Parts that fit together
Each part on the shelf has a job. Keeping to those jobs is most of what makes an arrangement sound clear instead of crowded.
- Lead
- The melody: the part someone would hum.
- Harmony
- Chords or a second line that supports the lead.
- Bass
- A soft triangle wave, low down, that anchors each chord.
- Texture, Spark and Sub bass
- Three more parts that appear when you choose Add expanded sounds: room for pads, little counter-melodies and a deeper bass.
Stamping a chord
- Choose Harmony on the shelf and open Write.
- Set LEN to how long each chord should last. 1/2 holds for half a bar.
- Press CHORDS. A STAMP row appears with one button for each kind of chord.
- Click the grid where the chord should start, or move the cursor there with the arrow keys. The note you click is the chord’s lowest note.
- Press a chord button. All of its notes land at once.
TipIf the STAMP buttons do nothing, the cursor is not set yet: click the grid first.
Kinds of chord
- MAJ
- Major: bright and settled.
- MIN
- Minor: darker, thoughtful.
- MAJ7
- Major seventh: soft and a little jazzy.
- MIN7
- Minor seventh: mellow, good for lo-fi and soul.
- DOM7
- Dominant seventh: tense, it wants to move somewhere.
- DIM
- Diminished: unstable and dramatic.
- AUG
- Augmented: dreamy and unresolved.
- SUS4 and SUS2
- Suspended: open sounding, neither major nor minor.
- PWR
- Power chord: just the root and fifth. Strong and plain, good for rock and chiptune.
A progression to start with
Four chords, one every half bar, all built from the C minor scale (MINOR under SCALE): C minor, then A flat major, E flat major and B flat major. The studio names notes with sharps, so on the piano roll those roots are C, G#, D# and A#.
Stamp MIN on C4, then MAJ on G#3, D#4 and A#3. Loop it and write a melody over the top. The minor pentatonic tune from the last chapter uses only notes of C minor, so it fits too.
Writing a bass line
- Start with the root of each chord (the note you stamped it on), two octaves lower, on the beat.
- Add movement with octave jumps: the same note, twelve rows higher, on an off-beat.
- Follow the kick. A bass note that lands with the kick sounds tight; one that fights it sounds busy.
- Leave space. The bass does not need a note on every step.
Riffs
RIFFS works like the chord stamp, but lays down a short pattern at the cursor instead: ARP UP and ARP DN (a chord played one note at a time), OCTAVE, TRILL, STAB, RUN UP and RUN DN.
Moving parts around
- OCT- and OCT+
- Move a whole part down or up an octave. Notes pushed past the ends of the range are dropped.
- Copy part
- Copies this part’s notes, lengths and expression.
- Paste as variation
- Makes a new pattern containing the copied part, so the original stays as it is.
- More
- Holds Merge notes (add the copied notes to this part) and Replace part (swap them in).
You can paste a melodic part onto another instrument, for example to double the lead on Harmony, but not drums onto a melody or the other way round.