The on-screen keyboard

The on-screen keyboard runs along the bottom of the window, in the Keyboard band next to the pitch and mod wheels. It is there to audition a patch without reaching for a controller: click the keys with the mouse, or play them from your computer keyboard, and the notes go into the same path as any external MIDI, so everything (the arpeggiator, the sequencer, the mod matrix) responds exactly as it would to hardware.

Clicking a key sets velocity by height

When you click a key with the mouse, where you click up or down the key sets how loud the note is. The key reads like a real keybed, hardest toward the tip:

• Click low on the key, toward the front edge nearest you, for a hard, loud note, up to full velocity at the very bottom.
• Click high on the key, toward the back, for a soft, quiet note.
• Anywhere in between scales smoothly between the two, so you can dial a note’s loudness just by choosing how far down the key you click.

Both white and black keys work this way, each over its own length. It is an easy way to play an expressive part with nothing but a mouse: walk your clicks down the keys for accents and back up for the quiet notes.

This applies only to notes you play with the mouse. Notes from a MIDI controller, an MPE surface, or the sequencer carry their own velocity and ignore the click rule.

What the velocity feeds

The velocity a click produces is the same input velocity a controller sends, so it runs through everything downstream: the velocity curve reshapes it first, then it sets note loudness and drives every velocity-based modulation route, and it feeds the arpeggiator and step sequencer. Clicking lower on a key is, in effect, the mouse’s way of striking harder.

Shaded keys

The keyboard also colours its keys to show you what is happening. Keys light up as they sound (including the notes the arpeggiator, chord lane, and sequencer are generating for you), hover and press states pick up the current theme, and the probability filter can shade the keys by its response so you can see, at a glance, which notes it is favouring.

Which oscillators fired: the spectral bands

When per-source Probability is in play, a sounding key does more than light up: it shows coloured bands for the oscillators that actually fired on that note, using each source’s mixer colour. Because every source rolls its own odds per note, the bands change from key to key, so you can see the generative mix rearranging itself in real time. An oscillator left at 100% (always on) shows as a plain highlight with no band.

This is one part of Aconite’s probability feedback. Any knob or fader targeted by a Probability route also pulses toward the generative accent colour the moment its gate fires, so you can watch probability land wherever you routed it. A gear-menu toggle, Chance pulse, turns that brightening on or off.