Docs / Gravity Engine

Gravity Engine FAQs

What's the difference between Key Preserving and Color Added when assigning a guide map?

Key Preserving and Color Added behave the same when you play in-key control chords.

The difference appears when you play borrowed/out-of-key chords:

Key Preserving keeps the 12 notes assigned to the white keys closer to the guide map's original key, so it feels like a brief detour before returning home.

Color Added brings in more notes from the borrowed chord's key, so it feels more like a temporary key change while that control chord is active.

What is a Guide Map in Gravity Engine?

A Guide Map is your harmonic palette in Gravity Engine: a collection of control chords (Fields) you use to drive harmony in a song or project.

Each Guide Map carries a key/mode identity from its filename tags (for exampleGM_KEY-...). You can transpose a map when assigning it, but transposition shifts pitch center; it does not rewrite the map's authored modal structure.

Gravity Engine provides 4 Guide Map display modes:

• Full map
• Core + satellites
• Core only
• Projected keyboard view (shows which control chord is mapped to each trigger note)

Gravity Engine always requires at least one Guide Map, so a default map is always available.

In Field Select, you choose control chords from the active Guide Map.

In Field Reshape, you can play any 3- or 4-note chord to reshape transformation behavior, not just chords that exist in the current map.

Each session supports 3 Guide Map slots: the main Guide Map plus Portal A and Portal B. Switching portals changes the active map, enabling fast harmonic/key-center changes during performance.