Your first song

This chapter goes from an empty window to a song with a band playing it, in a few minutes. Each step has a chapter of its own later on; this is the short way through.

1. A new chord sheet

Choose File > New (Ctrl+N). The chord sheet opens on an empty song in C major, 4/4, at 110 beats per minute, and a band is ready to play it: a piano, a bass, drums and a guitar, in the Pop beat style, which the Library on the left shows lit.

2. Type the chords

Click bar 1 and type, pressing Tab after each bar:

C   Tab   Am7   Tab   Dm7 G7   Tab   C   Enter

Each chord appears where it falls, with its Roman numeral under it: C is I, Am7 is vi7, Dm7 and G7 share bar 3 as ii7 and V7. As soon as a bar holds a chord, the band writes its parts on the playlist, one track for each player.

The chord sheet has everything a bar can hold: any chord symbol, Roman numerals, pitch-class sets, and the marks that make the band stop or push.

3. Play

Press Space, or ▶ in the toolbar. The band plays the four bars, and starts again from the top until you press Space once more. The bar playing is framed in white on the sheet, and the harmony keys along the bottom light the chord sounding.

If you have not answered it yet, Ferrous Lineup offers to download a SoundFont, the recordings of real instruments that make the band sound like one. Say Download (about 30 MB, once); Sounds tells the whole story.

To go round only some of the bars, click one, Shift+click another, and press Loop in the sheet’s practice row.

4. Pick a style

The band’s style is how it plays: the rhythm of the drums, what the piano and the bass do with each chord. To try another one:

1. Click in the Search box at the top of the Library and type bossa.
2. Click Bossa nova. A small window asks what to take from it: its drums and chord and bass parts, its instruments, its time signature, tempo and swing, and its chord progression. What is ticked when it opens keeps your chords, so press Apply. The tempo becomes the bossa nova’s, 130 beats per minute.
3. Press Space. The same four chords, now as a bossa nova.

Pick styles while the song plays, and the band carries on in each new one. Ctrl+Z goes back to the style before. Styles and the Library describes the Library and every option of that window.

5. The tempo and the key

• Tempo: drag the TEMPO number in the toolbar up or down, or double-click it and type 140.
• Key: pick another key in the Key menu at the bottom left, such as D. The whole song moves up a tone, chords and band together, and the chord sheet now reads D, Bm7, Em7 A7, D. Pick C again to come back.

6. Give it a form

A band rarely plays a tune just once. The Form row of the sheet says how:

• Intro: 2, 4 or 8 bars the band plays before your first chord, with chords that lead into it. They are written on the sheet, so you can change them.
• Choruses: how many times the band plays the chords you wrote. Set it to 3.
• Ending: two more bars, where the band goes home to the tonic and holds it, with a crash of the cymbal.

Press Home to go back to the start and play it all: intro, three times through, ending. Song form and sections adds verses, choruses and variations.

7. Save it

Press Ctrl+S and give the song a name. Songs are saved as .lineup files, which hold the chords, the band, every note and every setting; File > Open… or File > Open recent brings them back. To share the music with someone who doesn’t have Ferrous Lineup, File > Export WAV… writes it as a sound file; see Exporting.

Where to go from here

• To play along: Practising with the band shows how to leave a player out and play the part yourself, slow the band down, or let it speed up a little every time round.
• To learn what the chords do: Notes, intervals and scales starts the short course in harmony.
• To hear something finished: File > Demos has more than five hundred songs and pieces, from folk songs to Stravinsky; see Finding a demo.