Move as an M8
Control SurfaceAn emulation of the Launchpad Pro MK3 integration — plus assignable knobs, songs and graphics

Before you start

Three things have to line up: the M8 has to be told a Launchpad is attached, the module has to be running, and — for the knobs — the control channels have to agree.

On the M8

M8 In MIDI Settings, set CTRL SURFACE to “Launchpad Pro”. Without this the M8 ignores the grid entirely.

If you are going to use the Move's knobs, also set CONTROL MAP CHANNEL to match Knob Chan in the module's Settings — Shift+step 2 on the Move, once the module is running. Both default to 4.

On the Move

Plug a hardware M8 into the Move's USB-A port. Hold Shift and press step 13 to open Schwung's Tools menu, then pick the M8 module from below the divider.

The M8 app for iOS and iPadOS drives this module too. Connect the iPad to the Move's USB-C port rather than USB-A, and set CTRL SURFACE in the app exactly as you would on the hardware. Everything in Part one behaves the same way; the app is the M8 at the other end of the same Launchpad conversation.

To leave it again: hold Shift and touch the volume knob and the jogwheel, or use Exit Module in the module's own Settings.

On a first start the module announces itself as a Launchpad as soon as it loads, and keeps retrying about once a second until the M8 answers, so it does not matter which device was switched on first.

When it reopens with a remembered screen it stays quiet instead — see Troubleshooting. Hearing the announcement, the M8 initialises its control surface from scratch and lands on Session, which would drag it off whatever you were on. If the M8 really did restart while the module was away it asks on its own, and that is still answered.

The channels the integration itself uses

Separately from your knobs, the Launchpad conversation runs on fixed channels that cannot be changed at either end:

This is why the knob channel defaults to 4: it has to stay out of the way. It is also why blink and pulse are described throughout as things the M8 decides — the module is only told which of the three channels a colour arrived on, and reproduces it on the Move's own LEDs.

Button map

Each Move button is forwarded to the Launchpad control named beside it. The CC and Launchpad columns are what actually travels down the wire, useful when something is not behaving.

Pads are step inputs by column. The Up and Down buttons are the Launchpad's octave buttons, which the M8's documentation also calls the ∧∨ arrows.

The Launchpad's Novation logo, which the M8 lights to show live mode, is the small LED below step 16 on the Move.

Global actions

Available in every mode.

Mute and solo: the button picks the mode, a step button picks the track

Mute and Loop are the Launchpad's Mute and Solo. A plain press — no Shift, nothing held — switches that function between momentary, where the button blinks and the mute lasts only while you hold the track, and toggle, where it latches.

The muting itself is done with the odd-numbered step buttons, which are the Launchpad's T1–T8: in mute toggle mode, pressing step 1 mutes track 1. The sense can be inverted — mute a track statically first, then switch to momentary, and holding it unmutes.

Which tracks the pads can reach depends on the mode — note mode reaches any track, sequencer mode only tracks that are not empty.

File browser

Loading a project or an instrument puts the M8's file browser on screen, and the same few buttons drive it wherever it was opened from. Sample is both the way in and the way out.

Session mode

Back. The song view, and where the M8 starts. Each pad is a chain: eight tracks across, and song rows down — the topmost row of the grid is the lowest-numbered song row, as on the M8's own screen, which marks the span the grid is looking at with square brackets.

• Up Down scroll the span one row at a time; Shift + either scrolls a whole page of eight.
• Track buttons are the row buttons: they play or cue a song row.
• Play plays the current row.
• Shift+Left toggles between live mode and song mode. Live mode lets you queue or play individual chains, and lights the logo LED below step 16.
• Sample opens and closes the load project browser for an .m8s song — see File browser above.
• Shift + a pad stops that chain.

What the colours mean

The Move reproduces blink and pulse in software, because its own LEDs animate differently from a Launchpad's. A pad that pulses is pulsing between its colour and a dimmer neighbour of the same colour, so a pulsing blue cursor still reads as blue.

