The sequencer mindset
Sixteen steps, and an instruction on each — an Elektron box is a grid you sculpt while it plays.
Every device in this catalog is a sequencer-first instrument: the sixteen big buttons are not a keyboard, they are a bar of time laid out in space. A pattern is one trip across them; a trig is an instruction planted on a step — "play here." You do not perform the music forward through time; you stand outside the loop and edit it while it runs.
Reading the grid
Sixteen steps at sixteenth-note resolution is one 4/4 bar: steps 1-5-9-13 are the beats — which is why the four-on-the-floor kick below lands exactly there — and the groups of four are the same pages the hardware banks its longer patterns into. Rhythm becomes placement: a hat on every odd step is straight eighths; shift something one step off a beat and you have written syncopation, no timing skills required.
Two tracks, sixteen steps, a chase light. Press play — the default beat is four kicks and straight hats. Now edit it while it runs: move a kick off the beat, thin the hats out, push the BPM. Notice you never stopped the music to change it — that is the whole workflow.
On the hardware this is the TRIG page row and the sixteen [TRIG] keys — and each step already holds more than on/off. The first per-step value you met was VEL back in lesson 1; the next lesson blows that door wide open: