See your Scenes and Songs on a full timeline
Every sequenced note across every bank, with fader automation lanes and a playhead that follows along.
The EP’s display can hint at what you programmed. It cannot show it to you. Best Friend puts the whole arrangement on a timeline.
What you see
- Every sequenced note across every bank in a Scene or an entire Song, on one timeline.
- Fader automation lanes for each bank, underneath the notes.
- A playhead that follows the hardware as it plays.
You can navigate a single Scene or move through a whole Song.
The layout
Bar width follows the meter, so a 3/4 or 9/8 scene is drawn at its own width with the ruler numbers on the bar lines. Bar lines cross the bank gaps; beat lines stop at each bank. A held note draws as a bar, a short hit as a single cell. A bank with a shorter pattern than the scene tiles across the full width with its repeats dimmed.
The transport row reads the scene at a glance:
00:12 · 96 BPM · 4/4 · 8 Bars · C.03The bar count is the scene’s longest pattern.
Loading Scenes
Best Friend reads the project once when the app starts up. After that it stays silent: changing scene, pinching, toggling filters, and switching tabs all issue no reads. Only two things re-read — the toolbar Refresh, and changing the project on the hardware.
Reading the project briefly holds pad input on the EP, so Best Friend reads once and then stays quiet. A project switch you make while you are on another tab is held until you return to the Scenes tab rather than interrupting your playing.
The timeline opens on whichever scene the device is sitting on, including an empty one — it tells you there are no recorded notes rather than silently opening somewhere else.
Zoom and pan
- Drag to pan. Vertical and horizontal move independently, and the grid never drifts off the ruler or the pad column.
- Pinch to zoom the step axis only — rows and pad icons keep their size. Zoom stays anchored under your fingers.
- Double-tap to return to 100%.
- Tap a note to select it; the detail card below names its pad, sample, position, pitch, and
velocity —
B9 · Rimshot · 2.3 · D4 · vel 96. Tap empty grid to clear it.
Follow the playhead
With MIDI clock out enabled, arm follow in the toolbar and the playhead tracks the transport. One thing moves at a time: the playhead runs to about a fifth of the width while the grid stays still, then parks while the grid slides underneath it, then runs to the end once the last bar is on screen. On stop, the grid stays where the playhead left it and hand-scrolling picks up from there.
The timer sits before the BPM in MM:SS, in tabular digits that roll as they change. It tracks
the playhead, not the wall clock: a stop freezes it where the playhead froze, and a continue
picks up from there. A looping scene snaps back to 00:00 at the top of each loop.
With no clock arriving, a hint replaces the timer rather than showing you a frozen playhead.
A KEYS pad’s pitches on their own rows
A pad played chromatically is more useful spread out than stacked. Tap the note icon in the transport row and a melodic pad becomes one row per distinct pitch, lowest at the bottom. A repeated pitch shares its row, and a chord shows both of its notes.
Turn it off and the pad collapses back to one row, where a chord shows only its longest note. Single-pitch drum pads never split either way. Tapping a note rings that note’s row, and the detail card names the pitch you tapped.
It is read-only
Nothing on this screen changes anything on your EP.
What it shows you that the hardware cannot
The EP’s display tells you which pattern you are on. It cannot show you that the hat on bank C lands a step early, or that a fader move from weeks ago is still pulling a bank down.
From here you can bounce multi-track stems of the Scene or the whole Song, with the fader automation and the MIDI data alongside it.
