2026-03-24
What happened
Added a design section to PLAN.md about cue routing — the idea of routing individual rows to a secondary output (a separate MIDI port or reserved MIDI channels) that only the performer hears, like a DJ headphone cue bus.
The core insight: in a live set, every edit is currently public. With a cue channel, you get a private scratchpad running in real time. Try something strange on the cue output, hear it in context against the main mix, then commit it or discard it. The audience never knows either way. The cost of a bad idea drops to zero.
Per-row cue is the right starting point — swap out a single instrument in your headphones while the groove continues. The commit gesture should be bar-quantized by default (consistent with the legato-switching philosophy), with an immediate-cut option for deliberate transitions. Keyboard-wise, c as a prefix or toggle on the current row, Enter to commit all cue-routed rows to main simultaneously.
Not implemented yet — this is design notes. But the routing model is clear enough that it could be added without changing any pattern data structures.
Tweet draft
thinking about DJ-style headphone cue for a step sequencer — route individual rows to a private MIDI output, hear your edits against the main mix before committing them. like vim's unsaved buffer, but it's already playing
commit: b8dda4e