Keyboard Shortcuts
A beat dies a little every time you stop to aim the mouse. Select this note, drag it there, zoom in, miss, undo: the groove you were chasing is gone by the time the edit lands.
TrapMan is built so the edits you make constantly (rolls, nudges, octave drops, undo) live on the keyboard. Learn six shortcuts and the step grid plus piano roll start feeling like an instrument instead of an editor.
The full list
Shortcuts are shown in macOS notation.
| Shortcut | What it does |
|---|---|
Cmd+A |
Select every note in the piano roll |
Delete / Backspace |
Delete the selected notes |
Cmd+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z |
Undo / redo |
Cmd+U |
Subdivide the selected notes by the current grid — the hat-roll trick |
Cmd+Arrows |
Nudge the selected notes |
Cmd+Shift+Up/Down |
Move the selection up or down an octave |
The Cmd+U trick
This is the one to tattoo somewhere. Cmd+U takes whatever notes you have selected in the piano roll and subdivides them by the current grid: one note becomes a run of grid-sized hits.
So the fastest hat roll in the plugin is: place one hat note across the spot where you want the roll, select it, hit Cmd+U. Done: a perfectly tight roll at your grid resolution. Want it tighter? Set a finer grid and hit Cmd+U again. Then shape the velocity lane so the roll swells or fades instead of buzzing at one volume.
It works on any lane, not just hats: stutter a vocal chop, ratchet a snare into a fill, split an 808 into a bounce.
Nudge and octave moves for 808 lines
808 lines live and die on placement, and dragging notes around a piano roll is the slow way to find it. Select the note and use Cmd+Arrows to nudge it: each tap moves it by the grid, so you can walk a note through the bar until it sits.
Cmd+Shift+Up/Down moves the selection by a full octave. That's the fast way to audition the classic sub drop (duplicate feel, one keystroke down) or to fling a melody up an octave to hear it as a lead. Combined with Cmd+A, you can re-pitch an entire pattern's part in about a second.
And because Cmd+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z are always there, none of this is precious. Try the move, hate it, undo, keep looping. Redo with Cmd+Shift+Z is just as fast, so you can flick back and forth between two versions of a fill and let your ears pick the winner without ever reaching for the mouse.
Select-all and delete for fast rewrites
Cmd+A grabs every note in the piano roll at once, which turns the destructive edits into single gestures. Select all, then Cmd+Shift+Up to lift a whole part an octave, or Delete (or Backspace) to clear the lane and start the rhythm over from an empty grid. Pairing Cmd+A with the nudge and octave keys is the quickest way to reshape an entire pattern (re-pitch it, shift it, or wipe it) in a couple of keystrokes while the loop keeps running.
If you're still deciding whether grid-style programming is your workflow at all, start with what a step sequencer actually is: the shortcuts here are what make that workflow fast.