The Joys of the Retrograde Button

I’ve been playing the machines in conductor mode for a couple weeks now, but for some reason I had forgotten about one of the features I’d been most excited about when I coded conductor mode: the retrograde button. As the name implies, the retrograde button (the A button on a Wii in conductor mode) plays a loop backwards. In multi-measure loops, the order of the measures is preserved, but material within each measure is played backwards. Because it was the simplest manipulation to program, I coded it first and subsequently forgot about it. While practicing conductor mode today, I found myself staring at the Wii and thinking, “I wonder what the A button does?”

When I remembered, I tried retrograding a loop that would be easy to distinguish from its backwards variant, and it sounded great. The retrograde button is now slotted to be the first manipulation performed during the show.