Set the velocity range and add modulation by dragging
A two-handle velocity band with a floor and a ceiling, and modulation wound in by dragging up the key you are holding.
Both controls live in the keyboard’s settings sheet, and both are off until you switch them on.
Velocity
Velocity sensitive turns the keyboard’s velocity response on. The band underneath it has two handles — a floor and a ceiling — so you decide the softest and loudest a strike can be.
- Each handle moves on its own, and stops against the other rather than pushing it.
- No strike is ever quieter than your floor or louder than your ceiling.
- The numbers keep a fixed width while you drag, so the readout does not jitter.
- Turn sensitivity off and the whole control dims; no drag moves it.
The band persists when you dismiss the sheet, and across a relaunch.
Where on the key is loudest
Velocity is read from how far up the key you strike:
- On a white key the ramp tops out at the black-key line, so full velocity is reachable without fighting the black keys. The bottom of the key is all floor.
- A black key ramps over its own full height.
- With zones enabled, each zone is its own complete soft-to-loud sweep — the top of every zone is that zone’s loudest, not just the top of the key.
Modulation
Modulation sensitive lets you wind modulation in with the same finger that is playing:
- Press a key.
- Drag straight up, towards the black keys, and hold.
Full modulation is reachable on a white key at the black-key line, and the black keys do not steal the touch. With the toggle off, dragging sends nothing at all.
How the gesture behaves
- A fresh touch picks up where the last one left off — no jump back to zero.
- One gesture can wind a raised value all the way back down, dragging past the bottom edge of the keyboard if you struck the key low.
- Small vertical wobbles and sideways slides do nothing. A diagonal slide onto the next key retriggers the note without moving modulation.
- Once you are modulating, reaching sideways for another key keeps modulating.
- Turning the toggle off drops the value to zero immediately, and so does leaving the screen.
The modulation band clamps both ends, the same way the velocity band does — set it to 40–80 and the drag sweeps only that range.
With VoiceOver
The velocity band reads as two handles, “Softest velocity” and “Loudest velocity”, each adjustable on its own; the modulation band reads the same way as minimum and maximum. With modulation sensitivity on, a Modulation control follows the keys and adjusts by swipe, since the drag gesture itself is not reachable.
