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Timing & Tempo
The system uses several different measurements of time, which can be confusing if you've never used a tracker program before.
A step is always 1/50th second.
The line time (measured in steps) is the amount of time occupied by one line of a pattern. The line time can be changed on the fly by altering the Synth.Param.LINE_TIME parameter to create mid-song tempo changes, or even varied automatically on every line using the Synth.Param.GROOVE parameter. A line is the smallest unit over which you have full control when composing a song. When you're not using the sequencer (e.g. when performing live) then you have full control down to the step level.
A line is subdivided into a number of ticks. A few effects operate at tick level granularity, for example retriggering, glissando and arpeggio. Taking the retriggering example, if the number of ticks per line is set to 8 and the Synth.Param.RETRIGGER parameter is set to 2 then the gate will be triggered 4 times per line. Although the value of the Synth.Param.RETRIGGER parameter itself can only be changed once per line, internally events are being scheduled at tick level precision so that four short notes are played during the course of one line rather than just one note. The number of ticks per line can be altered using the Synth.Param.TICKS parameter.
The system doesn't use conventional tempo measurements such as BPM. However, it's important to understand how to calculate appropriate values for the line time, number of ticks per line and number of lines per pattern from conventional measurements.
Let's say that the smallest unit over which we need full control is 1/16 notes and that we want four beats per bar. We therefore want to compose patterns that are 4×16=64 lines long. Let's also say that we want a tempo of 125bpm. To derive the line time we calculate (60×50)÷(125×4)=6 because there are 60 seconds in a minute, 50 steps per second and four 1/16th notes in a crotchet. Finally, let's also decide that we will sometimes be expressing some 1/32nd and 1/64th notes using the limited descriptive language of retriggering, glissando or arpeggio (or any combination of those) but we don't require full control at 1/32nd or 1/64th level. Therefore, we can keep our patterns compact by sticking with only one line for each 1/16th note rather than having a line for every 1/32nd or 1/64th note, but we will require 64÷16=4 ticks per line.