672,000,000 Patterns!!

Domina is a seeded MIDI arpeggiator that runs as a VST3, AU, or CLAP instrument inside your DAW. It makes no sound of its own -- it plays whatever instrument you put after it. Give it a six-digit number and it composes an entire pattern: note lengths, rests, ties, accents, and a melodic line that leaps and then answers the leap the way a player would. Then it performs that pattern with the chord under your fingers. Change the chord and the melody follows. Change the seed and you have a different piece of music.

The Seed - Six Digits That Rebuild Everything

The seed is a number from 0 to 999999, set by six knobs, one per digit. Press RANDOM to re-roll all six at once, or click the readout and type a seed in directly. Nothing is stored and nothing is rendered: six digits rebuild the whole pattern exactly, on any computer, years from now. Find a phrase you love and write the number down - that is the entire patch. Behind the seed are three independent random streams: one for the musical form, one for the rhythm, one for the pitch. Because they are separate, turning a rhythm knob rewrites the rhythm and leaves the melodic contour exactly where it was. You can hunt for the right density without losing the tune you just found.

An Arpeggiator That Composes Instead of Cycling

A million seeds. Twenty idioms plus free running. Eight pattern lengths. Four octave ranges. That is 672,000,000 distinct patterns before you have touched a single knob and every one of them is then reshaped by COMPLEXITY, ORIGINALITY, three note-length weights, rests, and two gate limits.

Idioms - Twenty Genres as Skeletons, Not Presets

An idiom is the way a style speaks, held as data Domina is pulled toward rather than a phrase it plays back. Choose one and the pattern takes on that shape while remaining a different pattern every bar. What makes an idiom recognisable is almost always what it refuses to play. Folk vaults clean over beat 3. Reggae holds back the offbeats of 1 and 3 and sounds the ones on 2 and 4. Gospel pushes across the bar line and swallows the downbeat behind it. Disco vaults beat 2 with a three-three-two grouping. Those holes are the character; the slots between them are left open, and the seed fills them. That is why an idiom survives without the bar ever repeating exactly. The bank covers Latin, Folk, Gospel, Metal, Disco, 80s Pop, Reggae, Trance, House, Dance, Rock, Doobie, Astrada, three Oriental variants, and three written in 3/4: Georgia, Reggae and Ballad. The 3/4 idioms are offered only in a 3/4 project, and a 4/4 idiom in a 3/4 session stands down rather than smearing itself across the bar.

ORIGINALITY and COMPLEXITY - Two Separate Axes:

• ORIGINALITY decides whose pattern you are hearing. At 0 the idiom is not consulted at all and the knobs and the seed decide everything. At 100 the pattern is reduced to the idiom's own skeleton; its positions, its note count per beat, its accents, whatever the other knobs say.
• COMPLEXITY decides how much Domina elaborates whatever skeleton it was handed. At 0 you hear the raw material. Turned up, phrases repeat as motifs, notes tie together, accents follow the metre, and leaps are answered by steps. The two are independent, and the interesting territory is between them. High ORIGINALITY with COMPLEXITY up fuses the idiom with Domina's own invention into something that belongs to neither.

The Rhythm Ribbon

Across the top of the window, every note of the baked pattern is drawn as a bar, its width the note's length, with the play position sweeping across it. Pitch is deliberately not drawn, pitch depends on the chord you are holding, and the whole point is that the rhythm stays put when the chord moves.

Two amber locators set exactly which part of the pattern plays. Close them to a couple of beats for a stutter, or open them across sixteen bars for a whole section. BARS sets the length, the locators cut it, and LOC SNAP decides where they land -- from a whole bar down to an eighth of a beat. Drag the end locator into the empty bar the ribbon always shows to the right and the pattern grows to meet it.

Built to Be Played, Not Programmed

You can re-roll the seed in the middle of a bar and the performance does not stumble. The chord under your hands keeps sounding, the clock keeps counting, and the new pattern picks up exactly where the old one left off, in time, on the beat. Put RANDOM on a footswitch and hunt for a phrase live, in front of people, with the band still playing. HOLD locks the sequence onto the bar that is passing, as though the locators had closed around that one bar. Sit on a figure under a verse and let go into the chorus. Nothing jumps at either edge, the pattern simply stops passing the end of that bar while you hold it, and carries on from where it stood when you release.

