How to use Footings · The manual

At a glance MT-04

Footings is the bass companion to Voicings. It watches the chords arriving at its input, works out the root and quality, and plays a single-voice bassline underneath, in one of four styles.

It makes sound the moment you load it: the built-in audition synth is on by default and free-runs at the host tempo even with the transport stopped, so a held chord is always audible.

Signal path Signal, not screenshot

chords in → chord tracker → bass engine ─┬─→ audition synth → audio out
           (root + quality)   (one voice, │   (on by default)
                              ch 1)       └─→ MIDI out  (+ input thru, optional)

Set up From insert to first sound

01 Put Footings where the chords are: on its own track after Voicings, or anywhere your chords reach its MIDI input. It is a MIDI effect with a built-in synth.
02 Play or hold a chord. You hear a bassline straight away through the audition synth, transport running or not.
03 Press PREVIEW to plant a two-second C major and prove the chain end to end without touching a key.
04 Pick a Style and set BUSYNESS. To drive a real bass instrument instead of the built-in synth, turn AUDITION off and send the MIDI out to the instrument.

The controls Every parameter

The line

STYLE Anchor · Bounce · Walk · Drive: Four one-bar patterns, chosen as a vibe, not a theory setting. Anchor holds whole-note roots. Bounce plays root, fifth and octave eighths. Walk moves in quarters through a chromatic lower neighbour into the downbeat. Drive pushes accented root eighths.
BUSYNESS 0 … 1: Each step in a pattern carries a density threshold; BUSYNESS decides which steps play, sweeping a style from sparse to full. The downbeat root always sounds.
SLIDE 0 … 1: Lengthens notes toward each other for a legato, sliding feel.
OCTAVE -2 … 0: Shifts the fixed bass window in whole octaves. The root always lands in that window whatever octave you comp in; at the default -1 the window is E1 to D#2, and 0 is one octave up.

Feel

HUMANIZE 0 … 1: Pushes steps late, never early, and varies velocity so the line breathes. It ships at 0.15, just enough to unstiffen the grid.
VELOCITY Follow · Fixed: Follow rides the dynamics of the chord you play; Fixed holds a steady 100 of 127.
LATCH on / off: Keeps the last chord playing after you let go. Off, releasing the chord stops the line.

Output

AUDITION on / off: The built-in bass voice, on by default: a saw over a sine sub an octave down, through a filter that tracks the note. On, a fresh track makes sound by itself; off, route the MIDI to your own instrument. One platform caveat: the AU build is a bus-less MIDI FX (Logic and GarageBand), so the audition synth is inaudible there. AUDITION and LEVEL only make sound in the VST3 and Standalone, and the plugin’s own AU tooltips say the same.
LEVEL 0 … 1: The audition synth’s output level.
THRU on / off: Off (the default), the output is the bassline alone. On, your input chords pass through byte for byte with the bass riding on top, for a Voicings into Footings into synth chain.
PREVIEW button: Plants a two-second C major so you can hear the whole chain at once.

First five minutes A short walkthrough

01 Insert Footings and hold a chord. The bassline starts at the top of the bar.
02 Step through the four styles while you hold the chord to feel the difference.
03 Sweep BUSYNESS from low to high and hear a style go from sparse to full.
04 Turn LATCH on, play a chord, let go, and the line keeps walking while you set up the next one.
05 If you want a real bass sound, turn AUDITION off and route the MIDI out to your instrument.

Recipes Named workflows

Instant bass under Voicings

01 Chain Voicings into Footings into a synth, or run Footings on its own track fed by the chords.
02 Leave AUDITION on to sketch, or turn it off and THRU on to pass the chords to the synth with the bass added.
03 Choose Anchor for a held root or Bounce for movement, and match BUSYNESS to the song.

A walking line

01 Pick Walk and set BUSYNESS high enough to fill the bar.
02 Add a little SLIDE for legato between steps and a touch of HUMANIZE so it is not stiff.
03 Set VELOCITY to Follow so the line tracks how hard you play the chords.

Hold a groove while you write

01 Turn LATCH on.
02 Play a chord and let go; the pattern keeps running.
03 Try chords over the held groove to hear how each sits before you commit.

Good to know The fine print

The root is the lowest note you play, so inversions read as their bass note: a C over E is heard as an E chord and the line plays E. Quality comes from the third and fifth, so it hears major, minor, dominant and diminished, and extensions do not change it (a Cm9 reads as minor). A sus with no third is voiced conservatively as a plain major shape.
The Walk’s approach tone is a chromatic lower neighbour of the current chord, not a guess at the next one. It leads back into the same root as the bar loops; at a chord change on the bar line, beat 4 still approaches the root it was holding, not the one that arrives.
The bass register is anchored. Comping at C4 or C3 gives the same bass note; OCTAVE is how you move it.
The sustain pedal is deliberately ignored. LATCH is the hold Footings offers, on its own terms; a host all-notes-off silences the voice and clears the latch memory too.
The line leaves on MIDI channel 1 with every note-on paired to its off, so style switches, loop jumps and a host stop never leave a note hanging. Humanize is seeded per stream, so an offline bounce renders the same twice.
Every plugin in the suite maps the same way: click the MIDI chip in the header (it reads MIDI, MIDI · N, or MIDI · OFF) and the editor dims into learn mode with a balloon on every mappable control, plus ENABLE MIDI per instance, ALL PARAMETERS..., CLEAR ALL and DONE (Esc works too). One CC drives one parameter, on any channel, saved the moment you map it; switches and short lists step relative to the knob. The window also resizes from its corner.