Pick a mood
Each mood writes a complete new song in its own colour. The song you have now stays one Undo away.
Start from a song
Feel
Three settings that change the whole song at once.
Scale swaps the set of seven notes the song is built from. Bright is the major scale and Moody the minor. The other three are called modes: each is one of those two with a single note moved, and that one note changes the colour.
Speed is counted in beats per minute (bpm). 60 is one beat a second. Pitch moves every note up or down together. Musicians call this changing the key.
Swing delays every second tick, so the rhythm goes long-short and bounces. Space adds the echo of a big room. Warmth softens the sharp high sounds.
Chords
A few notes played together. They set the mood, and every other part follows them.
Your song walks through four chords, one per bar, then starts again. A bar is a count of four beats.
Each chord has a job. Home feels like arriving. Pull feels unfinished and wants to go back Home. Songs are mostly a trip away from Home and back.
The small Roman numerals (I, IV, V, vi) are how musicians name chords by their position in the scale. Capital means a bright chord, lowercase a sad one.
Try: tap the fourth chord and change it to Pull. Listen to how it leads back into the first.
Sparkle
Optional. A light high part that plays these chords one note at a time.
Playing a chord one note at a time is called an arpeggio. It fills the empty space above the melody without getting in its way.
Try: turn it on with Music box or Harp and pick Twinkle.
Melody
The part you would hum. Tap a box to place a note. Higher rows sound higher.
Read the grid left to right, like text. Each column is a moment in time. Each row is a pitch. The rows with a bold letter are the home note, and tunes often dip a little below it.
A note can be short or long. The four lengths here are the ones written in sheet music: a whole note fills the bar, a half is two beats, a quarter is one beat and an eighth is half a beat. The lighter boxes after a note show how long it is held.
Tinted boxes belong to the chord playing in that bar, so they sound stable there. The plain boxes add tension and usually want to step to a tinted one.
Good melodies mostly move to the row next door, take a bigger jump now and then, and repeat a shape so the ear can remember it. Bar 3 here copies the shape of bar 1.
Try: press Clear, then tap three or four notes per bar, starting each bar on a tinted box.
Play it by ear
Tap the keys to find a tune. Press Record and whatever you play is written into the melody as the song goes round.
Drums
The beat. One bar of 16 boxes, repeated. Tap a box to add a hit.
The 16 boxes are four beats, each cut into four. The darker boxes are the beats you would tap your foot to.
The kick is the low thump. The snare is the crack that answers it, usually on beats 2 and 4. The hi-hat ticks in between and sets how busy things feel.
Try: put a kick on every dark box. That pattern is called four-on-the-floor. It drives house, techno and disco.
Bass
The lowest notes. It follows your chords by itself. You only choose its rhythm.
The bass plays the note each chord is named after, far below everything else. You feel it more than you hear it.
On phone speakers bass is quiet, so try headphones.
Try: switch between Long and Driving while the song plays. The notes are the same. Only the rhythm changes.
Song shape
Each column is a part of the song. Each row is one of your layers. A filled box means that layer plays during that part.
The usual trick: start with one or two layers, add more, drop back to almost nothing, then bring everything in for the biggest moment.
Each part plays one side of the song. Side A is the verse. Side B is the chorus, with its own chords and a higher, busier melody. Moving from one to the other is what makes a song feel like it is going somewhere.