What Ferrous Lineup does

Ferrous Lineup is a backing band you can learn harmony with. You write the chords of a song bar by bar, pick a style, and a band plays them: a piano, a bass and drums, and in many styles a guitar, strings, an organ or a horn section too. Change the style, the key or the tempo, and the band plays the song again the new way. While it plays, the app names every chord you hear and says what it does in the key.

Ferrous Lineup is free software: you can use it, share it and change it under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.

What you can do with it

• Play a song with a band. Type the chords on the chord sheet, choose one of the styles in the Library, and press Space. Give the song an intro and an ending, play the chorus twice, let the band dig in on the bridge, or stop on a shot with the band.
• Practise with it. Leave a player out and play the part yourself, loop the bars you are learning, start slow and let the speed trainer bring you up to tempo, and print a lead sheet for a B♭, E♭ or F instrument.
• Learn harmony. The harmony keys show the seven chords of the key, coloured by what they do. Every chord on the chord sheet has its Roman numeral under it, and chords from outside the key say where they come from. Part 5 of this manual is a short course in harmony with the app as your instrument.
• Edit every note. What the band plays lands on tracks of its own, as ordinary patterns. Open one in the piano roll to see how a bossa nova pianist spreads a chord, change it, or write your own parts from scratch.
• Listen and study. Hundreds of demo songs, from folk songs and tangos to jazz standards and Boléro, open with their chords written out, and the listening guide says what to listen for.
• Go beyond keys. Write with pitch-class sets, twelve-tone rows and Kröpfl’s micromodes, and see the same music named in each of them.
• Share it. Export the song as a WAV or MIDI file, as a video with the views playing along, or as a printable lead sheet. Connect a MIDI keyboard to play along, or an external synth to play the band.

How this manual is organized

1. Getting started: installing the app, the main window, your first song, and the instrument sounds.
2. Songs with the band: the chord sheet, the styles, song form, breaks, swing, the bigger band, the soloist and your own styles.
3. Editing notes: patterns and the playlist, the channel rack, the piano roll, the harmony keys, tempo and key changes, and the settings.
4. Sound, MIDI and files: the mixer, MIDI keyboards and synths, saving and opening, and exporting.
5. Learning harmony: notes and scales, keys and modes, chords and what they do, voice leading, rhythm and meter, sets and rows, and practising.
6. The demos: how to find them, and a guide to listening to them.

At the end are the keyboard shortcuts, troubleshooting, a music glossary and an index.

How the manual writes things

• Words in bold are written as the app shows them: a button, a menu item, a window.
• A path through the menus is written with >: File > Demos > Songs means the File menu, then Demos, then Songs.
• Ctrl is the Control key on Linux and Windows. On a Mac, use ⌘ (Command) wherever this manual says Ctrl.
• Notes are named with letters (C, D, E, F♯). The app can name them in solfège instead (Do, Re, Mi, Fa♯): see Settings.

The app is also in Spanish, and so is this manual: the manual de usuario. How the program is built, and why, is in a separate book, Inside Ferrous Lineup, written for people who want to read or change its code.

Installing it

Ready-made programs for Linux, macOS and Windows are on the Releases page of the project. Open the newest release and download the file for your computer. Nothing else needs installing: the sounds, the fonts and the video encoder come with the app.

The … is the version, such as v0.4.1. Help > About Ferrous Lineup in the app shows the version you are running.

Linux

The AppImage. A downloaded file is not allowed to run until you say so. In a file manager, open the file’s Properties, and under Permissions tick Allow executing file as program; then double-click it. In a terminal:

chmod +x ferrous-lineup-v0.4.1-linux-x86_64.AppImage
./ferrous-lineup-v0.4.1-linux-x86_64.AppImage

If it does not start and mentions FUSE, install the FUSE 2 library (libfuse2, or libfuse2t64 on newer Ubuntu), or start it with --appimage-extract-and-run after its name.

The .deb. Install it with:

sudo apt install ./ferrous-lineup_0.4.0-1_amd64.deb

It adds Ferrous Lineup to the applications menu, and file managers open .lineup projects with it. sudo apt remove ferrous-lineup removes it; your songs stay where you saved them.

The .tar.gz. Unpack it and start ferrous-lineup in the folder:

tar -xzf ferrous-lineup-v0.4.1-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
./ferrous-lineup-v0.4.1-linux-x86_64/ferrous-lineup

Every desktop Linux has the sound and window libraries the app needs. The plain folder also needs the keyboard library libxkbcommon-x11-0, which the other two bring along or install.

Windows

The Setup program installs Ferrous Lineup with a Start menu entry and an uninstaller (in Settings > Apps), and double-clicking a .lineup project opens it. The program is not signed, so the first time Windows may show a blue window, “Windows protected your PC”: choose More info, then Run anyway.

The .zip is the same program without an installer: unzip it anywhere and double-click ferrous-lineup.exe.

macOS

Open the .dmg and drag Ferrous Lineup onto the Applications folder next to it, then start it from Applications.

The app is not notarized by Apple, so the first time macOS may say it cannot check it for malicious software. Try to open it once, then open System Settings > Privacy & Security and allow it there. On older versions of macOS, right-click the app and choose Open instead.

Once the app is in Applications, double-clicking a .lineup file in the Finder opens it in Ferrous Lineup.

The first start

Ferrous Lineup opens with a short song and its chord sheet, ready to play: press Space. The first time, it offers to download a set of real instrument sounds, about 30 MB, as soon as it opens; Sounds says what that is. Then go on with The main window and Your first song.

The app starts in English. It also speaks Spanish: **Edit > Settings…

Appearance > Language > Español** switches it at once, and it starts in Spanish from then on.

Checking a download

Each release lists a SHA256SUMS.txt file: a fingerprint of every download. If you want to be sure a download arrived whole, put it in a folder with that file and run, on Linux:

sha256sum --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS.txt

On a Mac, shasum -a 256 <file> prints a file’s fingerprint, and in Windows PowerShell Get-FileHash <file> does; it must match the line for that file.

Building it yourself

You can also build Ferrous Lineup from its source code, on any of the three systems. The book Inside Ferrous Lineup says how.

The main window

From top to bottom, the window has:

1. The menus: File, Edit, View, MIDI and Help. Next to them, a line of hints says what the thing under the mouse does.
2. The toolbar: playing, the tempo, the position, the pattern, the windows and the volume.
3. The Patterns and Library panel on the left, and the playlist in the middle, where the song is laid out in time. Windows such as the channel rack, the chord sheet and the piano roll open over it.
4. The harmony keys along the bottom: the key, the time signature and a big key for each chord of the key.
5. The status bar: messages, the sound output, and the playlist’s zoom.

The menus

The toolbar

From left to right:

Point at any button to see its name and its key.

The Patterns and Library panel

The panel on the left has two tabs:

• Library, in front when the app starts: the styles, rhythms and fills the band can play, and your own styles. Click one to try it in your song. See Styles and the Library.
• Patterns: the song’s patterns, the blocks the playlist is made of. Click one to select it. See Patterns and the playlist.

Alt+F8, or View > Patterns and library, hides the panel to give the playlist more room.

The playlist

The playlist is the whole song laid out in time: bars from left to right, and tracks one under another, each holding clips of patterns. Above the tracks are three strips:

• Sections: drag along it to mark a section, such as Intro, Verse or Chorus.
• Tempo: the song’s tempo as a line; click it to change the tempo from a bar on.
• Bars: the bar numbers, with the time signature and the key where they change. Click a number to move the playhead there; drag along them to loop part of the song; right-click one for its menu.

Patterns and the playlist tells how to work with it.

The windows

Each window opens over the playlist, at the size of what it shows, and remembers where you left it. Close one with its ×, its window button, or its key.

View also opens the Lead sheet, the Style editor… and Ear training.

The first time, the app starts with the chord sheet, the Library and the harmony keys open. After that, it starts with the windows that were open when you closed it. What comes to the front then depends on what you open: a song opens with the chord sheet in front, a beat (File > New beat) with the channel rack.

The status bar

The bottom line says what just happened (“Saved”, “Instruments play from GeneralUser GS”, what went wrong and why) and which sound output is in use. At its right are the playlist’s two zooms: how wide the bars are (↔) and how tall the tracks are (↕).

Keys that work everywhere

F1, or Help > Keyboard shortcuts, lists every key the app answers to, window by window; the same list is in Keyboard shortcuts.

Help > User manual opens this manual in your web browser, in the language the app speaks.

Help > About Ferrous Lineup shows the version you are running, the license, and links to this manual (on the web and as one PDF file), the book, the source code and the list of known problems.

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.

Sounds

Ferrous Lineup can play its instruments in two ways:

• with its own synthesizer, the Lineup Osc, which builds every sound from a few simple waves. It needs nothing else, and it is what plays until you choose otherwise;
• with a SoundFont, a file of recordings of real instruments: a piano, a double bass, a bandoneón, a choir, a drum kit. This is how the band should sound.

