Introduction Learn Usine Tutorial : The Grid

Tutorial : The Grid

The Grid is a powerful sequencer adapted to live and show control situations. The grid can organize many kind of objects to activate/deactivate them automatically. See grid-panel.

Overview

Main zones of the grid:

control bar where you find transport commands and information's about the current state of the grid.
headers appear at the beginning of each line.
sections are parts of your project, each section has its own duration.
info zone where you can display various information's and comments about the current section.
grid elements are objects that you put on the grid to activate or deactivate.

Control bar

play stop starts or stops the playing of the grid. Generally, this command is linked to the main engine ON/OFF and plays automatically (if the grid is not empty and autoplay-grid is activated in the settings).
goto first section returns to the first section (section 0), restart the grid from the beginning.
restart current section restarts the current section from the beginning.
goto previous section returns immediately to the previous section.
goto next section passes immediately to the next section.
continue to next section when this switch is activated, it will pass to the next section at the end of the current section.
de-zoom de-zoom all the grid to have a global view of all sections.
lock locks the grid to prevent any modification.
scroll enables or disables the scroll mode: the grid view will always follow the current cursor position.
elapsed time position of the cursor in the section, displayed in seconds.
remain time time remaining until the end of the section, displayed in seconds.
section name name of the current section.

headers

The header appears at the beginning of the grid line. See grid-line-header.

to resize [Click-Move] with the mouse on borders.
to collapse (reduce) or expand it use [Dbl-Click].
to rename use [Alt+Click].
to delete the entire line, put the header into the trash-bin.
to add a new line click on the header and in the contextual-menu click on add-new-line.

Sections

See grid-section-panel.

name of the section, to rename press [Alt-Click].
duration of the section, to change [Right-Click] and set the duration + format in its settings.
tempo of the section. By default the section follows the master-synchro tempo. But it can be set independently, [Right-Click] and set-tempo.
loop status determines if the section is played in loop, just once or is paused at the end. To change the status, [Click] on the icon. the section is played in loop until the control-bar goto-next-section is triggered or control-bar continue-to-next-section is activated. the section is played one or several times and goes directly to the next section. To set the number of times the section is repeated, [Right-Click] and set the repeat field to the proper value. the section is paused at the end.
to zoom the entire section [Dbl-Click], to go back to the global view [Dbl-Click] again.
to resize left [Click-Move] with the mouse on borders. . The resize is only visual and doesn't affect the real duration of the section.
to add a new section click on the section and in the contextual-menu click on add-new-section.

grid element

See grid-element-panel.

name : display the complete name of the element included the parent patch or rack.
type indicator is an icon which displays the type of object associated to the grid element.
- patch
- rack
- preset
- fixture
- control
- device
- module
- script
fade grip changes the fade-in and fade-out duration of the object. You can also change the fades settings with a [Right-Click] and in the settings set the fades durations and curves types.
change the start and end position of the element.
change the height of the element.

audio files

You can drop audio files directly on the grid. It will create automatically a rack with, as input, the header of the grid line. So the audio will go thru the new rack.