Bela - Trails

If Bela's Gliss was the one-dimensional gesture controller, Trails is its polyphonic, two-dimensional counterpart. A large illuminated capacitive touchpad tracks up to four fingers simultaneously, each mapped to its own channel with X and Y position outputs plus a gate. Draw gestures across the surface — smooth modulation curves, melodic sequences, rhythmic triggers — and Trails records them, up to 40 seconds per channel. Recordings loop, phase against each other, and can be quantized to scales (including custom two-octave designs) at the press of a button, turning freehand drawings into pitched melodies and rhythmic patterns. Both CV and MIDI are generated, so Trails drives Eurorack modules and external instruments alike.

Then, there are the transformation tools — recorded gestures can be rotated around a point, pinched into a smaller area, or offset — all while preserving their original shape and character. These transformations can themselves be recorded non-destructively, meaning you can layer gestural control on top of gestural control and undo it just as easily. On the temporal side, you can scrub through recordings by touch, set loop points, nudge channels forward or backward in time, and adjust playback speed per channel via the Touch Bar. Four initially simple finger-drawn paths can drift into polyrhythmic and contrapuntal territory with very little effort. There's also a fader mode which provides multiple banks of eight touch-controlled macro sliders when precise preset values are more useful than freeform drawing.

Ships as a two-part system: a 22HP main module plus a separate breakout module for its outputs (4HP in 3U or 22HP in 1U), mountable to the side or above. Sixteen scenes for recall. Trails offers a deeply expressive way to get modulation and sequence data into your system — and yes, it looks rather spectacular while doing it!

Features:

• Four-channel polyphonic touch controller with X/Y CV and gate per channel
• 85 × 85 mm illuminated capacitive multi-touch pad
• Capacitive Touch Bar for slew, playback speed and interpolation
• Gesture recording up to 40 seconds per channel
• Quantization to preset or custom two-octave scales
• Euclidean clock division per channel
• Spatial transformations: rotation, pinch, offset — recordable non-destructively
• Temporal manipulation: loop points, scrubbing, per-channel playback speed
• Multiple banks of eight touch-controlled macro faders
• 16-scene memory
• CV and MIDI (TRS) outputs
• 4 CV/trigger inputs (one per channel)
• Clock input
• USB-C for USB MIDI
• Configurable output breakout: 4HP (3U) or 22HP (1U), mountable left, right, or above
• 22HP main module