When the app opens

The first time you open Ferrous Lineup, before anything plays, a window called Real instrument sounds offers to download GeneralUser GS, a free SoundFont by S. Christian Collins, of about 30 MB, and asks “Play the instruments with it?”. If the app first offers to bring back unsaved work, the sounds come right after.

• Download fetches it once and keeps it on your computer. A bar shows how far it is, and Stop gives up. When it is done, the status bar says “Instruments play from GeneralUser GS”, and every instrument plays its recording from then on, next time too.
• Choose a file… uses another SoundFont you already have, any .sf2 file made for General MIDI.
• Not now, or closing the window, keeps the Lineup Osc. The app does not ask again; the setting below is there when you change your mind.

If GeneralUser GS is already on your computer, downloaded by an earlier version for instance, the window says so and offers Use it instead of Download: a moment later the instruments play from it. Until you answer, it asks again each time the app opens, and when you press Play or open a demo. Your answer and the sound settings below stay when you update Ferrous Lineup.

If the download fails (no network, a firewall), the window says why. You can download GeneralUser-GS.sf2 from its page with a browser and pick it with Choose a file….

The sound settings

Edit > Settings…, under Audio, holds the same choices:

The Audio page also says which output the sound goes to, and has Restart audio for when the sound card stops (see Troubleshooting).

WAV and video exports, the computer keyboard and a MIDI keyboard all play the SoundFont too.

An instrument for each channel

Every channel that plays notes has an instrument, one of the 128 of General MIDI, the standard list of instruments that every synthesizer and SoundFont numbers the same way, from the grand piano to the gunshot. The band’s players, the Library’s piano and bass, and every voice of every demo come with the right one.

To change a channel’s instrument:

• in the channel rack, right-click the channel’s name and open Instrument, or
• in the mixer, click the instrument’s name on the channel’s line.

The instruments are grouped as General MIDI groups them: pianos, organs, guitars, basses, strings, brass, reeds and so on. None (the Lineup Osc’s own sound) gives the channel back to the Lineup Osc, whatever the SoundFont setting says.

The same menu can also send the channel to an external synthesizer over MIDI: see MIDI keyboards and synths.

Your own sounds

The channel rack also plays sounds of your own. Drag a WAV file from your file manager onto a channel of the rack, and that channel plays it on each step you light, as a drum machine plays its samples. See The channel rack.

The chord sheet

The chord sheet is the song’s harmony, bar by bar, written the way a lead sheet writes it. It is where you type a song for the band, and where you read the chords of any song the app plays. Open it with F5, the first of the window buttons in the toolbar (a page of chord names), or View > Chord sheet. A song from File > Demos and a new song from File > New open with the sheet in front.

Reading the sheet

• Each bar shows its number in the corner, and the time signature where it changes.
• Each section starts a new line, under its name: “Verse”, “Chorus”. A section played three times is headed “Verse ×3”. A double bar line marks where a section starts, and the final bar line, thin then thick, where the song ends.
• Each chord sits where its beat falls. “C A7” in a bar of four beats puts C at the start of the bar and A7 halfway along, on beat 3.
• Under each chord is its Roman numeral in the key: in C major, Fm is iv, and A7, which leads to Dm, is V7/ii. A chord with another note in the bass gets the figures musicians use for inversions: G7/B is V⁶₅, C/E is I⁶. Under a set or a micromode, its notes. What chords do explains what the numerals mean.
• A bar with nothing in it goes on with the chord before, written faintly so the bar does not look empty.
• A key change is written at the top right of the bar where it happens, such as “→ G major”.

Point at a chord to have it explained: “A7: A dominant seventh, V7/ii in C major. A secondary dominant: A7 is the dominant of Dm, the ii of C major, as if Dm were a tonic. … Its notes: A C# E G.” Hold the mouse button down on it to hear it, with its bass note under it.

While the song plays, the bar playing is framed in white and the chord sounding is the brightest name on the sheet. The sheet scrolls along with the song while Follow playhead is on (the button with the arrow in the toolbar).

Typing chords

Click a bar to select it (it gets an orange frame), and type. The first key opens a field over the bar.

So typing a song is: click bar 1, then C, Tab, Am7, Tab, Dm7 G7, Tab, C, Enter.

If the computer keyboard is playing notes (MIDI > Typing keyboard to piano is on), the letter keys play instead of typing: double-click the bar or press Enter first.

What a bar can hold

Several harmonies go in one bar, separated by spaces:

Chords and their names lists the ways a chord can be written: Cmaj7, CM7 and CΔ are all read, Cm7 and C-7 too. What you type is written back in one way: a numeral becomes its chord (“V7” in B♭ major is written F7), and “CM7” becomes Cmaj7. Sets, micromodes and rows are explained in Beyond keys.

If something in a bar cannot be read, the field stays open and the reason is written above the sheet in red, for example: Bar 3: “Hm7” is not a chord (Am7, G/B), a set (3-11 T2, {0,4,7}), a micromode (Menor 3), a row form (P0, RI7) or N.C. Nothing changes in the song until the whole bar reads.

Where the chords fall in a bar

The sheet follows the convention of lead sheets for several chords in one bar:

In 3/4, two chords take two beats and one: “C G7” puts G7 on beat 3. With a / anywhere in the bar, every word is one beat, so you can put a chord on any beat you like.

Writing what the song plays

A song opens with its chords on the sheet already. A demo writes the chart it was made from; any other song, such as a MIDI file you opened or a recording you imported, gets the chords the app hears in it.

Write the chords the song plays, at the top of the sheet, writes them again from what the song plays now, in place of what the sheet says. Use it after you change the notes in the piano roll. It writes the bass player’s note after the slash when that note is in the chord, writes each section’s first chord again at its start, as charts do, and in a song whose key is a set or a row it writes sets or micromodes. One Undo takes it all back. While a band plays from the sheet the button is hidden, since the band’s notes come from the sheet.

Changing the bars

Right-click a bar for its menu:

• Type in this bar, Clear this bar, Move the playhead here;
• Insert a bar before and Insert a bar after add an empty bar, and everything after it moves along: notes, chords, sections, key, tempo and time markers. The new bar is empty, so the chord before goes on through it, as in a printed chart.
• Delete this bar takes the bar out, with its notes and chords, and everything after it moves back. The key, tempo and chord that were going on at the end of the deleted bar go on after it.
• End the song here: the band stops after this bar.
• Band on …: a break for the band on that chord (see Shots, holds, rests and pushes).
• Variation a, Variation b and Style for the band, from that bar on (see Song form and sections).

To work on several bars at once, click one and Shift+click another, or use Shift with the arrow keys; Ctrl+A selects every bar. Clicking a section’s name selects all of its bars. The bar numbers on the playlist’s ruler have the same insert and delete items.

How it looks

At the top of the sheet:

• Show names the same harmony in other ways, without changing a note: As written, as Chords, as Pitch-class sets or as Micromodes. Beyond keys tells what each says.
• Bars per line: Fit the names puts as many bars on a line as show every name, and the numeral under it, at its full size: 1, 2, 4, 8, 12 or 16, so that lines start where four-bar phrases do. A name may sit just after its beat when the one before needs the room, and words after the numeral, such as “borrowed”, are written where they fit (the numeral’s colour and the name’s hint say the same). The menu shows how many fit now, as Fit (4). With the sheet in the main window, the zoom keys over it change the size of everything, so zooming out fits more bars. Or pick a number, and names that don’t fit get smaller.
• ⛶ Fill the window puts the sheet in the playlist’s place in the main window, where a line holds more bars. Back to the playlist puts it back in its own window. The same switch is View > Chord sheet in the main window.

These choices are remembered for next time.

Chord sheets as text

Charts are often passed around as text, in a message or a forum post. Ferrous Lineup reads and writes them:

Title: Autumn Song
Key: C major
Tempo: 120
Style: Bossa nova

[Verse ×2]
| C  | Am7 | Dm7 G7 | C |
| F  | %   | G7     | C |

• File > Import chord sheet… opens a .txt file like this one (or drop it on the window) as a new song, with the band playing it and the chord sheet open. If a line cannot be read, nothing is imported and the status bar says which line and why.
• File > Export chord sheet… writes the song’s sheet the same way, with the bars lined up in columns.
• On the sheet, Ctrl+C copies the selected bars as text, and Ctrl+V pastes text from the selected bar on. Pasting brings only the chords; the song keeps its own key, tempo and style. A single line with no |, such as “Dm7 G7”, goes into one bar.

Everything but the bars is optional:

In a bar goes exactly what you would type in a bar of the sheet: % plays the bar before again, and an empty bar | | goes on with the chord that was playing; ||, |: and :| are read as plain bar lines. A Key: or Time: line between bars changes the key or the time from the next bar on.

Roman numerals are read in the chart’s key, so this chart:

Key: F major
| I | vi | ii7 V7 | I |

is F, Dm, Gm7 C7, F, and the same text with Key: D major is D, Bm, Em7 A7, D: one progression in any key.

