← Chop Machine

Chop Machine User Guide

Algorithmic Sample Sequencer

Chop Machine turns up to 8 samples into an evolving, algorithmically sequenced performance. Load your sounds, set a rate and a motion shape, dial in chaos, and the engine builds a pattern that chops between your slots. From there you refine it by hand with pins, silences and saved scenes.

Runs as VST3, Audio Unit (AU) and a Standalone app on macOS and Windows.

Version 1.0.0

Prefer it offline? Download the PDF. It is the same guide, also installed with Chop Machine.

Activating Chop Machine

Chop Machine is unlocked with a product key. On first launch a window asks for your key. Paste it in and click Activate. Your key is remembered on that machine and checked again at each launch, so the window won't come back. Until you activate, the instrument stays silent.

• No key yet? A free 5-day demo key is available at tendergreenstudio.com/demo/chop-machine.
• Activation is offline. No internet connection or account is required.
• Your name and key type appear on the ⓘ About screen once activated.

Quick Start (60 seconds)

1. Add Chop Machine to an instrument or MIDI track in your DAW, or open the Standalone app.
2. Load a sample. Press the ⤓ load button in a tile's header, or drag an audio file onto its waveform strip. Load a few across different tiles.
3. Pick a rate. Set RATE, say 1/16, for how fast the engine chops.
4. Play it. In Loop mode, which is the default, start the host transport in your DAW and the pattern follows the host tempo. In the Standalone, press ▶ Play and set the BPM. In Burst mode, hit ▶ in Standalone, or send any MIDI note to fire a one-shot pass.
5. Make it move. Turn up CHAOS, change the MOTION shape, and hit RE-ROLL until you find a pattern you like.
6. Refine. In the scope, drag to pin a step to a specific sample, or click a step to silence it.
7. Save the moment. Click SET, then a SCENE pad, to store the whole engine state for instant recall. Use ⤒ Save in the top bar to write a .chop patch file, with your samples embedded so it is fully self-contained.

That's the loop. The rest of this guide explains every control.

Want to hear it working first? Press ⤓ Load and open one of the factory patches. They arrive with their samples, scenes and settings already in place. Hit RE-ROLL from there and you're off.

The Interface

Chop Machine has three regions:

• Top bar. Transport, patch load and save, tempo, panic and info.
• Sample tiles. 8 sample slots where you load and shape each sound.
• Engine section. The pattern scope, the rate and motion controls, articulation, chaos, seed and the scene pads.

Top Bar

Load, Save, Reset and Fill grey out while playback is running. Stop the transport to use them.

Sample Tiles

Each of the 8 tiles is one independent sample slot. From top to bottom a tile holds a file load button and enable toggle, a waveform strip and a bottom control row.

Enabling and muting a slot

A small enable toggle sits at the top of each tile and is on by default. Switch it off to drop that slot out of the pattern. The whole tile dims as a visual cue, the engine chops only between the slots that are still enabled, and the slot's lane disappears from the scope. Turn it back on to bring the slot back. Each slot's enable state is captured by scenes and saved with your .chop patch.

Loading a sample

• Press the ⤓ load button in the tile's header, to the left of the on/off toggle, to open a file browser. You can also drag and drop an audio file onto the tile's waveform strip.
• The waveform draws once the sample is loaded. The maximum length is 20 seconds, and longer files prompt you to use the first 20 seconds or cancel. WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Ogg and MP3 all load.
• To replace a sample, load a new file onto the same tile.
• The tile shows the sample's name. Double-click it to rename the slot, or clear it to go back to the file's own name. Slot names travel with your .chop patch.

The waveform strip

Playhead. While the slot is sounding, a line tracks playback across the waveform, both during preview and live sequencing.

Start-point nub. A small downward triangle with a vertical line marks where BEGIN and the Legato types start playing. Drag it to move the start point.

Fine scrubbing. Hold Shift while dragging the nub and it moves at a much finer scrub rate. A small readout appears beside the nub giving the start position in seconds and milliseconds. You can press or release Shift part-way through a drag and the nub carries on from where it is rather than jumping.

Start-point audition. While playback is stopped, dragging the nub plays a short burst from the new start point, so you hear where you're landing as you move it.

Bottom control row

Playback types

Tip: BEGIN is tight and percussive, RANDOM is glitchy and unpredictable, and the two Legato types are smooth and evolving. Experiment with mixing playback types across slots for dynamic chop patterns, and let Decay take you from sharp stutters at the low end to sustained pads at HOLD.