The flash is timed in milliseconds — 450ms a side, so a full cycle is a little under a second — and therefore runs at the same speed on every screen. Counting frames instead would not: the knob page is a far heavier draw than a menu list and drops frames, which would make the same flash visibly faster the moment a menu opened.

Session-edit mode

Press Rec to toggle it. The pulsing blue pad is the cursor, and every other copy of the chain it is on pulses too — the quickest way to see where else in the song a chain is used.

• Hold Copy and a pad, then tap an empty pad to paste the chain there.
• Hold Copy and a pad, then double-tap a pad — empty or not — for a deep clone: a new chain with new phrases, rather than another reference to the same one.
• Hold Copy and a row button, then tap another row, to copy the row and insert it.
• Hold Delete and press a pad or a row button to clear it.
• Double-tap a chain to edit it in sequencer mode — the M8's screen follows to that phrase. This is an edit-mode gesture only; in play mode a double tap does nothing of the sort.

Beat repeat

Shift+Back. A second session screen, and one of the things a Launchpad adds that the M8 has no other way to do. The M8 has to be playing for it to do anything.

• Rows 6 and 7 set the range to repeat: press two pads for a span, or one pad on its own.
• Row 8 chooses which tracks the repeat applies to. The rest carry on normally.

Counting from the top as everywhere else, those three are the last rows of the eight — the bottom half on the Move. Press Shift+Back again to switch halves while you are here; plain Back returns to the main session screen.

Note mode

Menu. A grid pad controller for the currently selected instrument — also how you enter notes while a recording method is active.

• Left Right change track, or switch directly with a column selection. Note mode can reach any track, empty or not.
• Up Down scroll to higher and lower note pitches.
• Shift + Up Down load an instrument from the pool.
• Sample opens and closes the browser for an .m8i instrument file, which then plays on the current track.
• Hold Rec and press Play to start live recording into the active phrase.
• For manual note entry, hold Rec and press a note's pad while the M8's cursor sits in the N column of a phrase view.

The M8's own screen does not change for this mode — if you came from session mode, the square brackets simply stop being drawn.

Reading the keyboard

• White pads are the octaves of the first non-empty note of the current scale.
• Green pads are notes sounding right now — several at once if the instrument is a HyperSynth, which lights every pad it is using.
• The pad you hit lights, and so does the track button it belongs to.
• On a 12-note scale, including the ordinary chromatic one, the pad above any pad is a perfect fourth up. The layout is the same one the sequencer's bottom half uses.

Sequencer mode

Capture, or a double tap on a chain while session-edit mode is on. The M8's screen shows the phrase view. On a Launchpad the grid holds three zones at once; on the Move they fall either side of the half switch, which turns out to be the natural split.

• Left Right change track — here, only tracks that are not empty.
• Up Down scroll the keyboard.
• Sample opens the browser for an .m8i instrument file for the keyboard.
• Play a phrase by holding its phrase pad and pressing Play.

Sequencer-edit mode

Rec toggles it, and it is where a phrase can be edited — the notes are still played and recorded the usual ways. All the Copy and Delete gestures from session-edit mode work here too.

• Tap an empty pad in the note block to create a note; tap one in the phrase block to create a phrase — the same thing as EDIT+EDIT on the M8.
• Shift + Left Right rotate the notes within the phrase.

Hold an existing note in the phrase and the rest of the surface describes it:

• The four track buttons become its velocity — they are the row buttons, so they cover four of the eight levels at a time and a half-switch reaches the others.
• Up Down shift it by an octave.
• Hold Shift to browse the instrument pool, and release it to choose.

A keyboard pad plays its note, and that note becomes the one written when you next press an empty pad in the note block. So the keyboard both auditions the pitch and arms it.

Hold a phrase and Up Down transpose it — nothing else need be held. Play while holding one loops that phrase instead.

Pads & views

The Launchpad grid is 8 × 8 and the Move has 8 × 4, so the pads show half the grid at a time. This is the one place the Move's surface genuinely differs.

Rows are counted from the top down here, the way the M8 lists them: row 1 is the top row of the Launchpad grid and row 8 the bottom, and on the M8's own screen row 1 is song row 00.