Styles and the Library

A style is a way for the band to play: the drum groove, the rhythm the piano strikes the chords in (musicians call that comping), what the bass plays, and in many styles a guitar, strings or an organ. A style also has a usual tempo and a swing, and many bring a well-known chord progression of their kind of music.

The Library, the tab in front on the left of the main window, holds about two hundred styles: pop, rock, blues, jazz, soul and funk, hip hop, electronic, Latin, tango, Latin American folklore, flamenco, reggae, country and folk, classical and film music, dances in odd meters, and the styles you make yourself.

Finding a style

• Search: type a name, a kind of music, a time signature or an instrument, such as bossa, tango, 6/8 or accordion. × clears the search.
• In 4/4 keeps only the styles in the song’s time signature.
• Near 110 BPM keeps only the styles made for about the song’s tempo, at most 1.15 times faster or slower.
• With chords keeps only the styles that bring a chord progression.
• Swing keeps only the styles whose drums swing.
• Any instrument opens the list of the instruments the styles bring, and the drums. Choose one, such as Accordion, to keep only the styles that bring it.

The tick boxes name the song’s own time signature and tempo, and the filters are remembered for next time. When nothing is left, the Library says whether the search or the filters did it.

The styles are grouped by genre, with your own styles in a group of their own, and a search opens the groups it finds something in. Edit > Settings… > Library > Style list > Alphabetical list shows them all in one list instead.

Each style shows its time signature when it is not 4/4, as in Waltz (3/4). Point at one to read what it is: what to listen for, its progression in C as chords and as Roman numerals, its time signature, tempo and length in bars, and its drums.

Under the styles are three groups you can open:

• Twelve-tone rows and Micromodes (Kröpfl): styles that play a twelve-tone row or a micromode instead of chords. The key becomes the row or the micromode, starting on the key note; see Beyond keys: sets, rows and micromodes.
• Fills: one bar of drums each: Snare roll, Tom fill, House build, Latin fill, Hip hop fill and Crash ending. While the song plays, a click puts the fill in the last bar of the song’s drum patterns.

Trying a style

Click a style. A small window asks what to take from it. Each option brings one part of the style; unticked, the song keeps its own:

Next to each option, now: says what the song has and where it came from, so you can see what the option would replace. Press Apply, or Cancel to leave the song as it is. The window starts with the choices you confirmed last, also the next time you start the app.

Ctrl+click a style (⌘-click on a Mac) applies it at once, with the choices you made last. Ctrl+Z undoes a style, whichever way it was applied.

What the first choices do:

• Your chords stay. With Chord progression off, every style you try plays the chords already on the sheet. A style with no progression has its option greyed out.
• The tempo comes. With Tempo ticked, a style in the song’s own time signature brings its usual tempo, where most of the song plays, and any tempo changes move with it. Untick it to keep the song’s tempo while you try styles. A style in another time signature changes the bars instead, and each bar lasts as long as before: a song at 112 beats per minute in 4/4 becomes 84 in 3/4, the same pace counted in three, and goes back to 112 when a 4/4 style comes back. The song’s own time signature is the one it came with, so a style brings the same tempo whichever styles you tried before it.

The three accompaniment options go together as you like:

• Drums alone: the style’s drums under your own chord and bass parts, played in the style’s time signature if it is ticked.
• Chord and bass parts alone: the style’s way of playing the chords and the bass, with the drums you had.
• Voices / instruments alone: your own parts with the style’s sounds. The tracks named Keys and Bass, or the one chosen in the rack, take its piano and its bass. In a song without them, such as an imported MIDI file, each track but the tune takes the style’s sound for its family: a bass its bass, a piano its piano, a guitar its guitar, an organ or an accordion its organ (or its piano), and strings its strings.

So you can take one style’s drums and another’s chord and bass parts.

Where a style goes

• With a band, as in a song from File > New, a demo or an imported chord sheet, and whenever SONG is lit in the toolbar, the style becomes the band’s way of playing the whole song. While the song plays, the band goes on in the new style from where it is, so you can click through styles and hear each one over your chords.
• In pattern mode with no band (PAT lit, as in a beat from File > New beat), a click writes the style into a pattern of its own, a trial pattern, and plays it there, leaving the song alone. The next style you click rewrites the same pattern, as long as you have not changed it.

Right-click a style for two more choices:

• Play the whole song with this preset applies it to the whole song, even in pattern mode.
• Edit a copy in channel rack… opens a copy in the style editor, to change it and save it as your own (see Your own styles).

Where each part came from

At the top of the Library, nine lines say where each part of the song comes from: Drums, Chord and bass parts, Melody, Instruments, Time signature, Key, Chords, Tempo and Swing. Each one names the demo or the style it came from, says edited, was … once you change that part yourself, or yours when nothing brought it in. A melody only comes from a demo: styles bring none. Some lines also say what the part is, as in 4/4, C major, 130 BPM or even. Drums and Chord and bass parts name two styles when you took them from two. A line too long for the panel is cut short; point at it to read it all. A Sections line lists the sections played in other styles (see Song form and sections), and a Locked line the tracks that styles leave alone (see Locking a track, and playing your part). Undo, redo and saving keep all of it.

Progressions from the Library

The chord sheet’s Progression button opens the same list, with the same search and tick boxes, showing only the styles that bring a chord progression. Pick one, and its chords are written on the sheet from the selected bar on, in the song’s key, without changing the band’s style. The selection moves past them, so the next progression you pick goes on after it. It is a quick way to start a song: Progression, then Four chords, gives you I V vi IV, the progression of a thousand pop songs.

The Library settings

Edit > Settings… > Library has:

• Style list: Group by genre, as the app starts, or Alphabetical list.
• Style application defaults: the choices each style’s window starts with, as buttons to switch on and off (Drums, Chord and bass parts, Instruments, Chords, Meter, Tempo, Swing). Edit defaults… opens them as a style’s window does. Changing them changes the next style you apply, not the song.
• Your styles: Styles folder… chooses the folder your saved styles are read from (see Your own styles).

Song form and sections

A band doesn’t play a tune once and stop dead. It plays a few bars to set the key and the groove (the intro), then the tune, then the tune again, maybe several times, and then it ends: it lands on the home chord and holds it. Along the way it plays some parts fuller than others, and some songs change style halfway through. This chapter shows how to give a song that shape.

The Form row

The chord sheet’s Form row shapes the whole performance:

• Intro: No intro, 2 bars, 4 bars or 8 bars. The band puts that many bars in front of the song, with chords that lead into its first chord. They are written on the sheet under Intro, so you can read them, hear them and change them. Picking a length again writes them anew, and No intro takes them away. The rest of the song, melody and all, moves along to make room.
• Choruses: how many times the band plays the tune. The sheet shows it once, under Chorus ×3, between the repeat signs of printed music, and while it plays, the row shows which time round it is: “▶ 2 of 3”.
• Ending: two more bars after the last chorus. The band goes to the key’s home chord, plays one bar of it in the style, then strikes it once and holds it through the last bar, with a crash of the cymbal. The two bars are shown in grey under Ending, the last one marked held.

“Chorus” means once through

In a pop song, the chorus is the part that comes back after each verse. Jazz musicians use the word another way: a chorus is once through the whole tune, from the top of the chart to its last bar. A soloist “takes two choruses”; the band plays the melody for one chorus, then solos over several, then the melody again. The Form row uses the word the jazz way: one chorus is every bar on the sheet after the intro. The verses and choruses of a pop song are all inside it.

The intro: a turnaround

A turnaround is the handful of chords at the end of a tune that “turn it around” and lead back to the top. It makes the best intro, because the tune’s first chord then sounds like an arrival. Its engine is the dominant seventh: in C major, G7 (G B D F) holds B, which pulls up to C, and F, which pulls down to E. And D minor leads to G the way G leads to C, because roots that fall by fifths (A, D, G, C) are the strongest way chords move. See What chords do.

Into a minor chord, the ii is half-diminished (B D F A before Am), the chord that really sits on the second note of A minor, and the V is still a dominant seventh, E7, with G♯: the leading tone, a semitone under A, which pulls to it much harder than the G of E minor would.

The numerals are counted from the chord the intro leads to. Most songs start on their home chord, and then that is the same as the key. A song in C that starts on F gets Gm7, C7: the ii and V of F, so the intro still leads straight into the first chord. A song that starts on a pitch-class set, a micromode or a diminished chord gets a vamp instead: the band plays the first harmony from the first bar, setting up the sound before the tune comes in.

The ending: home, and held

The ending goes to the tonic, the chord the whole key leans towards. If the song starts on its tonic, the ending plays that very chord: a blues in C that starts on C7 ends on C7. Otherwise it plays the key’s plain chord, C in C major, Am in A minor. A song that changes key ends in the key its last chorus ends in. Type a chord in an ending bar, and it becomes part of the tune: the chorus grows to take it in, and the ending moves on after it.

End the song here, in a bar’s right-click menu, says where the band stops: it ends with that bar, and the chords written after it are cleared.

