And whoever wrote the manual:
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Synthdawg made the manual. Look at his other manuals and they are better than factory manuals. I get people are upset over the manual, but I don’t think there is a good way to document this device, there’s no “press xxx and the result is xxx”
At this point, I don’t think there will be a good manual or a way to approach this device on paper. How are you going to document predictability of a device made to be a somewhat controllable random?
I don’t think Mathias or Lars or anyone at torso can wrap their mind around what they created at this point. I think they have something that is bigger than them. Bigger than what they ever planned to build. And it now has a mind of its own.
No one uses this device the same way, and no one can describe how they use this device in a way that makes sense to everyone else. It’s one of those things you just gotta try and see if it’s your thing.
This thing is the most unique thing that has been put out into the hardware world in more than a decade.
I can really only sum it up in a movie quote:
“I’m setting the example. What I’ve done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed… forever“
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Looking him up. OMG he did the Deluge manual too, which I absolutely hated as well. I don’t mean to spread negativity but I guess I’m not in line with his style of explaining and how it connects to the actual device is horrible in my opinion.
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Again…I don’t think ANYONE can write a decent manual for this device
Most people might be better off which a cheat sheet of button combos
(And there’s a bunch, but once you get what YOU need, it will click and flow)
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I disagree. You can always write a better manual that’s easier to grasp and understand, no matter the complexity of the device.
My main gripe is this convention:
That gets translated in this kind of instruction:
It would be a gazillion times easier to just include simple illustration of all buttons, instead of trying to use text in different convention for everything.
An example of a new manual that does this well is the EP-133:
which illustrates all buttons and it immediately clicks. I don’t have to translate any text convention to any button on the device and destroy my brain in the process.
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I also disagree
When it says [bank], I know exactly what I’m supposed to be pressing
Edit: best not to mention TE stuff to me, cause my buckets of shade are endless for them. The manual might be fine, but the devices are trash.
(Just trying to keep it civil, lmao)
Maybe you just need more pictures in a manual? That’s a real thing. Some people learn better that way.
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It’s all good! We can disagree and move on with our lives. 
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Another way to decode it is (anything in parenthesis is a knob) and [anything in brackets is a button]
Let’s drop it here mate, I didn’t mean to flog this topic with my gripes or our disagreements on what makes a good manual. It is a wonderful device that many people enjoy at the end of the day and hopefully soon I might be one of those as well.
I wish you have a wonderful day!
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Either way, I threw out the manual after a couple months. I got the basics outta it and then I just went for it.
It’s all good. No disagreements. Just different views.
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Nice video to learn basic Torso.
About midi visualisation, is there an Android app or something similar to see what torso does ?
When I was first getting to learn it, I made a cheat sheet for what I thought I needed to remember about it, which helped a bit. I need to go back and redo it with all the new features at some point, when I have time to get back to it. It’s still a whole lot, but they’re just because the machine is a while lot. Once it’s loaded in my head though, it suddenly gets transparent again. Building that sheet, though, was quite hard and there really wasn’t a good or easy way to organize it — the beauty and complexity of the machine is that everything does what it does in a more or less straightforward way, but that everything affects everything, which is where both the power and the complexity come from. So explaining any individual thing is easy enough, but explaining the outcomes is much harder.
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I get it, even after the rewrite, which was an improvement, it’s hard to follow. I use it more for reference and find feeling my way around it much more helpful. They just need a section called “how to save and now lose all your work in button command”, and that would be all I needed.
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I agree the manual can be a bit hard to parse in the beginning. But I found that each time I went back to it after a good session of using the device, it was easier and easier to understand and my learning accelerated. And I’d also recommend trying to tackle one major feature at a time, e.g. try to wrap your head around voicing before digging into cycles.
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The manual is daunting, but the device is daunting. The manual is just a reflection of that.
To put it another way, I think most of the criticism of the manual (some of which I’ve made myself) is that it’s organized by individual function as opposed to overall goal. It’s “here how pulses works” instead of “here’s how to make a song.” And there are a lot of functions! 
But apart from the fact that a goal-based manual would be a bad reference, I’ll be honest the T-1 just isn’t a good goal-based device for me. It’s a “here are the concepts I want to play with” device, and the song emerges from that, not the other way around.
So I do think that if one (as suggested above) takes the manual at its word and goes through, section by section with device in hand, to gain an understanding of each individual function, you will be rewarded by the end when it all starts to come together.
Maybe what we’re saying is that there’s room for a “cookbook” type document also? To give ideas on how the combine the ingredients we’ve mastered from the manual? The t|so videos are starting to nudge in that direction.
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I think that’s covered in a lot of the T-1 videos but it may help them out a bit to transcribe a few of those with image examples to a doc.
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Ha ha ha. That manual sucks. I honestly learn a lot more from this device just by using it. And there is a quick reference guide that someone put together that earlier in this thread that has helped me out immensely.
Their instructional videos are helpful but TBH I think they would really benefit from someone sitting down with them and doing like an hour long deep dive. Like, someone from Torso and someone who is outside of the company but who has some familiarity with the T-1
I’d be interested in knowing what folks would like to be covered. I’m not YouTuber but I could make a video on how I use the torso and do a deep dive into capabilities. However, as has been said, everyone uses it kinda differently
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Also these videos are great:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_Ft_TvtMQ6DbGvf39Nzfor-PzGOj-BUK&si=z_KlbqA4YeH0jxkD
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