Ground

Functionality

Ground creates monophonic bass MIDI with a longer planning horizon than a simple riff generator. It aims movement toward climbs, pedals, cadences, and releases across phrases and sections, with color available for more chromatic or Jazz-leaning tension. High Sequence with high Cadence gives it a Fugue-friendly subject, dominant answer, pedal, and cadence form.

The Style selector includes Grounded, Ostinato, March, Pulse, Drone, Climb, Dub, and Jazz. Dub keeps the part sparse, low, and heavy with off-beat pickups. Jazz leans into walking-bass quarter motion and approach tones while still following the long-form phrase plan.

Ground is intended to drive bass instruments such as Basilico. Its phrase planner can still create lift with Register and Register Arc, but generated notes are folded back into a bass register lane after form generation, phrase refresh, cell mutation, and loop variation. That keeps long-form motion from turning into large octave jumps when the part is used as the low anchor.

Conductor integration

Ground accepts MIDI input for Conductor CC control. Set Conductor Ch (0 = off, 1–16) to the channel Conductor uses for its output (default 16). Conductor CC 21 drives density, CC 22 drives motion, CC 23 drives mutation rate, and CC 24 (value 127) triggers a new form. CC 20 (Scene) additionally maps the arrangement position to arc tension and writes a phrase role override for the current phrase, so Ground’s peak aligns with the arrangement’s energy peak and phrase roles track the song’s section vocabulary. See MIDI Mapping.

Status

Under evaluation. It can generate useful long-form patterns but the user interface isn’t very intuitive.

Controls To Watch

• Register chooses the base lane for the bass part.
• Register Arc controls how much phrase lift is allowed inside that lane.
• Style chooses the local rhythmic attitude, including explicit Dub and Jazz behavior.
• Sequence makes answer and release phrases reuse previous material.
• Vary mutates the form on loop boundaries while preserving the register guard.