Three stops in the cycle: Top (rows 1–4, steady light), Bottom (rows 5–8, pulsing), and — only if Odd Rows is switched on in Settings (Shift+step 2) — Odd rows (fast blink). The animation on the current mode button tells you which one you are on.

The mode button you are already on switches halves

Move only Each screen has one button that reaches it, and pressing that button when you are already there switches which half you see instead:

Pressing a different mode button changes screen, and each screen keeps its own half — the sequencer can sit on its keyboard while session mode stays on the rows you are arranging, and coming back to a screen puts you where you left it rather than on the top. A screen you have not visited yet opens on the top half. The press is still forwarded to the M8 either way; pressing Session while on session mode means nothing over there, which is what makes the button free to do this.

The knob page

Knobs 1–8 are yours to assign. They live in pages of eight, and pages belong to a song. Knob 9 (Main) stands outside all of it as a plain pass-through, with its own CC and channel in the Settings menu (Shift+step 2).

The display always shows the active song's current page. Turn the Jog wheel to move between pages — or to walk the knob cursor, once a click has raised it. Pages are created and pruned automatically as knobs need them.

Touch or turn a knob and two things happen: its name is replaced by its live value, inverted, and the top right of the display names what it is connected to — Ins0A Cut, Ins0A M2 Amt, REV Room Size. Let go and both clear. A three-letter name on a 32-pixel cell cannot say which instrument it belongs to; this is where that lives.

The bar along the bottom

The grid gives up its last nine rows to a hint bar — the same one every other Schwung screen carries, each pair a key in an inverted pill and what it does beside it. Three fit across the panel.

Holding Shift swaps all three. The page has two sets of gestures and room for one, and the Shift set is the half nobody can guess: that the step buttons reach the two menus, and that Shift while turning a knob auditions the change and puts it back. Shift is where you would go to ask what else is there, so asking it answers itself.

The wheel's hint follows what the wheel actually does: it pages on the knob page, walks knobs under the cursor, and is dropped entirely until the song has more than one page of knobs. Pages that hold something are what count — filling a page adds an empty one behind it so there is always somewhere to put the next knob, and a blank is a place the wheel can go rather than a place worth pointing at.

Value displays

An M8 parameter is a byte (00–FF) and a MIDI CC is seven bits. A knob set to Hex holds the byte and sends half of it, so the number under your hand is the one on the M8's own screen; the M8 hears one CC per two bytes, which is all seven bits can carry. Every byte is still reachable — see Speed below. Note-valued rows, Tracking's low and high value, are 00–7F on the M8 too and count in ones.

Speed

How far one detent moves a knob, counted in CC steps so 1x is what the knobs have always done whatever they read in.

Fractions accumulate, so a 1/4x knob moves on every fourth detent rather than rounding each one away.

Min and Max

Ends of a knob's travel, in whatever it reads in — a hex knob clamps at 30 to 4F, not 48 to 79. Tightening one pulls the value in with it, and the knob simply stops there rather than sending past it. On the device a shifted turn moves them by eight, since 256 bytes is a long walk a detent at a time.

The knob lights

Each of the eight knobs has a light beneath it that shows where it stands, as a colour walked along a sweep: the bottom of the travel is the sweep's first colour, the top its last. The light slides between colours rather than snapping. (A Launchpad and some controllers ring the knob with a collar of LEDs; the Move lights one lamp under each knob, so it shows the value as a colour rather than as an arc.)

Knob LED in Settings picks the sweep for every knob that has not named one of its own; the LED row in Knob Settings is where a knob names one, and reads Song until it does. An empty slot's light is dark.

The colour is read against the knob's whole scale, not its Min/Max — a knob leashed to the middle of its travel lights the middle of the sweep, because the light says where the value is rather than how far along its own leash it has got.

Knob 9, Main

It is a pass-through with no song behind it, so it has no cell of its own. Touch it or turn it and its value appears in a panel over the middle of the page instead; let go and the page comes back. It reads in hex by default, and its CC, channel, send mode and that choice of display all live on one screen: Settings → Main Knob.

Where you left it is remembered across a reload — it is kept with the settings, since it belongs to no song. It is restored but not sent: pushing a value at the M8 on load would move a parameter nobody touched, so the two agree again on your first turn.

Auditioning a change

Hold Shift and turn a knob: the M8 hears the move as you make it, and when you let Shift go the value returns to where it was. Useful for hearing what a parameter does without losing your setting. Main auditions the same way, and the two are independent — audition a song knob and Main together and both go back.

The knob cursor

Everything that belongs to one knob — its name, what it is connected to, its CC, how it sends, how it reads, where it sits, and adding or removing it — is reached this way. None of it is in the Settings menu, which holds only the handful of global rows further down.

Click the jogwheel and a cursor appears over the eight slots, on the first one that holds a knob. Turn the wheel to walk it, and click again to open what it lands on:

Walking past either end runs onto the neighbouring page, arriving at its far end, so every knob in the song is reachable without putting the cursor away. The first slot of the first page is a wall, and so is the last of the last.

It reopens where you left it, and remembers that per page — editing one knob is rarely one visit, and starting at the first knob each time meant walking the row again on every return. Wandering to another page and back costs neither its place; a page you have not opened the cursor on yet starts at its own first knob.

Hold Shift and turn and the knob travels with the cursor instead of the cursor moving over it — the same gesture the song list uses to reorder songs. A knob that belongs to a graphic takes the whole picture with it, and the step is "next valid position" rather than one slot, which is what lets a four-knob envelope move between rows at all: it cannot slide within one. Whatever is in the way comes back the other way, so nothing is pushed off the page.

It stays on the page you are looking at. A slot is a physical encoder, so a knob moved to another page would sit under no encoder at all.

Shift+Copy duplicates what the cursor is on into the next free slots, and Shift+Delete removes it. A graphic copies whole, for the same reason it moves whole — its knobs have to sit together on one row or the picture is not drawn. The copy gets fresh CCs and a picture of its own: two knobs learned to the same CC would move together on the M8, which is the opposite of what a copy is for. Delete takes the one slot and leaves its neighbours where they are, the same as Remove Knob in Knob Settings.

Both need Shift. Each is one keystroke from losing work, and unshifted those two buttons still belong to the M8.

The two buttons light while Shift is held, so the offer shows itself rather than having to be remembered — and only while it really stands: the cursor up, Shift down, and a knob under the cursor. On an empty slot they stay dark, because neither would do anything there and a lit button that does nothing is worse than an unlit one. Their colour is borrowed from the M8 — Copy is the Launchpad's Duplicate and Delete its Clear — and handed straight back on release.

Back puts the cursor away. It is only an overlay on the knob page, not a screen of its own — the pads, the mode buttons and the knobs all keep working underneath it, so raising it never interrupts what the M8 is doing.

Adding a knob

Raise the knob cursor with Jog Click, walk it onto an empty slot and click again. A page with no empty slot has no door — turn the wheel to the song's spare page, which is always there for exactly this. In the wizard, Jog moves, Jog Click picks, Back goes up a level.

New knobs take the next free CC, start at the M8's own default for that parameter, and are Hex + Absolute.

The EQ

M8 carries a three-band parametric EQ in more places than one, and the whole of it is reachable from Add Knob → EQ.

There are 128 numbered slots, 00–7F, which instruments are pointed at rather than owning — several instruments can name the same slot and share its settings. Alongside those sit four more, one each for the main mix and the three send effects. The wizard asks which one first; only the slot path asks for a number, and that number goes into the knob's name, so LGN0A and LGN2B stay apart on the same page.

Each EQ has three bands — Low, Mid and High — and those names describe their defaults rather than fixed roles: every band is functionally identical and can be set up however you like. All three offer the same five rows:

Nine rows, in one list — Low Gain, Low Freq, Low Q, Mid Gain and so on — rather than a band step and then a parameter step.

They read in the M8's own units

An EQ knob does not count in hex or in sevenths of a bit — it shows what the M8's EQ editor shows.

Frequency is a lookup, not a curve. The 128 steps are spaced unevenly: 2 Hz apart at the bottom (37, 39, 41 … 49), widening all the way out to 15 kHz. So the readings are a table with one entry per step rather than a formula. The three band defaults are where their names come from — and two of them are the nearest rung rather than a round number, because the table has no step on exactly 1000 or 5000 Hz.

These three readings are offered to any knob, in Knob Settings and in the browser, not only to one the wizard made. Nothing about them is EQ-specific once the scale is chosen. The main knob keeps the original four, since it is a pass-through with no parameter behind it.

Knob settings

Jog Click, the wheel to the knob, Jog Click again. Inside, Jog moves between rows; Jog Click enters a row so the wheel changes its value, and again to leave. Touching a different knob switches to editing that one.

Connect keeps the slot and the CC — the CC is what the M8 has been taught, so changing it would silently unlearn the mapping — and replaces the name, the starting value and the picture. A knob that is part of a graphic connects the whole group.

A knob in a graphic also moves as a whole group, and a group has to stay on one row, so a four-knob envelope can only swap between the two rows.

Knob graphics

Some choices add several knobs that share one picture instead of each drawing its own dial. The picture needs its knobs side by side on one row, so it may start a new row or page.

Remove knobs until only one is left and it goes back to being a dial. The type or wave is asked for once, when the graphic is added, because it is a selector on the M8 and so cannot be mapped to a CC.

LP>HP — two corners, no resonance

This filter type is the one place where the knob's label and the M8's parameter are different words:

Both are open at their defaults, and either one squeezes the band from its own side. CUT 00 with RES FF closes it completely.

The Settings menu

Shift+step 2 opens it, Jog moves between rows, Jog Click enters a row so the wheel changes its value, and Back closes. Everything here is global — not stored per song, and none of it belongs to a particular knob.

The same settings in a browser

Every row here except Songs and Exit is also on Schwung Manager's web UI, under Modules → M8 LPP Emulator → Settings. The manager writes what you choose into a file beside the module and never talks to the running module directly, so the module reads that file at startup, watches it while running, and writes its own changes back to it. A change made in the browser reaches the device within a couple of seconds, and a change made on the device shows up in the browser on its next load. Last one wins, which for one person at one device and one browser is what you would expect.

Exit stays on the device — there is nothing to leave from a browser. Songs have a page of their own, described under Managing songs.

Exit Module is one of two ways out. Schwung's own is to hold Shift and touch the volume knob and the jogwheel, which works from anywhere but takes three hands; this row does the same thing from the screen you are already on, saving any pending edit as it goes. (Shift+step 13 is the way into the Tools menu, not the way out of a module.)

Main Knob

Knob 9 belongs to no song, so its four settings are a screen of their own rather than four rows of the main list. Back returns to Settings.

Knob Chan is not a per-knob setting — it is the one channel all eight song knobs send on. A knob's own CC, mode and display are in Knob settings, behind the knob cursor.

Managing songs

Shift+step 1. The first row is + Add Song; the rest are your songs in preset-button order, with * on the active one.

Songs and Settings are siblings, each with its own way in, so Back closes this screen and returns to the knob page.

The two shortcuts work from anywhere, each other included. Shift+step 1 reaches Songs and Shift+step 2 reaches Settings wherever you are — from the knob page, from the knob cursor, and from inside the other menu — so you can cross straight between them without backing out first. Pressing the shortcut for the screen you are already on does nothing.

Holding Shift lights the small lamp beneath step 1, so the shortcut shows itself rather than being something you have to remember. Beneath, not the step button: the little lights under the step row are a separate set from the buttons above them — the same numbers, different lamps, which is why the M8's Launchpad logo is the one under step 16 rather than step 16 itself. Nothing else uses this one, so it is free to borrow and nothing has to be handed back. Step 2 needs no hint at all: it is already lit as a song preset.

The two rows are different kinds of light, too. The step buttons are RGB and read their byte as a colour; the lamps beneath them are white and read the same byte as a brightness. So a value that means a colour up top means "barely on" down below — which is worth knowing if you ever see one of these lit so faintly it looks broken.

Duplicating and deleting

Shift+Copy duplicates the highlighted song whole — every page, every knob, and every setting on every knob. The copy lands directly below the original rather than at the end of the list, because list order is also preset-button order and a duplicate is nearly always wanted beside the thing it came from. Its name gets a number: My Song becomes My Song 2, then My Song 3, counting up until it finds one that is free.

Shift+Delete asks before it acts. A song is every page of knobs on it and the button is one press with nothing held, so it opens a two-row question — Cancel and Delete — with the cursor parked on Cancel. Clicking straight through therefore keeps the song; deleting takes a deliberate move onto the other row. Back, or Delete again, backs out.

Both take Shift, and both light while it is held — the same grip and the same signal as on the knob cursor, so one pair of gestures does the same two jobs to whatever the cursor is on, whether that is a song or a knob. On + Add Song they stay dark: there is nothing there to copy or remove.

The M8 keeps working while either menu is open. The pads, the transport, the mode buttons and the knobs all carry on doing what they normally do and still reach the M8 — only the jogwheel, Back and the screen's own Shift gestures belong to the menu, so you can open one without the M8 going deaf.

Every gesture this screen owns sits behind Shift — rename on Shift+Jog Click, duplicate and delete on the two buttons, reorder on Shift+Jog. Unshifted, every button still belongs to the M8.

The last song cannot be deleted. Press Delete on it and the screen says so rather than offering a choice that would be refused — there is always at least one song.

Or from a browser

The song bank has its own page in Schwung's web UI: Modules → M8 LPP Emulator → Open web UI, or directly at /api/remote-ui/module-assets/m8/web_ui.html on the Move. Add, rename, reorder and delete songs, and choose which one is active. Position in the list is the preset step that recalls a song, so moving a song up or down there is the same act as moving it on the device.

Knobs too. Open a song and each page lists the slots that hold a knob — the name, the CC, the send mode, the value display, the LED sweep, the speed and the min/max ends are all editable, and a knob can be removed or moved between slots. Each page ends with a tile for its next free slot; when every page is full, a last tile starts another page. The slot number stays on each card, because that is which encoder it sits under. Two things stay on the Move, because both come from the catalogue and the geometry the module enforces — a knob's connection, and the picture a group of knobs draws. Both are shown on the page and carried through untouched, and a knob that belongs to a picture is marked with its role rather than offered move arrows.

A running module notices within a couple of seconds and reloads. Two things hold it off: a screen open on the device — the cursor is not pulled out from under you — and unsaved edits made on the Move, which are written out first and win. Both resolve on the next check.

Knobs stay on the device. The page moves whole songs and their knobs travel with them; adding and editing a knob is the wizard's job.

Song presets

The eight step buttons the M8 does not use — the alternate ones, between the steps it lights — switch songs with a single press.

The first eight songs occupy them in list order. To move a song to a different button, reorder the list.

Amber rather than white, because the row sits directly under the track buttons and the M8 paints those white and grey — two rows of the same two colours told you nothing about which was which.

Troubleshooting

Nothing on the pads at all

Check CTRL SURFACE is set to “Launchpad Pro” in the M8's MIDI settings. If it is, restart the M8 — that has fixed a dead grid outright more than once.

Reopened the module and the lights are wrong

The module remembers the screen. On the way out it writes down every lit pad, and which mode you were on and which half you were showing — including the half each other mode was left on. On the way back in it puts all of that back, so what you return to is what you left, right down to the pad colours.

The screen has to travel with the pads rather than being a nicety on top of them: the lit set is stored by Launchpad note, and which Move pad a note paints depends on the half, so restoring the colours without the view would paint them onto the wrong pads. The mode matters for the same reason, and because whether odd rows is offered at all, and which of the three mode buttons lights, are both read off it.

It has to, because nothing else will. Leaving the module and coming back does not make the M8 repaint: nothing in the MIDI protocol says "a Launchpad has just arrived" from this side — a real one is noticed because its USB device appears — so the M8 carries on believing it already painted everything, while the Move has been cleared to black underneath it.

The same memory covers the other way the pads get taken away: when Move's own keyboard borrows them for naming a song, the grid is put back from memory as soon as it hands them over, rather than staying dark until something else repaints it.