The Engine

This is the algorithmic heart of Chop Machine. The engine generates a step pattern from your settings, and you can steer or override it. The sections below follow the engine panel from top to bottom.

The Scope (pattern editor)

The scope sits at the top of the engine and shows the pattern it has generated. Each step is plotted at the height of the slot it will play, and the current step lights up as it plays. You can override the algorithm directly here.

• Pin a step to a slot by clicking and dragging up and down the scope. Pinned steps ignore the algorithm and always play the slot you chose.
• Silence a step by clicking directly on its node. It dims and shows an ✕. Click it again to bring the step back.
• CLEAR EDITS, the small button at the top right of the scope, wipes every manual override, both pins and silences, and returns the scope to the pure algorithmic pattern. Your knobs and settings are left alone.

Reading the scope: articulation SKIP steps appear as a gap with no node, REPEAT steps re-fire on the previous sound's lane, HOLD steps draw a rounded sustain bar where that sound rings on, and the ✕ is reserved for steps you silenced by hand.

Pins and silences are saved with your patch and your scenes. They are part of the performance.

Rate, Motion, Amplitude & Phase

The row directly under the scope.

RATE is the step speed, given as a musical division: 1/4, 1/8, 1/8T (triplet), 1/16, 1/16T, 1/32. Faster rates mean more chops per bar. Use the ◀ value ▶ stepper to change it.

MOTION is the shape of the sweep the algorithm uses to move across your slots: Ramp, RampDown, Triangle, InvTriangle, Sine, Random. It shapes the contour of which slots get chosen as the pattern progresses. Ramp climbs through the slots, Sine swings back and forth, Random scatters. Each shape sweeps once per bar at every rate, triplets included.

AMPLITUDE is the height of that motion wave, meaning how far it reaches across your slots, scaled around the center of the pool. At 100 the sweep spans as many enabled slots as possible. Turn it down to squeeze the motion into a tighter band around the middle slots, which narrows Random too. Amplitude shapes the clean motion only. Chaos still reaches everywhere regardless, so you can keep an orderly core and let chaos roam over the top of it.

PHASE slides the whole pattern back and forth in whole-step increments. The engine rotates the resolved step pattern, so the selection, the articulation and your pins and silences all ride along together, and you can shift the groove earlier or later without re-rolling. At 0 the pattern is unchanged, and changing RATE returns PHASE to 0.

Articulation (SKIP / REPEAT / HOLD)

The next row down. Articulation periodically alters steps to add groove and variation. One mode is active at a time.

Two controls shape it. EVERY · STEPS (1 to 4) is the number of untouched steps before an articulation begins, and the amount knob (0 to 4) sets how many steps in each articulation are affected before the pattern repeats. At 0 articulation is off. The knob's caption changes to show the active mode.

Chaos, Tune, Gate, Swing & Volume

The knob row.

CHAOS modulates numerous parameters. It has its own section below.

TUNE is a global transpose of ±24 semitones, two octaves either way, applied on top of each slot's own Pitch. Use it to move the whole instrument in key. At 0 nothing is transposed.

GATE sets how long each chop sounds. Low gives short, stuttery, gated hits. Higher values let each chop ring out more. The Attack/Decay settings for each sample slot operate within this gate.

SWING adds groove by delaying the offbeat steps. At 0 the pattern is dead straight. Turn it up toward a hard 3:1 swing. Swing is captured by scenes and saved with your patch.

VOLUME is the overall output level of the plugin.

The Chaos Engine

Chaos is one of Chop Machine's key features. It is there so you can find something sonically interesting quickly, by discovery rather than by editing steps one at a time. The knob sits at 0 to begin with, so a fresh instance has no chaos at all. Turning it up does more than add randomness. It moves the instrument through stages, where the character of the disorder changes along with the amount.

Low on the knob, only a few steps ignite. The disorder is light and your pins and silences stay intact. As you climb, more steps catch and the effects deepen continuously. There are no hard switches anywhere on the knob, only a smooth gradient.

Climbing further, ignited steps light up, grow and vibrate in the scope. They take on a pitch shift that stays consonant at first, using octaves, fifths and fourths, so it has a melodic character. Dynamics arrive early too, as accents and ghost note dips. This range is the sweet spot for melodic movement.

