7. Keyboard Settings
A. Octave
The octave up and down buttons (+ and - buttons) change the octave offset of the keyboard. Press both together to
reset the keyboard octave to its default.
Keyboard zones can have additional or independent octave applied. See the documentation on ‘Zones’ for details.
B. Transpose
Pressing Shift and the Octave Up or Octave Down buttons transpose the key-board MIDI notes in semitones. Press
Shift and Octave Up and Octave Down but-tons to reset the transpose. This can allow you to, for example, play only
white keys, but hear a major/minor scale with another root note.
Keyboard Zones can have additional or independent transposition applied. See the documentation on keyboard Zones
for details.
8. Tempo / Swing View
A.
Set Tempo
When the SL MkIII is controlling tempo (i.e. not slaved to an external device’s tempo) it can be adjusted by doing the
following:
1.
Press the Tempo button to enter the Tempo/Swing View.
2.
The display will change to show Tempo (BPM) and Swing values.
3.
Turn the leftmost rotary knob to change Tempo to integer values any-where between 40 and 240 beats-per-
minute (BPM).
B.
Display Clock Source
When the SL MkIII receives a valid MIDI clock (and MIDI Clock Rx setting is on), the tempo screen will update to show
‘External’. Note that the tempo value might fluctuate at first, but it will soon settle to a received clock value. Since the
keyboard is ‘slaved’ to an external clock, it is not possible to change the tempo using the above rotary control.
If the clock signal stops or is lost then the SL MkIII will revert to its internal tempo, and you can again use the rotary
knob to adjust tempo.
The clock source can only change while the Transport is stopped. If the Se-quencer is running synced to an external
clock, and the clock signal stops or is lost, the display will show ‘Sync Lost’. The Sequencer will remain in the ‘Sync
Lost’ state until the Transport is stopped. After pushing Stop on the Transport, the Sequencer will revert to using exter-
nal clock if the external signal is availa-ble. Otherwise, it will use the internal clock.
C. Swing
The SL MkIII’s Swing function moves MIDI notes off their usually mathematically precise positions in an attempt at
achieving a more natural or human sound. The result is more ‘swing’ or ‘feel’. In other words, if your arpeggios or pat-
terns feel rigid, try adding some swing to them.
More precisely, swing works by pushing even-numbered beats of the swing sync rate closer to the odd-numbered
beats. For example, with a common beat pat-tern of ‘1-2-3-4-1’ etc., positive swing pushes beats ‘2’ and ‘4’ later in
time towards beats ‘3’ and ‘1’ (note: this ‘1’ is the start of the next measure). On the other hand, negative swing push-
es beats ‘2’ and ‘4’ forward in time towards beats ‘1’ and ‘3’ respectively.
You can adjust global swing from 20% to 80%. By default, swing is 50%, which applies no swing (i.e. no change in the
rhythm). Greater than 50% adds positive swing, and less than 50% results in negative swing.
D.
Swing Sync Rate
Changing the Swing Sync Rate adjusts the length of the swing period. The set-ting defines the tempo interval by which
Summary of Contents for SL MkIII
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