TWEAKER Addon Premium

basehead‘s built-in 8-slot polyphonic MIDI sampler. Turn your sound library into a playable instrument — without leaving basehead.

What it is

An 8-slot polyphonic MIDI sampler built directly into basehead‘s NodeTree panel. Plug in a MIDI controller (or use the on-screen virtual keyboard), drag sounds from your library into slots, and start playing.

Sound designers spend their days hunting for the perfect sound — sometimes it’s faster to make it from raw materials you stack, layer, and mutilate.

Key features

8 independent sampler slots

Each slot is a self-contained instrument with its own:

• Volume & Pan — full mixer-style control per slot.
• Solo & Mute — isolate or silence individual slots on the fly.
• MIDI Key Range — define exactly which notes trigger each slot (Low Key / High Key).
• Root Note — set the original pitch so TWEAKER pitch-shifts automatically when you play higher or lower.
• Playback Direction — forward or reverse.
• Loop Modes — one-shot, loop, or ping-pong (in both directions — six modes total).
• Round Robin Trigger — sequential, random, or not-random (3 modes).
• Region & Trigger Markers — restrict playback to a section of the sample and set a custom start point.

Voice modes

Each slot’s playback engine, picked from the press-and-hold mode button. Tooltip lists them as Normal / Rise / Fall / Granular / Flanger.

• NORM — normal sample playback. The Mod row (WARB / TREM / PAN, see below) layers on top of this mode only.
• RISE / FALL — endless rising or falling Shepard tone. Octaves 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 (stacked symmetrically around the played note; label shows total voices, e.g. “6 oct (7 voices)”) and Speed 0.02–1.0 oct/sec.
• GRN — overlapping granular cloud. Two rows of controls:
  • Size 5–500 ms (grain length, default 80), Spray 0–100% (random grain-start jitter, default 0), Freeze/Scan (Scan drifts the grain start through the region at Scan speed −2…+2 region-lengths/sec, default 0.5).
  • Density 1×–8× grain overlap (default 3×), Pitch 0–1200¢ random per-grain detune (default 0), Spread 0–100% random per-grain stereo pan (default 0).
• FLNG — held note spawns a detuned stack for an ensemble / flanger sound. Detune 0–50¢ and Width 0–1 stereo spread. (Formerly labeled UNI.)

All voice-mode and modulation parameters save with the slot and the TWEAKER preset, and copy/paste between slots intact.

Mods:

Three modulation toggles on the Normal voice. Each reveals its own parameter row when turned on; any combination can run together.

• WARB — slow random pitch wobble (Warble). Depth 0–100¢ (default 50). Formerly labeled WARP.
• TREM — tremolo. Shape (Sine / Tri / Sqr / Saw), Rate 0.1–12 Hz (default 5.0), Depth 0–100% (default 60).
• PAN — auto-pan. Shape (Sine / Tri / Sqr / Saw), Rate 0.1–8 Hz (default 1.0), Depth 0–100% (default 100).

Drag-and-drop loading

Found a sound in your Results grid? Drag it directly onto a TWEAKER slot. CloudPack files download automatically — you’ll see a progress bar right on the slot until it’s ready.

Drop several files → instant Round Robin

Multi-select a batch of files and drop them all onto one slot. Each file becomes a Round Robin variation (Sequential / Random / Random-No-Repeat), and mismatched sample rates or channel counts are normalized automatically. The slot name shows the first file with a count for the rest, e.g. “footstep_01 (+9)”. HTTP / HTTPS URLs are welcome in the mix — LAN-streamed files work alongside local paths. Presets remember the whole source list and rebuild the pool on recall.

MIDI Learn

Hit the Learn button on any slot, then play two notes on your controller — TWEAKER sets the key range automatically. The same goes for Root Note: one button, one keypress, done. Every knob and slider in TWEAKER also accepts MIDI Learn — assign any CC to volume, pan, ADSR, filter, anything. Right-click the control, hit Learn, twist the knob on your controller, done.

Pitch wheel support. Map your controller’s pitch wheel to the main Pitch slider (or globally via the SAMPLER CONTROLS header right-click) — TWEAKER detects pitch-bend messages and locks the slider into Semi (semitone) mode automatically. The right-click MIDI Learn flyout exposes a Pitch Bend Range submenu.

Real-time visual feedback

Every sampler slot shows a mini waveform with a live playhead, region markers, and trigger position. A MIDI activity LED confirms your controller is connected and talking. Each of the eight slots has its own color for instant identification.

Double-click any mini-waveform to open a full-size editor for setting region markers and trigger points precisely.

Preset system

Dial in the perfect multi-slot configuration and save it as a preset. TWEAKER stores everything — file paths, mixer settings, MIDI ranges, loop modes, marker positions — as a portable JSON file. Load it back anytime, update it in place, or start fresh with Reset All.

Virtual keyboard

No MIDI controller handy? TWEAKER includes a 3-octave on-screen keyboard (C3–B5) so you can trigger slots with mouse clicks. Great for quick auditioning or laptop workflows.