Past the middle the modulation stacks. Ignited steps pick up attack and decay shaping. Some steps begin to flip their playback, re-firing randomly or sliding into a legato run, and a little higher some hits play in reverse. The pitch palette widens to take in thirds, sixths and sevenths. Each layer is rolled from the seed, so some steps get more influence than others.

Near the top, dissonant intervals such as tritones and half steps arrive, along with a touch of microtonal detune. It is meant to feel wrong and dissonant on purpose, but still controlled.

The → PATTERN toggle beside the knob decides how far chaos reaches. Off, which is the default, chaos drives only the sonic layer of pitch, dynamics, envelope, reverse and flips, while the slot each step picks stays on your motion shape. Turn it on, and chaos also influences which slot each step fires, scrambling the selection itself for a wilder pattern.

Four key concepts to remember about the Chaos knob:

• It always comes home. Every chaos effect is an offset layered on top of your settings and never overwrites them, so turning the knob back down returns everything exactly to where you set it.
• It is reproducible. Chaos is driven by the chaos seed described below, so the same seed at the same knob position always gives the same result, and a saved scene recalls it exactly. As you turn the knob up, steps ignite one at a time in a fixed order chosen by the seed, and a new seed reshuffles which steps go first.
• Your edits are respected. Pinned and silenced steps are always honored. Even with → PATTERN on, chaos never changes a slot you pinned, although a pinned step's pitch and other settings can still move.
• It is safe. An output limiter keeps levels in check even at full chaos, and a small LED on the VOLUME knob lights whenever it is working.

Watch for it: ignited steps shimmer in the scope, and a tile's knob glows in its slot color on the hits chaos is modulating.

Chaos Seed & Re-roll

The pattern is deterministic. The same seed with the same settings always produces the same pattern, which is what makes a pattern you like reproducible and savable.

The CHAOS SEED chip shows the seed value currently driving the pattern. RE-ROLL generates a new random seed, and with it a fresh pattern. Keep pressing it until something grabs you, then save the scene. How much changes each time scales with CHAOS, so at zero chaos the seed has little effect beyond the Random sample playback mode and motion setting.

Scene Pads (SYNC + 8 pads + SET)

The bottom row. The 8 SCENE pads store complete snapshots of the sample slots and engine for instant recall. Recalling a scene restores the whole instrument rather than just the engine. Only the loaded audio stays put between scenes.

To capture, click SET. The button reads PICK and the pads start blinking. Click a pad to store the current state there. To recall, click a stored pad.

SYNC sits to the left of the pads and quantizes switching. Arm it, and while playing, clicking a pad queues the switch rather than applying it. The pad blinks amber and the change lands on the next loop boundary, so transitions stay in time. Click another pad to re-queue, or click the current scene to cancel. When playback is stopped, switches apply at once. SET and SYNC are mutually exclusive, so arming one disarms the other. Queued switches are live only and are not saved.

Scenes are saved inside your .chop patch, so a saved patch carries all 8.

Building Progression: the scenes are a perfect way to build a progression in your chop patch. Create a scene, then fiddle with settings to derive a new variation, and save to the next scene. Layer it up with an evolving beat and you have the foundation for a full track. Switching pads rapidly with SYNC armed is its own effect, too.

Transport Mode: Loop vs Burst

Chop Machine has two transport modes, set by the LOOP / BURST toggle in the top bar. This setting can only be changed when playback is stopped.

LOOP runs the pattern continuously. In a DAW it syncs to the host transport, so you start your DAW playing and Chop Machine chops along in time. In the Standalone it runs on its own internal clock: press ▶ Play to start and ❚❚ to stop, and set the tempo with the editable BPM control. Sending any MIDI note also starts the loop in Standalone mode.

The Standalone picks its own audio output and MIDI input. Both live under Options at the top left of the window, in Audio/MIDI Settings…. That is where you choose your interface, and where a MIDI keyboard has to be ticked on before it can trigger anything.

BURST is a one-shot pass. Press ▶ in Standalone, or send any MIDI note, and the engine fires a single pattern pass and stops. Sending a new note restarts it from the top. This is the mode for triggering fills and hits from a keyboard or a clip.

Drag-Out Loop Export

The ⇲ Export control in the top bar lets you drag the current loop straight into your DAW or file browser as an audio file. Drag it and drop it onto an audio track or a folder. A plain click does nothing.

What you get is the whole current pattern as one seamless loop, fully processed. What you hear is what you drag: all applied settings are baked in.