Nothing is said to the M8 on the way back in. The announcement that normally introduces the module is held back when there is a screen to restore, because the M8 answers it by initialising the surface from scratch — landing on Session and repainting, which is the very thing the restore is there to avoid.

A remembered screen goes stale after two minutes. Restoring one means taking it on trust that the M8 is still there and still on it — which is fair for a trip out to the Tools menu and back, and wrong after the Move has been sitting switched off or with the M8 unplugged. When it is wrong the cost is the worst kind: a grid full of old LEDs that looks live while nothing is connected. So the snapshot carries its age, and past two minutes it is ignored whole — no pads, no mode, no half — and the module introduces itself and shows Waiting for M8… exactly as on a first run.

There is no way to simply ask. A connected M8 sitting idle sends nothing at all, so silence cannot tell "here and quiet" apart from "gone", and waiting a moment to see would answer the wrong question. The clock is the only signal available.

Two things are left out of the restore on purpose. An odd-rows view is dropped back to the top half if Odd Rows has been switched off while you were away — from the browser, even — so the pads are not stranded on a layout the cycle cannot reach. And the restored screen is only a belief about where the M8 is: if the M8 moved on its own while the module was closed, the first mode button you press resyncs it, because that forgets the grid and lets the M8 repaint.

A mode change is deliberately left to the M8. Press Session, Note or Sequencer and the module forgets the grid rather than replaying it — the remembered pads belong to the screen you are leaving, and the M8 repaints for a screen change anyway, so replaying them would put the old screen up for the moment it takes the new ones to arrive. The pads go dark and fill in with what is actually there. Switching halves is not a mode change and keeps its memory, because the M8 sends nothing for that and the memory is all there is.

A handful of lights are painted only when the M8 first initialises a Launchpad and are not part of any screen repaint, so no memory on this side can recover them — Play, Rec and the Up Down arrows. If those are the ones that look wrong:

• M8 In MIDI Settings, set CTRL SURFACE away from “Launchpad Pro” and back again. The M8 initialises the surface from scratch, which repaints the lot.
• Or restart the M8, which does the same thing the long way round.

A pad or two is dark that ought to be lit

Most often after reopening, sometimes after changing view: one pad in an otherwise full row is out, and it is a different pad next time. The module was never told about it.

The M8 sends changes, not the grid. It paints a screen once and afterwards mentions only what moved, so the module's picture of the grid is only ever the sum of what it has been told — and on a mode change it deliberately forgets that picture, because the colours belong to the screen being left. Any pad the M8 has not mentioned since is a hole, and a hole paints as dark. Reopening cannot help: what is restored is the same picture, holes included.

Measured on the wire, to give a sense of the scale of it: reopening the module produced one LED message from the M8. Switching to Sequencer produced 20, and coming back to Session produced 38.

The fix is to make the M8 repaint: press another mode button and press your way back. A screen change is the one thing it always repaints for. It does not always fill every hole, because that repaint is itself only the changes the M8 believes it needs to send — and when it doesn't, re-picking CTRL SURFACE on the M8 initialises the surface from scratch and paints the lot.

This is worth knowing rather than worth fixing. The only thing that reliably produces a complete grid is that from-scratch initialisation, and it lands the M8 back on Session — so buying a complete grid automatically would cost you the screen you were on, every single time you opened the module.

The pads work but the knobs do nothing

The channels disagree. Knob Chan in Settings and CONTROL MAP CHANNEL on the M8 both default to 4; set them to the same thing. If the channel is right, the parameter has not been learned yet — cursor on it, hold OPTION, turn the knob.

A filter or envelope picture moves the wrong way

Almost always the two knobs are learned to each other's parameters. A swap turns a wide-open band into a closed one and back, so it looks exactly like the drawing is mirrored. Touch each knob and read what the header says it should be, then re-learn on the M8 — or swap the two CC numbers in Knob Settings, which leaves the M8 untouched.

A knob's header names the wrong instrument

Knobs made before the connection was recorded, or added through Generic, derive their description from their name — which can name the parameter but never the instrument. Use Connect to record it properly.