Bela Trails [PRE-ORDER]

Trails is a polyphonic touch recorder that puts the control of music under your fingertips. It allows melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and control elements to be composed simultaneously through gesture and shape. These gestures can be transformed in space and time, intuitively generating contrapuntal and polyrhythmic relationships across four channels.

Trails outputs both control voltage and MIDI, enabling it to control a wide range of Eurorack modules as well as hardware and software instruments. Gestures can be stored across 16 scenes for recall and live performance, and used either as smooth, continuous signals or quantised to produce melodic and tempo-synced material.

Polyphonic Touch
Building on the success of its predecessor Gliss (https://bela.io/products/gliss/), Trails expands the idea of recordable touch control into a fully polyphonic system. Where Gliss demonstrated the expressive potential of touch-based recording, Trails extends this approach into a broader compositional space, offering a new way of thinking about gesture, structure and control.

At its core, Trails features four channels, each providing X and Y position outputs that follow finger movement across the touch surface, alongside a gate output for timing and rhythm. Gestures can be recorded individually or across multiple channels, allowing anything from single-parameter modulation to complex, multi-voice relationships. Recorded gestures may be freely switched between continuous curves and stepped, quantised signals, turning drawn movements into melodies and rhythms using built-in scales or custom tuning.

Compose with Shapes
Trails’ transformation tools allow gestures to be rotated, pinched or spatially offset while preserving their original character. These transformations can themselves be recorded and applied non-destructively, making them suitable for subtle variation as well as performative intervention. Transformations can also be applied selectively per channel, enabling complex internal relationships to emerge.

Temporal manipulation plays an equally central role. Gestures can be scrubbed, looped and nudged along a timeline, opening up possibilities for rhythmic phasing, shifting loops and touch-controlled resets. Playback speed can be dynamically altered using the Touch Bar, either globally or per channel.

Draw Sound
For macro-level control, Trails includes multiple banks of eight touch-controlled faders, allowing parameters to be set, chained and morphed between using adjustable slew times. This makes it possible to move smoothly between complex states or introduce abrupt structural changes.

Completing the system is a flexible breakout module, which can be mounted to the left, right or above the main unit, allowing users to tailor the layout to their own Eurorack systems. Positioned between controller, instrument and compositional tool, Trails offers a tactile and deeply musical approach to gesture-based composition, performance and control.

Inputs

• • 4 × CV inputs (one per channel, reset and modulation)
  • 1 × Clock input

Outputs (via breakout)

• • 8 × CV outputs (X/Y per channel)
  • 4 × Gate outputs (one per channel)
  • MIDI TRS

Interface

• • 85 × 85 mm multitouch capacitive touchpad with shine-through LEDs
  • 10 × 85 mm capacitive slider with shine-though LEDs
  • 6 illuminated control buttons (record, play, quantise, S&H, undo/redo, shift)
  • 4 channel select/mute buttons
  • 4-position mode selector
  • USB-C port on back for USB MIDI

Includes

• • Power ribbon cable
  • Alternative 1U faceplate for output breakout
  • Mounting screws

• Width: 22HP / Output breakout: either 4HP (3U) or 22HP (1U)
• Depth: TBD
• Power: TBD