The format is 24-bit WAV at the host sample rate. In a DAW it renders at the host tempo so it drops in tempo-locked, and in the Standalone it uses the internal loop BPM. The tempo and seed are written into the filename, as ChopMachine_<bpm>bpm_seed<seed>.wav, so you can re-stretch it later if you need to.

Exporting never interrupts playback. It renders offline in the background.

Resampling. The drag doesn't have to leave Chop Machine. Drop ⇲ Export onto a tile's waveform strip and the loop you just made becomes that slot's sample, ready to be chopped again. The whole pattern folds down into one slot, so you can build a dense layer, capture it, and let the engine cut it up as a single sound. Do it twice and you're chopping a chop. The slot takes its name from the export, so it carries the tempo and seed it came from. Rename it if you'd rather.

Fill from One Sample

The ⧉ Fill button in the top bar loads one sample into several slots at once, which is how you slice a single loop or layer one hit across slots. Clicking it opens a small popup.

1. Pick the source. Browse for a file, or drop an audio file onto the popup card.
2. Choose the slots. Eight chips, all on by default. Click to include or exclude any slot.
3. Set auto-chop. With it off, every chosen slot gets an identical copy of the sample with its start point at the beginning. With it on, the start points are spread evenly across the sample in ascending slot order, so the slots step through it like a chopped loop. Auto-chop also forces Reverse off on those slots, so the chop reads cleanly left to right.
4. Hit Fill.

Filling replaces whatever was in the selected slots and switches those slots on.

Saving Your Work

Chop Machine saves state in two complementary ways.

1. Inside your DAW project or plugin preset. Your full state, including the embedded sample audio, is stored automatically with the host project and with the host's own plugin presets. After saving, reopen the project and everything comes back.
2. .chop patch files. Use ⤒ Save and ⤓ Load in the top bar to write portable patch files. The audio is embedded and FLAC-compressed, so a .chop file is fully self-contained. Share it or move it between machines and the samples travel with it.

Factory Patches

Chop Machine ships with a set of hand-authored factory patches, each with its audio embedded.

Alongside them is Default Patch, a simple patch with synthesized tones. This is the state that new instances open with, and what ↺ Reset returns you to.

The bank reaches you in three ways.

1. Chop Machine's own Load dialog. The first time Chop Machine runs it copies the bank into your patch folder, so ⤓ Load lists the factory patches beside your own.
2. Your host's preset browser, where the host provides one. That means the preset menu at the top of the plugin window in Logic Pro and GarageBand for the Audio Unit, or your DAW's VST3 preset browser. Selecting one loads it as the live patch. Some hosts put this menu elsewhere, or don't offer one at all. If you don't see a list, use ⤓ Load instead, which reads the same bank.
3. A shared, read-only copy that the installer leaves on the machine. This is where the first-run copy comes from, and you can always copy patches out of it by hand.

Both the patch bank and the preset browser files are optional components in the installer, so if one of them is missing it may simply have been unticked at install time.

The patches are yours to edit. The copy in your patch folder is an ordinary .chop file, so change it and save over it if you want. Chop Machine never overwrites a file that is already in your patch folder, which means your version of a factory patch stays your version, including through updates. The flip side is that a factory patch you have saved over will not be restored on its own. Take a fresh copy from the shared bank folder if you want the original back.

Where Your Files Live

Uninstalling leaves your work alone. On macOS, run the bundled uninstaller from Terminal: sudo bash "/Library/Audio/Presets/TendergreenStudio/Chop Machine/uninstall-chop-machine.sh". On Windows, use Add or Remove Programs. Either way it clears the plugins, the app and the shared factory bank, while your patch folder, your product key and anything you saved into the preset folder stay exactly where they are.