A live pitch-wheel widget to the left of the keyboard — controller’s pitch-bend in real time. Right-click it to MIDI Learn the global Tweaker pitch wheel and pick its bend range.

Under the hood

Up to 128 simultaneous voices per slot. Pitch-shifting is calculated from the interval between the triggered note and the root note — wavetable-style resampling from a single loaded file. Full ADSR envelope and filter controls are accessible through the dedicated ADSR panel for deeper sound shaping.

The workflow

1. Browse your library in basehead.
2. Drag sounds onto slots.
3. Tweak the knobs, sliders, and whack the MIDI keyboard until you make something fresh.
4. Record your new creation with Performance Take Recording (included with the TWEAKER license), or use basehead Connect to route to your DAW for recording.

Recording your performance

TWEAKER has its own record button next to the virtual keyboard at the bottom of the panel — separate from the main transport record. A small chevron next to the dot opens a record-options menu (output location, taglist, history behavior). The recording modes are organized into two submenus — Stems and Surround Mode — mutually exclusive with each other.

Stems — multichannel takes

Turn on Enable Stems in the options menu and every loaded slot grows a Stem picker (1–8) next to its Root. Each slot records to whichever stem you choose, and the recorded file auto-sizes to the highest stem actually used — unused stems are never written as empty channels. Up to 8 stems means up to a 16-channel file.

Monitoring stays stereo while you play; the multichannel separation only exists in the recorded file.

TWEAKER record options menu — Enable Stems at the top toggles the stem picker per slot.

Cascade gesture

Hold Ctrl (Windows) / Cmd (macOS) while picking a stem on one slot to auto-increment the rest down the chain: slot 1 → stem 1, slot 2 → stem 2, slot 3 → stem 3, etc. Saves a lot of clicking when you want a one-stem-per-slot layout.

Separate Files vs Interleaved

When stems are enabled the options menu offers a radio choice:

• Separate Files — one stereo .wav per stem, named TWEAK-<time>-stem1.wav, -stem2.wav, etc.
• Interleaved — one multichannel .wav with every stem on its channel pair.

Surround Mode — multichannel panning + takes

Turn on Surround Mode in the record submenu to switch TWEAKER into a spatial rig. It replaces every per-slot pan slider with an XY surround panner, adds a live Stage view above the slots, and records the take with the format’s channel count, SMPTE order, and pan positions baked in. Mutually exclusive with Stems.

Requirements

• Requires 4+ audio outputs (from your device or BaseHead Connect). Only formats your device can monitor are listed.
• Hidden on Free / Lite editions.
• Formats: Quad (4 outs) · 5.0 / 5.1 (6 outs) · 7.0 / 7.1 (8 outs). Default 5.1.
• Choice drives both live monitoring and the recorded take.

The Stage strip

A live Stage view sits above the slots whenever Surround Mode is on. It draws the room, the current format’s speakers (with a distance ring), and the listener at center. Every loaded slot is a puck in its slot color — two linked dots for a stereo slot, one for mono. Level glow, note-on ripple rings, and MVMT voice clouds animate in real time; each speaker lights up with the live output level. Front-center reads C (LFE is omni, so it isn’t a positional speaker; it has its own send).

• Drag a puck to re-pan the slot directly.
• Click a puck to select that slot (either dot of a stereo pair works).
• Ctrl (Windows) / Cmd (macOS) + click resets to front-center.
• ⤢ Pop Out floats the Stage in an always-on-top window with the selected slot’s control strip below it — puck selection follows. While popped out, the inline Stage hides so the slot grid gets more room; closing brings it back.

Per-slot surround panner

The per-slot pan slider becomes an XY panner — a rounded-corner square pad tinted to the slot’s color. Click the pad to pop a larger panner in the slot’s flyout. All sliders below reset with Ctrl / Cmd + click.

• ROTATE — rotates the stereo image around the puck. −180°…+180° (0° = normal L/R, ±90° splits the channels front↔rear). Stereo slots only.
• WIDTH — stereo spread. 0%…200% (100% = normal, 0% collapses to mono at the puck). Stereo slots only.
• MVMT — per-trigger movement / scatter. Each triggered note lands at a random spot around the puck, so repeated notes build a cloud of voices across the room.
• LFE — LFE send (5.1 / 7.1 only).
• CENTER — center-channel divergence send. Mono slots only, formats with a C speaker (not Quad). 0% = C silent.

Crop box — drag the corner handles to confine how far the pan travels. Appears only when MVMT is active; a static puck ignores the crop and roams the whole field, so the box isn’t shown when it would do nothing.

Auto-Pan & MIDI

• Auto-Pan in surround mode wiggles left / right at the slot’s current depth.
• Pan X and Pan Y are MIDI-learnable — right-click the panner to assign.
• All surround positions and sends save and load with TWEAKER presets.

Need to Receive MIDI from a DAW?

TWEAKER can be played from any DAW running on the same machine via a virtual MIDI loopback. macOS and Windows each need a one-time OS-level setup.

Open the DAW MIDI Guide →

Happy Tweaking!