All About Trails
Five Ways to Think About Polyphonic Touch
Since the release of the Bela Gliss touch recorder module in 2023, Eurorack users have adopted a new way of controlling sound. Traditional tools like sequencers, LFOs and other voltage generators have a foundational place in composition and sound design, but touch recording with Gliss opened a new level of dynamism and immediacy, and a more intuitive relationship with sound. Why program a signal when you can simply draw it?
The new Bela Trails module expands this idea across multiple dimensions. What if we can use touch to generate all sorts of musical content? What happens when we make touch polyphonic? What if we use touch to manipulate the gestures themselves? By posing and answering such questions, Trails opens new space not only for Eurorack control surfaces but the controller space at large.
With a limited batch of pre-orders now available, the story of Trails is in its opening stages. In the coming months, we will share ideas and techniques for thinking about and using Trails ahead of its broader release in June, 2026. For now, we share five unique features as a primer for understanding its capabilities and to help future users get the most from its potential.
Compose with Movement
When you touch Trails, you generate melodic, rhythmic and control signals simultaneously. Gestures that are continuous, smooth and unquantised can be locked to a scale and generate quantised steps at the press of a button. The process is non-destructive, so you can freely move back and forth between smooth and quantised signals.
This compels us to think of the touch surface as not merely a generator of coordinates on the X and Y planes, but rather as an interface for exploring melodic, harmonic and rhythmic space. Rather than composing in steps and sequences, we use touch to explore pitches, rhythms and sounds in terms of up and down, left and right, and all the spaces between.
Transform Recorded Gestures
Recording your gestures is just the beginning. One of Trails’ most powerful traits is its ability to manipulate pre-existing gestures with another layer of touch. Gestures can be rotated around a central point like hands moving on a clock; pinched inside a resizeable box shaped by two of your fingers; or offset and pushed towards a chosen point.
The behaviour that arises from these manipulations is something special. The original shape of your gestures remains audible, but the relationship between them changes as they are repositioned around space. This is particularly powerful in melodic contexts. Contrapuntal variations emerge based on how you move your gestures across the touch surface.
These adaptations are recordable, in a sense allowing you to manipulate a recorded gesture with a recorded gesture. And just like changing between continuous and quantised signals, this process is non-destructive.
Bend Time
Gestures can be viewed on a timeline with their playheads visible moving left to right at their given rates. The playback position of a gesture can be altered with touch, incrementally sped up or slowed down, or locked into custom loop lengths, opening the door to rhythmic phasing, dynamically shifting loops, touch-controlled resetting and much more.
This invites us not to think of our gestures as something you record and then leave to linearly repeat, but rather as a signal whose point in time need not be fixed.
Macro Gestural Control
Trails’ four channels can be addressed independently or in groups. This means a single touch can input data into all four channels simultaneously. Each channel’s X and Y outputs are freely assignable to whatever destination you choose, giving you a total of eight CV signals and four gate outputs.
This allows Trails to generate everything from large, macro-scale changes in a single complex sound to fine-tuned control of parameters across multiple voices, and anything in between.
Morphing Faders
By nature, Trails sets your signals in motion. But with eight banks of eight touch-controlled faders, you are able to generate a suite of static values which are useful for creating large-scale changes in your sound.
With this chain of preset values, you can then smoothly morph from one bank to another. The rate of the transformation is under your control, allowing shifts that move slowly and gradually or jump suddenly between states.
Trails is available to pre-order in limited quantities.
For updates on Trails, join our low-volume mailing list and follow on Instagram.
