Getting started

PatchSmith is a grid on the left and a live sheet preview on the right. Everything you type is saved as you go and, when you are signed in, synced to your account. Use a tablet or a laptop — the grid needs the width. On a phone, View the sheet shows the patch read-only, ready to print or save as a PDF.

Quick start

1. Open PatchSmith from the dashboard. A patch called Patch is waiting; tap Rename to name it, or + New patch for another.
2. Pick your Console in the bar at the top. It decides every limit underneath — how many buses, matrices and output sockets you get, and how many characters of the strip name reach the desk (12 on an X32, 6 on an SQ) — so it comes first. Its routing preset and the Export button sit in the same bar.
3. Fill in Band / act, Venue and Date. They head the printed sheet.
4. With an empty grid you are offered starter templates: 4-piece rock band, Singer-songwriter duo, Festival 24ch or Empty. Pick one, tap + Channel to add rows by hand, or bring in the patch you already have — a paste, a CSV file, or the input list from your stage plot.
5. Type into Source and watch the row fill itself: the Strip name, the colour and the 80 Hz low cut follow the instrument it recognises.
6. Name your DCA groups underneath the grid, then tap Print above the preview — or Export in the top bar for the PDF sheet, a CSV, or the console file (X32/M32 scene or SQ show).

The grid, column by column

Keyboard entry

Tab moves across the cells of a row. Enter anywhere in a row jumps to the next row's Source — and on the last row creates a new channel after the last one (or in the first gap once 64 is used). Entering a 24-channel patch is a run of typing and Enter, no mouse needed.

Instrument recognition

The recogniser reads the source name — case-insensitively, in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese, and with the abbreviations techs actually write (BD, SN, OH, HH, Git, Vox, BGV, T1–T12 for toms) — and sets defaults:

• Colour: drums cyan, bass red, guitars green, keys yellow, vocals and speech magenta.
• Low cut: on for vocals, speech, guitars, strings, snare, overheads, hi-hats and horns.
• Strip name: abbreviated to the console's 12 characters the way an engineer would — Backing Vocals 1 → BV 1, Acoustic Guitar → Ac Gtr — with umlauts transliterated for the scene file.

The word that names the channel wins over the rest of the line: Vox Gtr is a vocal at the guitarist's position, Synth Bass is a bass. German compounds work too (Westerngitarre, Standtom, Sprecherpult).

Once you change a colour or a low cut by hand, the recogniser leaves that field alone. An unrecognised name simply gets no preset.

The edit card

Tap ⋯ on a row for the full editor: Source, Strip, Mic / DI, Stand, Stagebox / physical input (sheet only), Notes, Colour, 48V and Low cut chips, and chips to assign the row to any of the eight DCA groups — so on a tablet, where the grid hides the Colour column, every field is still reachable. Move up, Move down, Insert channel above and Remove channel are here too.

Saving

PatchSmith saves as you type — there is no "unsaved" state to lose. The patch row says what happened:

Save does not do the saving — it only skips the couple of seconds of waiting and pushes your patches, your routing presets and your named versions to your account right now. Use it before you close the laptop.

Changing the channel order

The ↑ and ↓ buttons on each row move a channel through the list.

What moves is the source, not the number: the set of channels your patch occupies never changes. A patch on 1, 2, 3, 9 stays on 1, 2, 3, 9 — the deliberate gap survives — and the sources shuffle between those four numbers. Channel numbers are physical, so nothing here invents or destroys one.

A stereo pair moves as one block, and it can only land somewhere it is still odd→even. That is why a pair sometimes jumps two places instead of one: with a pair on 3/4 and single channels on 1 and 2, the only place "up" can mean is 1/2. If nowhere in that direction works, PatchSmith says so instead of quietly producing a pair the desk will not link.

Renumber 1…n, under the grid, closes every gap at once: the channels are renumbered from 1 in the order shown. Stereo pairs are pushed to the next odd channel so they stay linkable, which is why the result is not always an unbroken 1, 2, 3…

Versions

Versions, on the patch row, saves the patch under a name you choose — as sent to the festival, after soundcheck — and it stays until you delete it. This is not an undo history: it is the handful of moments that matter, so they do not get buried under a hundred keystrokes.

• Save version snapshots the whole patch: channels, DCAs, console, outputs and the header.
• Restore puts that version back. The patch as it is right now is saved as a version first, so a restore can never be the thing that loses an afternoon's work.
• The last 12 versions per patch are kept; older ones drop off.
• Versions sync with your account, like the patch itself.

Removing a channel

Channel numbers are physical, so removing a channel leaves its number free — nothing below it moves. The banner that appears offers both Undo and Close the gap, which pulls every channel below up by the number of channels you removed.

Closing a gap of one channel shifts everything below by an odd number, and that lands every stereo pair below it on even→odd, where the console can no longer link it. PatchSmith asks before it does that — see Stereo pairs.

DCA groups

Eight slots, each with a name of up to 12 characters and a colour. Assign channels from the edit card; the sheet prints the DCA numbers per row and lists the named groups underneath.

Not every show runs DCAs. Switch Use DCAs off and the strip, the chips on the edit card and the DCA column on the sheet all disappear. It is a per-patch setting, and the assignments are kept — switch it back on and they are all still there.

Outputs & routing

Below the DCAs: the console's Main L/R, its mix buses (16 on an X32/M32, 12 on an SQ), its matrices and its physical output sockets — name and colour for each, and for every socket which mix feeds it.

Main L/R lands on the last two output sockets, the way it is patched on almost every job: the wedge and matrix sends take the outputs from 1 upwards and the PA feed is the pair at the end of the loom. Both starter presets follow that, and you can move it like any other socket.

The routing preset picker is in the top bar, next to the console. It shows which preset this patch is on, with a ★ when that preset is the one new patches for this console start from.

The ⋯ button beside it is where presets are managed — Save as preset…, Update preset, Set as default, Delete preset. Those are things you do once and then leave alone, which is why they are not sitting in the bar.

Editing a patch's outputs detaches it from its preset (Custom) until you save or update one. Two starter presets per console are provided.

Next

• Get your patch in — import the patch you already have.
• Stereo pairs — odd→even, and what happens when you insert rows.
• Print the sheet — the preview, the columns and printing.