Sections

Most songs have parts with names: an intro, verses, a chorus, a bridge. Sections are marked on the playlist, in the strip above the bar numbers:

• Drag along the Sections strip to mark one. It takes the first usual name not used yet (Intro, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Outro…). ➕ Section in the playlist’s toolbar marks the next stretch of the song after the last one.
• Drag a section to move it, or its right edge to make it longer or shorter.
• Click a section for its menu: Select clips in this section, its Name (type one or click Intro, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Outro, Pre-Chorus, Solo, Break or Drop), Play it a number of times (a section is drawn once and played that many times), 🔁 Loop this section, ⧉ Duplicate (a copy, with its clips, right after it), ⇶ Write out the repeats (turns “×3” into three copies, so each time round can be changed on its own) and 🗑 Delete section (the clips under it stay).

On the chord sheet, each section starts a new line under its name, as “Verse ×2” when it plays twice. Click a section’s name on the sheet to select all its bars; right-click it for the menu below, for the whole section.

Variations a and b

A band doesn’t play every part of a song the same way. The verse is lighter, so the words come through; in the chorus the drummer, the bassist and the pianist all lift at once. Every style has two variations: a is the style as it is, and b is the same style played fuller.

Right-click a bar on the chord sheet and pick Variation a or Variation b: the band plays that variation from that bar to the next change, or to the end. To change only some bars, select them first (click the first, Shift+click the last) and right-click one of them; the bars after them keep what they played. A boxed letter marks each change, on the sheet after the bar number and on the playlist’s bar numbers, like the rehearsal letters over the staff in band parts.

The drums announce each change: the bar before it gets a fill, and the first beat of the new variation a crash cymbal, the signal real drummers give.

What “fuller” means:

The hi-hat is two cymbals that the drummer closes with a pedal: a short, dry “tick”. The ride is one large cymbal that rings, a shimmering wash that fills more of the sound. A cross-stick is the stick laid across the snare, its end clicking on the rim: soft and woody. Moving from one to the other is the most common way a band lifts a chorus. Where a style has no well-known busier way to play (a tango, a bossa nova, a chorale), variation b only changes the drums and the loudness.

A style for some bars

Many songs change their feel partway through: a verse as a bossa nova and a bridge in swing, a pop song that goes to half time for its bridge. The same right-click menu has Style: …, which names the style playing in that bar. Open it, then a genre, and pick a style: the band plays it from that bar on, or only in the bars selected. The sheet writes the style’s name at the bar where it starts. The song’s style, at the top of the menu, goes back to the band’s own.

A style for some bars changes how the band plays: the piano’s comping, the bass line, the drums, the guitar, strings and organ patterns, and the swing. It keeps who plays: the same piano and the same bass go from the bossa nova verse to the swing bridge, as in a real band. The drums play the outgoing style’s fill into the change and a crash on its first beat.

The menu lists only the styles in the time signature of those bars. To play a waltz in the middle of a song in 4/4, change the time signature of those bars first (see Tempo, time signatures and key changes).

Shots, holds, rests and pushes

A style plays the same groove bar after bar, and that is what makes it a style. But listen to a real band: at the end of a phrase they all hit one chord together and stop dead, or hold a chord out under the singer, or drop out for a bar so the drummer or the soloist is alone, or come in with the next chord a little before the beat. Arrangers write these moments into the chart, and they are what make a band sound arranged rather than looped. The chord sheet has a mark for each.

Typing the marks

Dots after a harmony stop the band; carets before it bring it in early:

A push can be joined to a stop: ^G7. is a shot an eighth note early. Under each marked harmony, a word says what the band does there (shot, hold, rest, push); point at it for the whole sentence. N.C. keeps its own dots: they are part of its name.

Try it: press Ctrl+N and type these bars, one per bar:

C   ^F   G7.   Am..   F G7...   ^^C   F G7   C

• bar 2: the band plays F on the “and” of beat 4 of bar 1, an eighth note early, and lets it ring over the bar line;
• bar 3: the whole band strikes G7 once, with a kick and a crash, and then nothing until bar 4;
• bar 4: Am struck and held for the whole bar;
• bar 5: F in the style for two beats, then silence where G7 is;
• bar 6: C a sixteenth note early;
• bars 7 and 8: the style again.

Setting them from a menu

Right-click a bar and open Band on G7 (there is one for each harmony in the bar) to pick Shot (.), Hold (..) or Rest (…), and Push (^) or Push a sixteenth (^^). As the style goes and On the beat take the marks off. Like every change on the sheet, the band plays again, Ctrl+Z takes it back, and the marks are copied with the bars, as text too.

The music

Shots. A shot (also a hit, a stab or a kick) is a chord the whole band plays at once, short and accented, followed by silence. Big band charts are full of them, the drummer playing them with the band on the crash cymbal and the bass drum. A run of shots, one at the start of each bar or two, is called stop-time: the band plays only the hits and leaves the rest of the bar to the singer, the soloist or a tap dancer. The verses of Muddy Waters’ Hoochie Coochie Man are a famous stop-time groove. In Ferrous Lineup each player strikes the shot its own way, the piano its chord, the bass its note, the guitar a strum, a little harder than the style, and the drums play a kick and a crash. The harmony is still there for whoever plays over the silence.

Holds. A hold is a chord struck and held: at the end of a phrase, under the last word of a line, or to let a soloist play freely over one harmony. It is not a fermata: a fermata stops the beat, and the band waits for the conductor, while a hold lasts exactly until the next harmony, and the beat goes on underneath.

Rests. A rest is the band dropping out, drums too. Arrangers call it a break: in jazz the band stops for a bar or two and the soloist plays alone, and in funk and hip hop, the bars where only the drummer played gave the “breakbeat” its name. Write the drums’ break yourself in the piano roll, or play it with You play (see Locking a track, and playing your part).

Pushes. A push, or anticipation, is a chord played before the beat it belongs to and held over it. Without it, the downbeat is the strongest moment of the bar; with it, the chord comes early and beat 1 is silent, and the music leans forward. That is syncopation, an accent off the beat, and pushes are everywhere in pop, rock, funk and Latin music: in the salsa tumbao, the bass plays the next chord’s root on beat 4, held over the bar line. A push of a sixteenth note is subtler, the pull of funk and fast Latin music.

The caret looks like the marcato, the accent musicians write over a note to play it strongly, and a push is played with an accent.

Swing and feel

Clap along to a jazz or blues record and say “da-da da-da” with the eighth notes. It won’t fit: the band plays “doo-ba doo-ba”, a long note and a short one, in every beat. That unevenness is swing, and it is why a shuffle bounces and a pop song doesn’t.

The Swing control

Swing sits in the playlist’s toolbar, next to Loose, and on the chord sheet, next to the key and the tempo. Drag the number up or down, from straight (even eighth notes) to 100%. Try it on File > Demos, Midnight Shuffle, while it plays: the drums, the piano, the bass and the harmonica all change their feel together, and not a single note moves in the piano roll. Swing is played, not written: the notes stay on the grid, and playback moves the second eighth note of each beat later. Saving keeps it, Ctrl+Z takes it back, and WAV and MIDI exports play it.

How long is the long note?

The 100% row is how textbooks explain swing: split the beat into three (a triplet) and play the first two parts as one note. That is why jazz charts write plain eighth notes with “Swing” over the first bar: writing every pair as a triplet would fill the page with brackets and threes. Real players don’t stick to one ratio. They swing harder at slow tempos and even out at fast ones, where there is no time for a long-short pair, so try the whole range.

A swung pair is not the same as a dotted eighth and a sixteenth (3 : 1). That is a rhythm of its own, sharper, like the “Hap-py” of Happy Birthday, and swing leaves it alone: it only moves notes that sit on the second eighth note of a beat.

Styles and swing

Each style brings its own swing: Swing, Jazz ballad, Jazz waltz and Shuffle at 100%, Rock and roll at 50%, most others straight. Change it, and the style remembers: the next time you pick it, in any song, it plays with your amount. The Library’s Swing option (see Styles and the Library) says whether a style brings its swing to the song. The swing is the whole song’s, so it swings the melody too, as a jazz singer swings the tune.

A section in another style (see Song form and sections) swings as that style does: a swing bridge in a straight pop song swings its eighth notes, and a rock section in a jazz song plays them even.

Where swing doesn’t apply

A shuffle is the blues’ name for the same long-short feel, usually a full triplet. Some blues are written in 12/8 instead, four beats of three eighth notes each, the triplet feel written out (Trouble in Mind in the demos). So the control is greyed out in 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8: the beats already split in three, and there are no pairs to swing. The same goes for 5/8 and 7/8, whose beats are the eighth notes themselves. It works in every time signature counted in quarter notes or half notes, such as 4/4, 3/4 or 2/2.

Hip hop, funk and “new jack swing” swing their sixteenth notes instead, the pairs inside each eighth note. This control swings eighth notes only.

Loose timing

Loose, next to Swing in the playlist’s toolbar, makes notes land a little off the grid, as when a person plays: from off, as the app starts, to 40 milliseconds. Each note starts up to that much late, a different amount each time, and the notes a player strikes together move mostly together, so a chord is a little late as a whole, not spread out like a harp. The same song sounds the same each time you play it, and a WAV export sounds like playback.

