Finding a demo

Ferrous Lineup comes with more than five hundred demos: folk songs and dances from all over the world, tangos, jazz standards, spirituals, ragtime, and orchestral music from Bach to Stravinsky. Each opens as a song you can play, read and change: its chords on the chord sheet with their numerals, its melody on its own channel, and a band playing it. This part of the manual is a guide to listening to them.

The Demos menu

File > Demos lists them all:

• The starting song: the beat and chords Ferrous Lineup opens with.
• Songs: more than 340 tunes with their melodies, sorted by genre: Latin American folklore, Tango, Jazz, Classical and film, Balkan and Turkish, Country and folk and more.
• Styles: each of the Library’s 215 harmony styles as a short song, to hear what a style does before you use it (see Styles and the Library).
• Twelve-tone: each row style as a short piece, playing the row forward, backwards, upside down and both (see Beyond keys: sets, rows and micromodes).
• Micromodes: each micromode style as a short piece, and Webern’s trichords, a famous row made of a single micromode.

Every list is in alphabetical order. Hold the pointer over a demo to read about it: who wrote it and when, and what to listen for in its harmony, its rhythm and its form.

Searching

Type in Search demos, at the top of the menu, and the submenus give way to one list of the demos that match:

A search looks at each demo’s title, who wrote it and when, its feel and genre, its key and its time signature, and last of all the notes about it. Each word you type has to start a word there: bach finds Bach, not Offenbach. Capitals and accents don’t matter, so fur elise finds Für Elise. Some searches to try:

The demos whose title starts with what you typed come first; demos where your words were found apart, or only in the notes, come last and fainter. Enter opens the first one, and the arrow keys go through the rest.

Opening a demo

Clicking a demo opens it in place of your song (asking first, if your song has unsaved changes) and plays it from the start. A song demo opens with the chord sheet in front, and the Library selects the style and the rhythm the demo is closest to. The title bar says (demo, read-only): change anything you like, and Save asks for a new file, so the demo stays as it was (see Saving, opening and recovering).

Ways to listen

A demo is a lesson that plays. Some ways to use one:

• Follow the chord sheet. The bar that plays is framed, and the numeral under each chord says what it does in the key (see What chords do). Coloured numerals mark the chords from outside the key (see Chords from outside the key).
• Watch the harmony keys. The chord that sounds lights up, and the chords that often come next are framed: guess which one comes.
• Open a part. Double-click a clip in the playlist to see its notes in the piano roll, the melody, the bass or the piano’s chords.
• Slow it down and loop it. The practice row plays a hard passage slower, and over and over (see Practising).
• Play along. You play takes a player away from the band so you can take the part yourself (see Locking a track, and playing your part).
• Change its style. Click a style in the Library and the band plays the same chords another way: a tango as a bossa nova, a folk song as a jazz waltz (see Styles and the Library).

The listening guide

The next chapters pick out demos worth hearing, a genre at a time, and say what to listen for:

• Folk music of South America, and the Misa Criolla: zambas, chacareras, huaynos and a Mass.
• Tango and Latin America: from the habanera to the tango, the choro and the bossa nova.
• Jazz, blues, gospel and pop: ragtime, the standards, the big bands and the blues.
• The concert hall: Bach, Beethoven, Ravel’s Boléro, Debussy and Stravinsky.
• Odd meters and the Balkans: dances in five, seven, nine and more.