Tips & Workflow Ideas

• Start with contrast. Load sounds that differ from each other, such as a kick, a vocal chop, a noise hit and a melodic loop. The algorithm's movement is most musical when the slots are distinct.
• Re-roll, then refine. Hit RE-ROLL to find a base pattern, then pin a couple of anchor hits and silence the clutter to make it yours.
• Use a Legato type on one slot to put an evolving texture under the percussive BEGIN slots.
• Automate CHAOS and GATE in your DAW for builds and drops. Low and long in the verse, high and short for a glitchy fill.
• Bank scenes for an arrangement. Capture a verse scene, a chorus scene and a fill scene to three pads and switch between them live, with SYNC armed so the switches land in time.
• Slice a loop fast. Drop one breakbeat into ⧉ Fill with auto-chop on to spread it across all 8 slots, then let the engine sequence the slices.
• Add motion with PHASE and SWING. Nudge SWING for groove, and ride PHASE to slide the whole pattern earlier or later without changing the seed.
• Tame the sweep with AMPLITUDE. Pull AMPLITUDE down to keep the clean motion in a tight band of middle slots, then turn up CHAOS. You get a focused core that chaos occasionally throws wide.
• Bounce ideas out. Drag ⇲ Export onto an audio track to capture the exact processed loop you are hearing as a tempo-locked WAV.
• Resample into a slot. Drop ⇲ Export onto a tile's waveform instead of onto your desktop: the loop becomes a sample, and the engine starts chopping the thing it just played. Stack a busy pattern, fold it into one slot, then build a sparser pattern around it.

Troubleshooting

• Silent, and an unlock window keeps appearing. The plugin isn't activated yet. Paste your product key and click Activate, as described in Activating Chop Machine.
• Logic Pro or GarageBand asks for my product key again. Both run plugins in a sandbox, which gives Chop Machine a private settings folder inside each app, so a key entered elsewhere isn't visible there. Paste it once in each and it sticks: there is no activation limit and it won't ask again.
• No sound when the DAW plays in Loop mode. Make sure at least one slot has a sample loaded and that the track is receiving the transport, then check that the VOLUME knob and the slot Level knobs aren't at zero.
• Nothing happens in the Standalone in Loop mode. Press the ▶ Play button in the top bar to start the internal loop, and set the tempo with the BPM control beside it. Make sure at least one slot has a sample and that VOLUME isn't at zero.
• The Standalone makes no sound at all, or my MIDI keyboard does nothing. Open Options → Audio/MIDI Settings… at the top left of the window. Check the output device is the one you're listening to, and tick your keyboard on under the MIDI inputs. It is off until you enable it.
• A sound is stuck or running away. Hit ⚠ Panic to reset all voices.
• The factory patches aren't in my DAW's preset browser. Not every host reads the shared folder the factory presets install to. Reason is one that doesn't. Nothing is missing: use ⤓ Load inside Chop Machine instead, which lists the same bank. If you would rather have them in the browser, copy them by hand from the factory preset folder into your own, both listed in Where Your Files Live.
• The factory patches aren't in my Load dialog. They're copied into your patch folder the first time Chop Machine runs, and only once, so if you deleted them since they won't come back by themselves. Copy them across from the shared factory bank folder, listed in Where Your Files Live. If that folder is empty too, the factory patch component was unticked at install time, so re-run the installer with it selected.
• My long sample got cut. Samples are capped at 20 seconds. Load a shorter region, or accept the prompt to use the first 20 seconds.
• Pitch changed the timing too. In this version Pitch resamples, so pitch and speed move together.

Specifications

• Formats: VST3, Audio Unit (macOS), Standalone app.
• Platforms: macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later, Intel and Apple Silicon; Windows 10 or later, 64-bit.
• Sample slots: 8, up to 20 seconds each. Loads WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Ogg and MP3.
• Pattern length: one bar, from 4 steps at 1/4 to 32 at 1/32.
• Loop export: 24-bit WAV at the host sample rate and tempo.
• Activation: a one-time product key, verified offline. No account or internet connection.

What's Next

This is Chop Machine 1.0, the first public release, and we have more planned for it. This initial release has been thoughtfully designed to provide a fun, fluid experience for creating chopped loops from samples. Planned features include more advanced pitch shifting algorithms, finer control over the Chaos knob, more advanced auto-chopping, and more. An iOS release is also planned.

Your input can also shape what gets built next. If you hit a bug, or there's a feature you want, or something in the instrument doesn't work the way you expected, we want to hear about it. Three key places to reach us:

• Email hello@tendergreenstudio.com
• Reddit reddit.com/r/TendergreenStudio
• Discord discord.gg/tPqy5skKk2

We can't promise to build everything that gets asked for, but bugs come first, and features asked for by more than one person move up the list, as long as they fit the overall theme of the device. Telling us what you're trying to make is genuinely useful, even when it isn't a feature request. We also love to hear tracks created with the help of Chop Machine!

Trademarks

VST is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH. Audio Unit (AU) is a trademark of Apple Inc. Chop Machine is built with the JUCE framework.

Thanks for using Chop Machine. Questions or feedback? See the ⓘ About screen for contact and community links. 🔪🎛️