A bigger band and the horns

A piano, a bass and drums are a jazz trio, and the rhythm section of most bands. But a rock band without its guitar, or a tango without its violins, doesn’t sound like itself. Many styles bring more players: a guitar, strings or an organ, each playing the way that music uses it, and any style can add a horn section.

The Band menu

🎷 Band, at the top left of the chord sheet, chooses who plays and with which sounds. What they play, the drums and the chord and bass parts, comes from the Library (see Styles and the Library); this menu leaves it alone.

• Instrument lineup ▸ puts a whole new set of instruments in the band, keeping the rhythm, the chords and the timing: Grand piano + acoustic bass, Electric piano + synth bass, Piano, acoustic guitar + strings, Piano, electric guitar + organ, Piano + strings, Piano + nylon guitar, Accordion + acoustic bass, or Horns, timpani + strings.
• One line for each player in the band: Piano, Bass, Drums, Guitar, Strings, Organ, Soloist and Horns, as the band has them. Untick one to leave it out of the band, and click its instrument to give it another sound, from the 128 of General MIDI (see Sounds). The drums have a channel for each drum, so their sounds are chosen in the channel rack.
• Horn section adds horns to any style (see below).
• Soloist (experimental) and Another solo: see The soloist.
• No band takes the band away. The chords stay on the sheet, and a style from the Library brings a band back.

Each player has its own track in the playlist and its own channel in the channel rack, with the instrument the style chose.

Who comes in

Switch to a style without a guitar and its track and channel go away; Ctrl+Z brings them back. In the chord sheet’s You play row, a player who doesn’t play yet is greyed out.

How the guitar plays

A pianist can play any notes of a chord. A guitarist has six strings, tuned E A D G B E from the lowest, and four fingers to press them against the frets. So a guitar chord is a shape: a fret, or nothing, for each string, written in chord books from the low E string, with x for a string not played and 0 for an open one. The lowest string that sounds must be the chord’s bass: the C shape leaves out the low E string, because an E there would make it C/E.

The guitar in Ferrous Lineup finds its shapes the way a guitarist learns them, by trying the frets in reach and keeping the easiest: the open chords of the chord books (C x32010, G 320003, D xx0232, Am x02210, G7 320001), barre chords in other keys (F 133211, one finger flat across the first fret), and a shape for every chord in every key.

It strums them as a guitarist does: a down-stroke sweeps the strings from low to high, a few milliseconds apart, and the lighter up-stroke between the beats comes back over the top four. What it plays depends on the style:

• Strummed chords (pop, folk, country): the whole shape in the style’s rhythm.
• Power chords (rock, punk, metal): only the root, its fifth and the octave, A5. Distortion turns a third into a sour buzz and a fifth into a bigger sound, so rock guitarists leave the third to the bass and the singer.
• Four to the bar (swing): three-note chords, root, third and seventh, struck on every beat, as Freddie Green kept time in Count Basie’s band.
• The boogie shuffle (blues, rock and roll): two strings, the root with its fifth, then with its sixth: A and E, A and E, A and F♯, A and F♯.
• The chop (reggae, soul, Motown, bluegrass): a short chord on the top four strings on beats 2 and 4, with the snare. Country calls it the “chick” of “boom-chick”. In ska it plays between all the beats.
• Scratching (funk, disco): sixteenth notes on a muted guitar, a few accented, most only a percussive “chk”.

Strings and organ

Strings hold each chord as long as it lasts, an octave above the piano, softly: a pad, a cushion of sound under the band. Pop uses them to lift the chorus, so in Pop beat and Motown they only play in variation b (see Song form and sections).

The organ holds chords too, as a church organ in a chorale or a Hammond in a slow blues. In reggae it plays the bubble: short chords between the beats, low down, and an octave higher on beats 2 and 4 with the guitar’s chop. In Rock beat it waits for variation b, the way an organ fills out a chorus.

The horn section

Soul and funk records have one, and so do big bands, salsa orchestras, ska bands and the brass bands of the Balkans: trumpets, saxophones and trombones playing the chords together. Tick Horn section in the Band menu, and a Horns track comes in with the band, playing the chord sheet in a part that suits the style. Point at Horn section to read what the horns will play in the style you have; untick it to send them home.

The 3 + 3 + 2 rhythm splits the eight eighth notes of a 4/4 bar into groups of three, three and two, with an accent at the start of each: on beat 1, on the “and” of 2, and on beat 4. It is the tresillo of Cuban music, and it is everywhere in pop and soul horn lines. The afterbeats are the off-beats of a brass band: in a march the tuba plays “oom” on the beat and the horns “pah” between.

The horns play Brass Section in most styles, French Horn in classical ones, Synth Brass 1 in electronic ones and Alto Sax in the Big band ballad; click the Horns line in the Band menu to choose another sound.

A big band is its horns, so the Big band and Big band ballad styles bring them: Horn section is ticked as soon as you pick one of them, and untick it to send the horns home. When you then pick another style, the horns the big band brought leave with it; horns you ticked yourself stay.

Close harmony

Horns playing chords together voice them in close position: the notes of the chord as near together as they go, inside an octave, under the highest horn, the lead. That is how arrangers make three or four horns sound like one big instrument.

• There are as many horns as the piano’s chord has different notes, up to four.
• A chord with more than four notes, such as C13 (C E G B♭ D A), leaves out its fifth first and then its root, which the bass plays anyway. The horns keep what makes the chord sound as it does: E, B♭, D, A.
• The lead stays between F4 and F5, where a trumpet section sounds bright without straining.
• From one chord to the next, each horn goes to the nearest note it can. C to A♭ is E4 G4 C5 to E♭4 A♭4 C5: two horns move a semitone, and the lead holds C. From G7 to C, B rises to C and F falls to E, as the leading tone and the seventh of a dominant do.
• The horns avoid parallel fifths: two horns a fifth apart that move to another fifth sound like one horn, and a line is lost.

With Voice leading ticked in the piano roll you can watch each horn move (see Voice leading).

Locking a track, and playing your part

The band writes its parts from the chord sheet, and writes them again whenever the chords, the key, the bars or the style change. This chapter is about the parts that should stay as they are: a part you played or edited yourself, a track you want to keep while you try styles around it, and a part you want to play live, with the band leaving it out.

Locking a track

Say you played a piano part yourself, or picked a nylon-string guitar for the chords, and now want to hear the song as a bossa nova. Lock the track first. A locked track keeps its notes and its instrument, and styles play the rest of the song around it.

1. Open a demo, such as Ode to Joy, and show the channel rack with F6.
2. Click the small padlock between Keys’s knob and its name. It closes and turns orange. Right-clicking a channel’s name has Lock and Unlock too, and Ctrl+Z undoes either.
3. In the Library, apply another style, such as Bossa nova. The drums and the bass change; the Keys part is the one you had. The status bar ends with 🔒 Kept: Keys., and the Library’s list of where each part came from has a Locked line.
4. Unlock Keys again. If the band was playing the piano, it takes the part back, and your Keys is muted so the two don’t play over each other.

What a lock keeps:

• A locked Keys keeps the song’s chords, and the new bass follows them.
• A locked drum keeps its notes while the other drums take the new rhythm.
• When the band comes into a song whose own Keys or Bass is locked, it leaves that part to it, and the chord sheet says so: “🔒 Keys is locked: the band leaves the piano to it.”
• A locked band player keeps its notes and doesn’t take new chords: “🔒 The bass is locked: it keeps its notes, not new chords.”

What moves the whole song still moves a locked track with it: a new time signature puts its notes in the new bars, and a key change moves them to the new key. A lock protects a part from styles, not from the song changing shape, and you can always edit a locked track by hand.

A part you edit stays yours

Open a band part in the piano roll (double-click its clip in the playlist) and change a note: from then on the band leaves that part as you left it, even when the chords change. The chord sheet says “✎ You edited the bass: the band keeps it as you left it.”, with a Play it again button that hands the part back to the band, written from the sheet as it is now.

You play

The chord sheet’s practice row has You play, with a button for each player the band has: Piano, Bass, Drums, Guitar and so on. Click one, and the band leaves that part out so you can play it yourself. For every player but the drums, your keyboard switches to that player’s sound, a MIDI keyboard or the computer’s keyboard (MIDI > Typing keyboard to piano): you take over the bass with the bass’s sound. Click the button again to have the band play it.

The band goes on writing the part while you play it, so when you hand it back it plays what the sheet says now. A player the style has but that doesn’t play yet (strings that only come in for variation b, or any player before there are chords) is greyed out.

Practising has the rest of the practice row: the count-in, the metronome, a slower speed, tap tempo and looping bars.

The soloist (experimental)

The band accompanies: it plays the chords so that someone else can sing the tune or improvise over them. The soloist is that someone else, improvising a line over the chord sheet. It is experimental and off until you switch it on, because a solo made by rules is a study, not a performance. But it is a useful study: every note it plays has a reason, and the piano roll shows the reason, so you can see how an improvised line is built and try the same rules on your own instrument.