MUTE ARP silences the arpeggiator only: what you play passes straight through, unarpeggiated. Drop out of the pattern for a bar and back in again without lifting your hands. MUTE OUT stops everything.

Rhythm You Can Shape

The three weights, 1/16, 1/8 and 1/4, are not switches but a ratio, so what matters is their balance. Push 1/4 up for long, sparse, held playing; push 1/16 up for a rolling texture. RESTS decides how much of the bar is left silent, and gaps are placed on weak positions first so they sound intentional rather than accidental. GATE MIN and GATE MAX set how long each note is held as a fraction of the space it has, and Domina picks a value between the two for every note. Both low is staccato, both high is legato, and a wide gap between them is where a line stops sounding typed in.

Humanisation

RANDOM VELOCITY adds two fields: how far below and how far above the VELOCITY knob a note may land. With the knob at 76 and the fields at 6 and 8, every note is drawn somewhere between 70 and 84. A fresh value is drawn for every note, so a repeated pitch never comes back at the same weight, and the accent shape underneath is untouched, this scatters around it rather than replacing it. The two amounts are separate on purpose. A player's stray notes land quieter than the ones they meant, not louder.

MIDI Learn on Everything

Domina watches the CC traffic arriving on its input, and a chip in the header shows the last controller it saw. Drag that chip onto any knob or button to assign it, or right-click a control to arm it and move a controller. Every knob, every toggle, and the RANDOM seed button can be learned, so a footswitch can re-roll the pattern mid-performance. Assignments save with the project.

Sync, or Not

SYNC TO DAW takes the tempo from the host and locks the pattern's position to the song timeline, so bar 3 of the song is bar 3 of the pattern, and a loop, rewind or locate is followed with the phrase carried across. Switch it off and Domina runs on its own clock at FREE BPM, starting from zero the first time you play. CONTINUOUS decides what happens after a silence. On, the pattern keeps its place forever. stop playing, wait, play again, and you rejoin wherever the clock has got to. Off, two seconds of silence and the next chord starts the pattern from its beginning.

Details That Matter in a Dark Room

The on-screen keyboard shows everything Domina receives, whether it came from your controller or from clicking the keys. Its colours are reversed from a real keyboard on purpose, dark naturals, light sharps, because a wall of white keys would take over a dark panel.

Six accent colours

blue, yellow, green, red, orange and purple. change the whole interface from a row of LEDs beside the seed knobs. Your choice is saved to disk, so every future instance opens that way, in any project.

Built-In Guide

Press GUIDE and a twelve-chapter manual opens covering everything from the seed to the idioms to the locators, with a chapter selector and a scrolling body. No PDFs, no external files, no website to go and find.

Main Features:

• VST3, AU, and CLAP formats. runs in any modern DAW.
• Seeded composition: 672,000,000 patterns before any knob is touched.
• Six-digit seed with RANDOM re-roll and direct typing.
• Three independent random streams so rhythm edits never move the melody.
• Twenty genre idioms plus free running, including three in 3/4.
• Meter-aware idiom selection, 3/4 idioms offered only in 3/4 projects.
• ORIGINALITY and COMPLEXITY as two independent shaping axes.
• Rhythm ribbon with draggable locators and adjustable snap.
• Pattern length from 1 to 16 bars.
• Note-length weights, rests, and independent gate minimum and maximum.
• RANDOM VELOCITY with separate below and above amounts.
• HOLD to lock the sequence onto the passing bar.
• MUTE ARP for unarpeggiated pass-through, MUTE OUT for silence.
• SORT NOTES to choose between pitch order and the order you played.
• Sync to host tempo and timeline, or free-run at your own BPM.
• CONTINUOUS to keep or restart the pattern after a silence.
• MIDI learn on every knob, every toggle, and the RANDOM button.
• Selectable output channel and velocity scaling.
• Six-colour interface theming, saved between sessions.
• Twelve-chapter built-in guide.
• Universal binary on macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel), signed and notarized.
• Resizable window with a fixed aspect ratio.
• Custom dark theme designed for low-light environments.

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