2. A melody over the beat
The bottom half of the grid is a keyboard in the key of the song. This tutorial puts a bassline on track 5, then shapes how the notes hit and how long they ring. Still no paging: one track page, one screenful of steps.
Pick the key
Press B5 for track 5, then R6 for Scale mode.
- The top two rows are a piano, black keys above white. Tap A for the root.
- The scale list starts on row 5, Major first. Tap the second pad of row 5, Minor. It turns green.
- Press R1 to go back to Note mode.
The key belongs to the project and sets the keyboard for every track, so the bass and the lead can’t drift out of the song. A single track can be given its own scale later with the bottom-right pad, and the simulator prints each pad’s name, which is the quickest way to learn the list.
Read the keyboard
The bottom four rows now hold only the notes of A minor, lowest at the bottom left, rising one scale note per pad to the right and then upwards. Every row starts on the root, so with a seven-note scale each row is exactly one octave: A2, B2, C3 … and the row above begins on A3. Root pads are tinted in the track colour so the octaves are easy to find.
Press a key to hear it. It sounds for as long as you hold it and changes nothing, so you can try a phrase out before writing it down.
SHIFT + the keyboard’s top-left key moves the whole keyboard up an octave, bottom-left moves it down — the way the notes run. A bass track usually wants one octave down. Each track remembers its own octave.
Write the notes
There are two ways round, and they do the same thing:
- Hold a step, tap a key. The step takes that note. Keep the step held and tap more keys to build a chord of up to four notes — a key you tap twice comes back out again.
- Hold the keys, tap a step. The step takes the chord you are holding. This is the faster way once you know what you want.
A step you simply tap on, as in the first tutorial, gets the last note you assigned on that track, so a run of notes at the same pitch takes one tap each.
To see what a step holds, hold it: the step goes green and its notes light green on the keyboard. That is also how you check a chord before changing it.
Play it in instead
- Press REC on the page panel. It lights red.
- Press PLAY, beside it, and tap keys in time.
- Each note lands on the nearest step: past the halfway point of a step it goes to the next one. The playhead runs red while it is listening.
- Press REC again to stop recording. Nothing is erased by recording — notes played onto the same step build a chord.
Shape the notes
Press R2 for Step parameters. The steps stay in the top four rows; below them are two lanes of 16 pads.
- Tap a step to select it — it turns green and the lanes show its values. Hold several steps to set them all at once.
- Rows 5–6, velocity: 16 levels from 8 to 127, left to right. The steps above glow brighter the harder they hit, so the accents of a whole pattern are visible at a glance. Put the downbeats high and the notes in between low.
- Rows 7–8, gate: how long the note lasts, one pad per length, shortest on the left. The first five pads are parts of a step — pad 1 is the shortest stab there is — pad 6 is one step, and it carries on to 16 steps on the last pad. One tap is one length; see Step parameters for the whole ramp.
- CLEAR + a step puts its velocity and gate back to normal; DUPLICATE + step + step copies both.
Press R1 to return to Note mode.
Keep it from repeating
Press R3 for Probability. Select a step and pick a level on rows 5–6: 16 levels from 6% up to 100%, which is where every step starts. Set a couple of ghost notes to a third or a half and the loop stops sounding quite the same each time round. Hold CLEAR and tap a step to put it back to certain.
What you learned
- R6 sets the key; the keyboard then plays only notes that fit.
- Hold a step and tap keys, or hold keys and tap a step — up to four notes each.
- Holding a step shows what is in it; SHIFT + an outer key shifts the octave.
- REC on the panel records what you play; R2 and R3 shape it afterwards.