Trying it

1. Press Ctrl+N and type these bars, one chord a bar:

   Dm7   G7   Cmaj7   A7   Dm7   G7   C6   C6
   

2. In the Library, apply Swing.

3. Open 🎷 Band and point at Soloist (experimental): the hint says who the soloist is in this style, a tenor sax. Tick it. A Soloist track comes into the playlist, and a Soloist channel into the channel rack.

4. Press Space. Over the band, the sax plays two-bar phrases in swung eighth notes, with a breath between them.

Another solo, in the same menu, plays a different one; Ctrl+Z brings the last one back. Untick the soloist and its track and channel go away. Like every band part, the solo is played again when the sheet changes, and if you edit its notes it stays as you left it until you click Play it again or Another solo.

Reading the solo

Double-click the soloist’s clip to open its part in the piano roll. Its notes are coloured by what they are:

• green for chord tones, marked with which one: R for the root, 3, 5, 7, and 6 or 9 when the chord has them;
• blue for the other notes of the chord’s scale: p a passing note, n a neighbour note, s any other;
• orange for chromatic notes, from outside the scale: a an approach, cp a chromatic passing note.

Point at a note, or play the song, and the line above the grid says what it is, in a sentence, and which scale the chord plays.

In this solo, bar 3 ends with B3, the 7th of Cmaj7, on beat 4, then B♭3 on the “and”, then A3 on beat 1 of bar 4, the root of A7: three notes a half step apart, walking down into the next chord. The B♭ belongs to neither chord, and that is fine: it falls on the weak half of the beat, and it leads somewhere.

How an improvised line is built

Chord tones on the beat

Ask a jazz teacher how to start improvising over chords, and the first rule is nearly always the same: play chord tones on the strong beats, and anything that connects them in between. On the beat the ear checks the melody against the harmony; between the beats it is moving and forgives more. A line that lands on a chord tone on each beat “makes the changes”: you can hear the chords in it even without the band.

The most telling chord tones are the 3rd and the 7th, the guide tones. They say whether a chord is major or minor and what kind of seventh it has, and in a ii–V–I they move by half steps: the 7th of Dm7 (C) falls to the 3rd of G7 (B), and the 7th of G7 (F) falls to the 3rd of Cmaj7 (E).

The soloist picks, for each beat, the chord tone nearest to where it is going. The line keeps its direction until it turns at the edge of the instrument’s range, or now and then on its own, and once in a while it leaps past a chord tone to the next. So it moves mostly by small steps, as tunes do, with a leap here and there.

Chord scales

Between the chord tones go other notes, and which ones depends on the chord: over Dm7, is the note between A and C a B or a B♭? Jazz teaching answers with chord scales: each chord gets a seven-note scale that holds it, and the notes between come from that scale. The scale comes from the chord in its key. Over Dm7 in C major the B is natural, because the music is in C: the scale is C major from D, called D Dorian. The modes of the key are what its chords play:

Seven names for the same seven notes. The names matter because they say which note is the root and where the half steps fall from it: that is what gives each chord its colour in the key (see Keys and modes).

Other chords get their scale the way a player thinking in the key would choose it:

1. A chord of the key plays the key’s scale from its root, as in the table. In a minor key, a chord with the raised 7th (E7 in A minor, with G♯) plays the harmonic minor from its root: E F G♯ A B C D, called E Phrygian dominant.
2. A chord borrowed from the minor key on the same note plays that key’s scale: Fm in C major comes from C minor, so it plays F Dorian.
3. A secondary dominant plays the scale of the chord it leads to: A7 in C major is the V7 of Dm, so it plays D harmonic minor from A, A B♭ C♯ D E F G. That is why a solo over A7 here has B♭ in it: it points to the D minor chord that follows.
4. Anything else plays the scale its kind usually gets: Lydian for a major chord from outside the key, Lydian dominant for a dominant seventh that leads nowhere, half-whole diminished for 7♭9 and 7♯9, whole-half diminished for a diminished seventh, whole tone for an augmented chord, Locrian for a half-diminished one, Dorian for a minor chord.

And the chord’s own notes always win: E9 in C major starts from A harmonic minor, but its 9th is F♯, so F♯ replaces F in its scale.

Chords from outside the key explains borrowed chords and secondary dominants.

Notes between the beats

Each kind of note between the chord tones has a name, and most are older than jazz; harmony textbooks call them non-chord tones:

• a passing note fills the gap between two chord tones a third apart, by step, going the same way: C D E over C;
• a neighbour note steps away from a chord tone and comes back: E F E;
• a chromatic passing note fills a whole step with the half step in between: D D♯ E;
• a chromatic approach comes into a chord tone from a half step below or above: F♯ G. A phrase that starts just before the beat, a pickup, usually starts with one.

Chromatic passing notes on the “and” of the beat are part of the sound of bebop, the jazz of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie: a half step added between two scale notes keeps the chord tones on the beats when a line runs in eighth notes.

Phrases and breathing

Singers and horn players have to breathe, so lines come in phrases. The soloist plays two-bar phrases, each starting on the beat, a beat late or with a pickup, and leaves a beat or two empty at the end. The rests are what make it sound like someone talking. Its eighth notes swing as the band’s do.

The soloist plays over the chorus, not the intro or the ending (see Song form and sections), and keeps playing through shots and rests (see Shots, holds, rests and pushes): that is what a band stops for. Over N.C. it is silent. Over a pitch-class set, a micromode or a row form it plays the set’s own notes on the beats, with chromatic notes between them.

Who plays

The tango accordion is General MIDI’s stand-in for the bandoneon. The ranges are the comfortable middle of each instrument, where it sings. Click the Soloist line in the Band menu to give it another sound.

Your own styles

The Library’s styles are a good start, but the groove you hear in your head may not be there. The style editor lets you write your own band parts, with the channel rack and the piano roll you already know, and save them as a style that sits in the Library next to the others.

Opening it

• In the channel rack, Edit style… opens a copy of the style the song plays, with every part its band plays, and New style… starts an empty one. New style… is also at the top of the Library.
• View > Style editor… opens the editor, or brings it to the front.
• In the Library, right-click a style: a built-in one says Edit a copy in channel rack…, one of yours Edit in channel rack….

A built-in style opens as a copy, named “… copy”, so the original stays as it is. One of your own opens as itself, and Save style writes it back to its file.

What a style holds

A style of your own is one repeating pattern, one to sixteen bars long, with a lane for each part: drums, a piano or other chord part, a bass, and the guitar, strings, organ or soloist of a bigger band.

Along the top: Start from…, Save style, Save as…, Undo, Redo, Preview ×4 and Stop preview. Under them:

Below is a channel rack with the style’s lanes. Click steps to write drums, as in any pattern. Click a lane’s note preview to open its piano roll, where drawing, moving, stretching notes and the Tools menu work as they do in the song. + Add channel adds a lane.

Write the pitched parts over C major. When the style is applied, each note moves to the chord of the moment: a C plays the chord’s root, an E its third, a G its fifth, and the other notes follow the key or keep their colour. So a bass line written as C, G, C, E in the editor plays the root, fifth, root and third of whatever chord the song has.

Start from… copies an existing style into the editor, from the same list as the Library, with its search; Empty style starts from nothing.

Preview ×4 plays the pattern four times and stops; Space starts or stops it while the editor has the keyboard. The song pauses while it plays.

The editor has its own Undo and Redo (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z), separate from the song’s. Nothing reaches the song until you apply the style; applying it is then one step to undo, like any other style.

Saving and using your styles

Save style writes to the file the style came from; Save as… asks for a new one. Styles are saved as .lineup-style files, in a styles folder: a styles folder in the app’s data folder unless you choose another in Edit > Settings… > Library > Your styles > Styles folder…. The Library lists the styles in that folder; one saved elsewhere is not listed, and the app says so.

Your saved styles join the Library’s list, next to the built-in ones, in a group of their own, User styles (or among the others in the alphabetical list). Applying one works as for any style: Drums brings its drum lanes, Chord and bass parts its other lanes, Voices / instruments their sounds, and so on (see Styles and the Library). A style of your own plays in the band, so its drums and its sounds come only with its chord and bass parts: with those unticked, the Library says to tick them.

A song keeps its own copy of the style it plays, inside its .lineup file. Delete or move the style file, or open the song on another computer, and the band still plays it.

Patterns and the playlist

A song in Ferrous Lineup is built from patterns, short blocks of music a bar or a few bars long, laid out in time on the playlist. A pattern is “what every channel plays during these bars”: a drum beat, four bars of chords, a fill. The playlist says where each pattern plays, and how many times. The same pattern can play many times: change it once, and every place it plays changes with it.

The song the app opens with shows the idea. It has three patterns: Chords (two bars of C, Am, F and G), Beat (one bar of drums) and Fill (a drum fill). On the playlist, Chords plays four times on the first track, and Beat five times on the second from bar 3, with Fill at the end.

