The channel rack

The channel rack (F6, or View > Channel rack) shows one pattern, a row for each channel: each drum, and each instrument that plays notes. It is where you write drums, step by step, as on a drum machine.

Reading it

The window’s title names the pattern it shows, as in Channel rack · Beat. Each row has, from the left:

• a light, green while the channel is heard: click it to mute or unmute the channel;
• a knob for its volume: drag it up or down;
• a padlock, to keep the channel’s notes and sound when you try styles (see Locking a track, and playing your part);
• its name;
• its steps: sixteen to a bar, one for each sixteenth note, shaded dark and light beat by beat so you can count them.

A channel that plays melodies or chords shows a small picture of its notes instead of steps. Click it to open the piano roll.

Over the steps is a row of small lights. While the pattern plays, the light over the step that sounds is lit orange and its column is outlined, down every row.

Writing drums

Click a step to light it, and the drum plays there; click it again, or right-click it, to clear it. Press Space with the rack in front to hear the pattern over and over (or press L for pattern mode and Space), and change steps while it plays.

A good first beat in 4/4, in one bar of sixteen steps:

That is the backbeat of rock and pop: the low drum on the strong beats, the snare on the weak ones. Move a kick to step 11, the “and” of beat 3, and the beat gets a push.

When a pattern has no drum steps but others do, the rack says so, with a button for each pattern that has them, as in “No drum steps in Chords: click a step to add one. Drums are in: Beat, Fill”. Songs often keep their drums in patterns of their own.

Along the top

• Edit style… and New style… open the style editor (see Your own styles).
• ▶ Play pattern plays every channel of this pattern; while it plays, the button is Pause pattern, and ■ Stop pattern stops it.
• While the song plays, ▶ Play over the song plays the pattern on top of it instead, from the next bar and in time with it, until you click it again: a way to try a new pattern with the rest of the song.
• The list picks which pattern the rack shows, as the PATTERN list in the toolbar does.

Channels

• Click a name to select the channel and hear it; click it again, or an empty part of the rack, or press Escape, to select none. The selected channel is the one a MIDI keyboard or the computer keyboard plays.
• Double-click a name to open the channel’s piano roll.
• Right-click a name for its menu: Piano roll, its Instrument (see Sounds), sending it to an external synth over MIDI (see MIDI keyboards and synths), Lock or Unlock, and Remove channel. Delete removes the selected channel too, and Ctrl+Z brings it back.
• ➕ Add channel, under the rows, adds a drum (Kick, Snare, Clap, Hat, Open hat, Rim, Low tom, High tom, Ride, Crash, Cowbell, Shaker, Conga), a Lineup Osc (synth) to play notes, or a MIDI Out (external synth), whose notes play on a synth outside the app.

Your own sounds

Drag a WAV file from your file manager onto a channel’s name, and that channel plays it on every step you light, as a drum machine plays its samples. Dropped anywhere else on the rack, it gets a channel of its own. The song keeps where the file is, not the sound itself, so leave the WAV where it is: moved or deleted, the channel has nothing to play. A WAV longer than ten seconds is taken for a whole recording and imported as a new song instead.

Zoom

Over the rack, Ctrl with + and −, or with the mouse wheel, makes the whole rack bigger or smaller, and Ctrl+0 takes it back to 100%.