dice land the same way every bar, so your bounces are repeatable.

The pads: eight gestures under your fingers

On top of the grid sit eight gesture pads: 1/16 and 1/8 stutters, a tape drop, a beat repeat, a low-pass dive, a vowel fill, a stutter build and a gate chop. Hold a pad and it takes over the STUTTER and FILTER lanes; the grid itself never changes. Presses snap to the nearest 1/16, so a slightly late hit still lands in time.

Every pad can be reshaped on the PERF page. The setting that changes how it feels most is RELEASE: stop the instant you let go, finish on the next grid line, play out the full cycle, or latch on until you tap it again.

AUTO: eight patterns instead

Press AUTO and the pads become pattern pads. Pad 1 is the preset's pattern and pads 2 through 8 are variations of it: Skip, Pickup, Brake, Sparse, Echo, Stabs and Half-Speed. Tap one and MIGR8 switches on the next step. It's the fastest way to perform a whole section: run the groove on pad 1, hit Pickup going into the bar line, Brake before the drop. RANDOM rolls fresh variations onto the other seven pads whenever you want new ideas.

A simple way to start

1. Put MIGR8 on a drum loop and load LOPSIDED ORBIT.
2. Let it run a few bars, then nudge REMIX up for more re-hits.
3. At the end of a phrase, hold pad 7 (Stutter Build) and let go on the downbeat.
4. Record your pad moves as MIDI (notes 48 to 55) or automation, so your fills are editable later.

In Logic Pro

Logic doesn't send MIDI to audio-effect inserts, so to play the pads from a keyboard, load MIGR8 MIDI on a Software Instrument track, set its Side Chain to the track you want to chop, and set that track's Output to No Output (don't mute it, because a muted track sends nothing to the side chain). Then play C2 to G2.