Patterns

The Patterns tab, next to the Library on the left of the window, lists the song’s patterns, each with its colour. Click one to select it. The selected pattern is the one the channel rack and the piano roll show, and the one a click on the playlist places.

The PATTERN controls in the toolbar work on the selected pattern:

• the list picks another pattern;
• ➕ adds a new, empty pattern;
• ⋯ has the pattern’s Name, Clone (a copy to change on its own) and Delete (which takes its clips off the playlist too);
• the last list sets its length: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 or 16 bars.

A song with a band has a pattern for each player, written from the chord sheet: you don’t need to touch them to hear the band, and the band writes them again when the chords change (see Locking a track, and playing your part).

Pattern mode and song mode

PAT and SONG, at the left of the toolbar, choose what ▶ plays:

• Pattern mode plays the selected pattern over and over. Use it while you write a beat or a part.
• Song mode plays the playlist from the playhead to the end.

L switches between them.

Placing and moving clips

Each block on the playlist is a clip: one pattern, at one place on one track. The playlist’s toolbar line says it in short: “Click to place “Beat”. Double-click a clip to edit it, drag to move it, drag its right edge to repeat it, right-click to delete.“

• Click an empty place on a track to put a clip of the selected pattern there.
• Drag a clip to move it, to another bar or another track.
• Drag its right edge to repeat it: the clip grows by whole patterns, and plays the pattern that many times in a row.
• Double-click a clip to edit it: melodies and chords open in the piano roll, drums in the channel rack.
• Right-click a clip to delete it.

Snap, in the playlist’s toolbar, says where clips land: on a Bar, a Beat or a Step (a sixteenth note).

To work with several clips at once, Ctrl+click them one by one, or Ctrl+drag a box around them on an empty part of the playlist; drag one of them and they all move together. Ctrl+click a section on the Sections strip, or pick Select clips in this section in its menu, to select the clips under it. Then:

Ctrl+click an empty place to choose where Ctrl+V pastes, without placing a clip.

Tracks

Tracks are rows to arrange clips on; any pattern can go on any track. A song has as many tracks as it uses, and under the last one is a fainter row: place a clip on it, or click its ➕ New track, and it becomes a track. ➕ Track in the playlist’s toolbar adds one too.

• The light at the left of a track mutes it and unmutes it.
• Click its name to rename it.
• Drag its lower edge to make it taller or shorter; double-click the edge to give it back its usual height.
• Right-click its name for Track height, Reset track height, Insert track above, Insert track below, Move up, Move down and Delete track, which deletes its clips too.

The strips above the tracks

• Sections: drag along it to mark a part of the song, such as a verse or a chorus. See Song form and sections.
• Tempo: the tempo as a line, with each change marked. See Tempo, time signatures and key changes.
• Bars: the bar numbers, with the time signature and the key at bar 1 and wherever they change. Click a number to move the playhead there. Drag along them to loop that part of the song: song mode then plays it over and over, and the playlist’s toolbar shows 🔁 Looping bars 3–4 ✖; click it to play the whole song again. Right-click a number to insert or delete bars, or to change the time signature or the key from there.

Moving around

The two zooms are also at the right of the status bar: ↔ for the bars and ↕ for the tracks. Follow playhead, in the toolbar, keeps the bar that plays in sight; turn it off to scroll freely while the song plays.

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%.

The piano roll

The piano roll shows the notes of one channel in one pattern: time from left to right, pitch from bottom to top, with a piano keyboard down the left side. Each note is a bar as long as the note lasts. It is where melodies, chords and bass lines are written and changed, note by note, and where the app tells you what the notes make.

Opening it

• Press F7, or click Piano roll in the toolbar: it opens on the selected pattern and the selected channel.
• Double-click a clip of melody or chords in the playlist, or a channel’s name in the channel rack.
• Right-click a channel’s name in the rack and pick Piano roll.

The window’s title names the pattern and the channel, as in Piano roll · Chords · Lineup Osc. When the channel plays nothing in that pattern, the piano roll says so and offers a button for each pattern where it does play; for drums it offers the channel rack, where drums are written.

Reading the grid

• The rows of the notes of the key are lighter than the others, and the rows of the key note are brown. On the keyboard, a blue dot marks each note of the key and an orange one the key note. Click a key to hear it.
• Bar lines are stronger than beat lines.
• A note wide enough on screen carries its name. A note of the chord heard where it starts is spelled as that chord spells it: in C major, the fifth of C diminished reads G♭, not F♯. Other notes are spelled as the key spells them.
• Over the grid, two rows name the chords: the first the chord this channel plays, the second, All, the chord all the channels make together.
• Above them, a line says what is under the pointer: the chord at that step, its name and its number in the key (“Am: A minor, chord vi of C major”). Another names the set of the notes, for the set theory of Beyond keys: sets, rows and micromodes.
• While the music plays, the step that sounds is shaded, and the line above the grid names the chord that sounds there.

Writing notes

Draw, in the toolbar, says what a click puts down:

• Single note;
• Chord in key (triad) or Chord in key (seventh): the chord of the key on the note you click, with the notes the key gives it, so in C major a click on D draws Dm and on G draws G (or Dm7 and G7);
• one kind of chord, the same on any note: Major, Minor, Dominant seventh, Major seventh, Half-diminished seventh, Six-nine and the others, thirty in all;
• A set from the set browser….

For a chord, the list next to it chooses its inversion: which of its notes is lowest (see Chords and their names). The note you click stays the root. Length is how long a new note is: 1 step, 2 steps, 1 beat, 2 beats or 1 bar.

Snap to scale makes the notes you draw or move land on the notes of the key. Right-click it for Snap notes you play too, which turns the keys played on a MIDI or computer keyboard into the nearest note of the key, both when you hear them and when you record them.

The chords of the key

Under the toolbar, a button for each chord of the key, as in Chords in C major: I · C, ii · Dm, iii · Em…. Click one to hear it. Point at a chord in the grid, or hold one on a keyboard, and the chords that often come next light up, with a line that says so: “After Am (vi), try: Dm (ii), F (IV), G (V).” What chords do explains why those.

Tools

The Tools menu changes the selected notes, or every note when none is selected:

Up a note in the key is the musician’s way to move a tune: C E G in C major becomes D F A, a minor chord, not D F♯ A, because it stays in the key. Up a semitone moves every note by the same distance, out of the key.

Pasted or duplicated notes make the pattern longer when they need the room. Notes copied in the song can be pasted in the style editor, and the other way round.

Velocity

Under the grid, the Velocity lane shows how hard each note is played, as a bar from soft to loud. Click or drag in it to set the velocity of the notes on that step, or of the selected ones there.

Seeing the other parts

• Ghost notes shows the notes of the other channels faintly behind this one’s, so you can write a bass line that fits the chords, and names the chords they all make together.
• Voice leading draws how each voice moves from one chord to the next (see Voice leading and how parts move).

The key and the windows of sets

The Key menus at the top left are the song’s key: picking another moves the song, as described in Keys and modes. Next to them, the notes of the key are spelled out. Row…, Sets… and Micromodes… open the windows of twelve-tone rows, pitch-class sets and Kröpfl’s micromodes (see Beyond keys: sets, rows and micromodes).

Zoom

Over the piano roll, Ctrl with the mouse wheel, + or − makes the steps wider or narrower, and Alt makes the rows taller or shorter, around the pointer. Ctrl+0 takes it back to 100%.

The harmony keys

Along the bottom of the window are the harmony keys: a big key for each chord of the song’s key, numbered I to vii in Roman numerals. Hold one and its chord plays. They are a way to hear the chords of a key, to find the chords of a song by ear, and to see, while a song plays, which chord sounds and where it is likely to go next. F8, or **View

Harmony keys**, hides them and shows them again.

The keys

Each key shows the chord’s numeral, its name, and what it does in the key, in a word and a colour:

What chords do: numerals and functions explains the numerals and the three functions.

Hold a key with the mouse, or press 1 to 7 on the computer keyboard, to play its chord on the channel selected in the channel rack (“Hold a key or press 1 to 7 to play on “Lineup Osc”“). While it sounds:

• its notes light up on the small keyboard at the right;
• the line of hints at the top of the window spells it out: “IV: F major (F A C), subdominant: away. Key 4.”;
• the status bar names it: “F: F major, chord IV of C major.”;
• the chords that often come next get a frame, the most usual one the brightest, and the line next to the keys names the move: “F → G: step up to the dominant”.

While the music plays, the key of the chord you hear lights up, and the chords that often follow it are framed, so you can watch a song’s harmony move.

The controls at the left

• Key: the song’s key note and scale. Picking another moves the song into it, as described in Keys and modes. While the playhead is past a key change, Now in A major appears under it, and the keys are that key’s chords.
• Time: the song’s time signature (see Tempo, time signatures and key changes), and how many steps a bar has.
• Triads, 7ths and 9ths: chords of three notes (every other note of the scale), four (with the seventh) or five (with the ninth). In C major, V is G with triads, G7 with sevenths and G9 with ninths.
• The hints list, Detailed, Short or Minimal: how much the hints explain, here and in the piano roll. Detailed gives whole sentences, Short the same in a few words, Minimal only the chord names.
• 🔍 Find the key: listens to the song and says which key it is in (see Keys and modes).

