One screen holds the whole rig: a disk that shows the groove, a mixer under your thumbs, and effects that commit on the bar. This page walks the home screen top to bottom.
123456Four controls frame the screen: your account, the master bus, and the two modes the machine lives in.
The CU button opens your account sheet: set up a community profile, replay the welcome tour, and control sync. Projects, saved presets, and your edits to factory templates travel over iCloud to your other devices; the core app never requires an account.
MASTER opens the console for the whole bus: the master output fader, an eight band EQ, the global LFO, groove, and the shared send effects. One scroll covers all of it; nothing hides in menus.
The EQ draws its curve live across eight bands from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, with curve presets like Deep and Bass Booster as starting points. The LFO section sets waveform, musical rate from 1/16 up to 16 bars, polarity, onset delay, and targets; tags list every knob it currently drives.
An Advanced Settings toggle at the bottom reveals the hidden mix layer: per channel trim, filters, pan, transient shaping and saturation, the glue compressor, and the analog finish stage. Everything ships calibrated, so open it only when you want to retune the machine.
ACT is the stage. Pads perform, pattern taps arm on the bar, knobs ride the sound, and nothing you touch edits the project. Play hard; RELOAD brings the mix home.
EDIT opens the machine. Channel buttons open their detail views, steps go on the disk, the arranger unlocks, and every change saves as you make it. There is no save button anywhere in Cue8.
A hardware style LCD keeps the vitals on one line, with the arranger directly under it.
Left to right: the loaded template or project name, the song key and scale, the tempo, and a counter that tracks the playing bar and your place in the arrangement.
Tap the name to open the Library: fifteen factory templates drawn as colored disks, your own projects, and the community one tab away. Key and scale cover 12 roots and 17 scales, and every melodic entry locks to them, so nothing lands off-key. Nudge the BPM with the arrows, scrub it, or rotate the disk itself.
Sections are the song: INTRO, BUILD, GROOVE, as many as the set needs, each 2 to 32 bars. A section stores its pattern picks per channel, its fill rules, and automation targets for tempo, accent, groove, and the sends.
Playback walks the arrangement on its own, so the structure holds while your hands work the mix. Tempo automates as an offset from the project BPM; retime the whole song and the automated sections follow in one gesture. Reorder and tune sections from the ARR menu in EDIT.
The face of the instrument: eight rings, a pattern hub, fill arcs, and five effect pads in orbit.
Each channel owns a ring, drawn in its own color. Steps light where they sit, and while playing, the current step lights across the rings: position reads at a glance with zero spinning parts. In EDIT the disk focuses on one channel and its ring becomes the step editor, velocity drawn per step.
The center holds transport and the pattern buttons A to H. The hub never moves; the light does. Rotating the platter drags the tempo, clockwise to speed up.
Eight variations per channel, A to H, plus the two fills. Tap one in ACT and it arms, switching cleanly on the next bar. Chain variations and the machine walks the chain for you: the second pair of hands a phone does not have.
Two fill lanes ride the disk, FL and DR, each a real pattern per channel. Tap to throw one now, or arm the arcs and they fire themselves: FL every 2, 4, or 8 bars, DR every 8, 16, or 32. Both dials live on the disk and move while you play, so you can double the fill density going into a transition. A short answer and a long one, so builds breathe on two time scales.
Five pads orbit the disk, and every move they make commits on the bar. FILTER: drag up for high pass, down for low pass; release keeps the filter where you leave it, and a single tap clears it on the next bar. HOLD: loop a slice of the groove and slide to set the length. GATER: chop the mix with a gate locked to the step clock.
RISER: build a rising sweep, gate it sideways, release to drop. THROW: throw the mix into a feedback echo, drag up for denser repeats, slide right for a longer gap, and the release drops on the next downbeat. Grab early or let go late; the machine lands it clean.
Seven knobs and a reset ring the disk. They perform; their deep settings live in the Master Console.
One global LFO reaches any knob on any channel. The home knob rides its depth live, from a shimmer to a full sweep; waveform, rate, and targets are chosen in the console.
Swing, velocity contrast, and humanize in one knob. Set it once and the drums sit back in the pocket; automate it per section and the feel evolves with the song.
The depth of the accent lane. Low reads laid back, high reads driving: the fastest energy control on the screen, and a natural per section automation target.
RELOAD returns the deck to its saved baseline: mutes, solos, macro knobs, and a latched filter come home, quantized to the bar. The arrows undo and redo your latest moves, so an experiment is never a commitment.
A master delay shared by the whole deck. The home knob rides its level; each channel sets its own send from its detail view.
One shared room for the mix. The knob decides how much of the deck lives in it; per channel sends decide who.
Width and motion on the master bus. A touch thickens the synths and hats; more turns movement into a sound of its own.
Eight strips, always visible. Faders ride, macros perform, and the buttons underneath are instruments themselves.
Every channel carries one assignable macro knob. In EDIT you aim it at any parameter the channel owns; in ACT it is that parameter, on stage. Defaults ship tuned per template: DECAY on the kick, SNAPPY on the snare, CUTOFF on the bass.
Cap grab faders with hardware weight. Slow drags land single units, fast sweeps cover the whole throw, and a haptic notch marks the saved home position, so you find your way back without looking.
M and S on every strip, committed on the bar while playing, so cuts land musically. RELOAD lifts them all at once when the break is over.
Tap a channel button and the voice fires; hold it and the channel rolls in time with the clock. In EDIT the same buttons open each channel into its detail view.
In EDIT, every channel opens into its own instrument: presets on top, the engine below, and the disk focused on that channel. All eight voices are synthesized live; there are no samples anywhere in the machine.
The kick: four synthesized layers of body, transient, click, and sub. Presets from 808 to ANALOG set the character; TUNE, PITCH, DECAY, CLICK, and SUB shape the hit, with TONE, DRIVE, COMP, ATTACK, and RELEASE to finish it. A RUMBLE layer adds a low bed behind the kick, with an OFFSET that places it off the beat.
Body and crack in one voice. SNAPPY balances the noise layer against the shell, tune and decay do the rest, and a triplet grid is one tap away on its ring.
The closed hat: tight metallic noise with a short decay window, built to sit on top of the kick and carry the sixteenths.
The open hat picks up where the closed one ends, with a decay that reaches long enough to wash over the offbeats.
The one drum that follows the song key: its pitch tracks your root, so every tom line lands in tune with the bass. Decay runs from a dry knock to a long boom.
Percussion: rims, clicks, and metallic strikes, with TONE shaping the color. The seasoning channel, and a favorite target for the global LFO.
The polyphonic synth: three voices, chord aware step entry, and a full arpeggiator with register control and ratchets. Two morphing oscillators per voice, FM when you want teeth, a ladder filter, and envelopes for amp and filter. Presets run from KEYS and PAD to SUPERSAW and DARK.
The monophonic bass: two morphing oscillators into a resonant ladder filter, with glide that turns overlapping steps into sliding legato lines. Presets run 808, ACID, REESE, WOBBLE, SUB, and more.
Steps enter as scale degrees locked to your key. The sequencer runs up to 64 steps at its own resolution, and TIE & MERGE stretches notes across bars.