When the key is a pitch-class set, a twelve-tone row or a micromode instead of a major or minor scale, the keys play groups of its notes, and the buttons choose how many (see Beyond keys: sets, rows and micromodes).

Playing chords to the band

MIDI > Accompaniment follows chords turns a keyboard into an arranger keyboard: while the music plays, the chord you hold on a MIDI keyboard or the computer keyboard becomes the chord of the accompaniment. The chords and the bass line keep their rhythm and move to your chord from their next note. One key plays its major chord, two keys a minor third apart its minor chord. The last chord stays until you play another, and the written notes come back when playback stops; the song itself does not change.

Tempo, time signatures and key changes

How fast a song goes, how its beats are counted and which key it is in can be set for the whole song, and changed partway through, as a score changes them.

Tempo

The tempo is how fast the beats go, in beats per minute (BPM): at 60 BPM a beat lasts a second, at 120 half a second. Slow ballads sit around 60 to 80, most pop between 90 and 130, dance music around 120 to 130, and fast swing or punk well over 160.

The TEMPO box in the toolbar is the tempo the song starts at: drag the number up or down, or double-click it and type one. The chord sheet shows it too, next to the key. To find the tempo of a song you hear, click Tap on the chord sheet on every beat (see Practising).

Changing tempo partway through

The Tempo strip, above the bar numbers in the playlist, draws the tempo as a line: flat while it stays the same, a jump where it changes at once, a slope where it changes gradually. Click it at a bar to open its menu:

• ♩ = the tempo from there on: drag it, or click it and type one. A new tempo adds a change at that bar.
• Get there: At once, as after a pause or at a new section, or gradually, over 1 beat, over ½ bar, over 1 bar, over 2 bars, over 4 bars or over 8 bars.
• Remove this change takes it away.

At bar 1 the menu sets the tempo the song starts at.

The strip labels each change as a score does: “♩ = 90” for a sudden one, “rit. → 60” for a gradual slowing down, a ritardando, and “accel. → 140” for a gradual speeding up, an accelerando. Songs often slow down at the very end, and a ritardando over the last two bars makes an ending sound like one. Playing, and exporting a WAV or a MIDI file, follow the changes.

Time signatures

A time signature says how the beats are counted. The top number is how many notes make a bar, the bottom one which note: 4 for quarter notes, 8 for eighth notes, 2 for half notes. 4/4 is four quarter notes to the bar; 3/4, three, the waltz; 6/8, six eighth notes felt as two beats of three. Rhythm and meter explains them, and the odd ones such as 5/4 and 7/8.

The song’s time signature

Time, in the harmony keys, is the song’s time signature, with how many steps a bar has next to it. Open it to choose another:

• one click for the usual ones: 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 3/8, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, 9/8 and 12/8;
• or Any other: the top number, the bottom one (1, 2, 4, 8 or 16), and Beats grouped as, for meters whose beats are groups of two and three notes, such as 7/8 counted 2+2+3. Use 7/8 then sets it.

A new time signature for the whole song puts every bar’s notes into a bar of the new kind, and each bar lasts as long as before: a song at 130 BPM in 4/4 plays at 97.5 in 3/4, three beats in the time four took. The tempo changes move with it. The options at the top of the list, shared with the Library, say what else comes in:

• Drums: the drums of the Library’s style for that meter, such as a waltz for 3/4. Off, the song keeps its own drums, in the new meter.
• Chord and bass parts: how that style plays the chords and the bass. Off, the song keeps its own, in the new meter.
• Use style instruments and Use rhythm’s swing: the style’s sounds and its swing.

The status bar says what was done, as in “The song now plays Waltz in 3/4, every bar squeezed or stretched into a 3/4 bar”. Going back to the song’s first time signature gives back exactly the song you had, and Ctrl+Z undoes it in one step.

Changing time signature partway through

Right-click a bar number in the playlist: under Time signature from bar 5 is the same choice, for that bar and the ones after it. The bars before stay as they are, and so do the style and the instruments. Remove this change goes back to the time signature before it. The bar numbers show the time signature at bar 1 and wherever it changes, and the chord sheet writes it at the start of the bar.

Key changes

Picking another key in the Key menus moves the whole song to it, and a key change partway through names a new key from a bar on, without moving any note: both are in Keys and modes. The same right-click menu on the bar numbers has Key from bar 5, and the bar numbers write the key in blue where it changes.

Inserting and deleting bars

The bar numbers’ menu also has Insert a bar before, Insert a bar after and Delete this bar, which move everything after them, as on the chord sheet (see The chord sheet).

Undo, zoom, windows and settings

Undo and redo

Every change to the song can be undone: notes, steps, chords, clips, tracks, a style tried from the Library, a new key or tempo, a mixer setting. Ctrl+Z undoes the last change and Ctrl+Shift+Z (or Ctrl+Y) does it again. The Edit menu names what they would undo and redo, as in Undo add notes. The app keeps the last hundred changes.

The style editor has an undo of its own, apart from the song’s (see Your own styles).

Windows

The chord sheet, the channel rack, the piano roll and the mixer open over the playlist, each at the size of what it shows, and each where you left it last. Each has a key, and a button in the toolbar that is lit while it is open:

• × at a window’s top right closes it; its key or its button opens it again.
• ▼ at its top left folds it up to its title, out of the way.
• View lists every window and panel, and also opens the Lead sheet, the Style editor… and Ear training.
• View > Chord sheet in the main window puts the chord sheet in the playlist’s place, with more bars to a line.

The app remembers the size of its own window, which windows were open and where they were, and starts with them the next time. The first time, it starts with the chord sheet, the Library and the harmony keys.

Zoom

The zoom keys zoom what is under the pointer:

The step under the pointer stays under the pointer. Ctrl+0 takes what is under the pointer back to 100%. On a Mac, ⌘ takes the place of Ctrl. The playlist’s two zooms are also at the right of the status bar.

Settings

Edit > Settings… has five pages. What you change is kept at once, also for the next time; Done closes the window.

Appearance

• Language: English or Español. The whole app changes at once, menus, hints and chord explanations included.
• Interface size: text, buttons and menus bigger or smaller throughout the app.
• Editor zoom: the playlist’s and the piano roll’s zooms, across (Horizontal) and up and down (Vertical), and the channel rack’s, which is one for both. Reset all zoom levels to 100% resets them all.
• Zoom shortcuts: the keys above, as a reminder.

Harmony

• Note naming: Letters (C, D, E…) or Solfège (Do, Re, Mi…), for notes, keys and chords everywhere in the app (see Notes, intervals and scales). Until you choose, they follow the language: letters in English, solfège in Spanish.
• Roman numerals in minor keys: how the chords on the third, sixth and seventh notes of a minor key are numbered. bIII bVI bVII counts them from the major scale, as pop and jazz books do: in A minor, C is ♭III. III VI VII counts them from the minor scale, as classical harmony books do: C is III. Both name the same chords (see What chords do).

Library

The style list, the choices each style’s window starts with, and the folder of your own styles: see Styles and the Library.

Audio

• Output: the sound card in use, with its sample rate and channels. Restart audio opens it again, for instance after plugging in headphones.
• Instrument playback: SoundFont instruments and SoundFont drums, and SoundFont library: the SoundFont in use and Choose SoundFont…. See Sounds.

Playback

• Follow playhead: keeps the music that plays in sight in the playlist, the chord sheet and the piano roll.
• Count-in, Metronome, Practice speed and the Speed trainer: see Practising.
• Write a trace while playing: writes every note played to a text file, to check what the app plays by reading it. It is off each time the app starts, and is useful when reporting a problem with playback.

The mixer

The mixer (F9, or View > Mixer) is where the parts of a song are balanced: how loud each one is, where it sits between the two speakers, how much of it is heard in a room, and how its sound is shaped. Every change in it can be undone, and is saved with the song.

The lines

Each channel has a line, and the lines are grouped as a score groups its instruments, from the woodwinds at the top down to the strings: Woodwinds, Brass, Percussion, Drums, Harp and guitars, Keyboards, Synths, Voices and Strings. The order is only how the mixer shows them; the channel rack keeps its own.

At the top, Master is the volume of the whole song, the same as the VOL slider in the toolbar, with a meter for each speaker. Reset mix goes back to the usual mix: the usual volumes, every pan in the middle, the reverb off, no effects, no solo, and nothing muted but what the band itself leaves out. Ctrl+Z brings your mix back.

Placing the band

A mix is easier to hear when each part has a place of its own. Some habits that work:

• Keep the bass, the kick drum and the singer in the middle. They carry the song, and low notes sound the same from anywhere.
• Move the chords and the other parts a little to the sides, as the players would stand on a stage: a piano at L30 and a guitar or an accordion at R30 leave the middle to the tune.
• Turn down before turning up. When a part is lost, lowering the others usually works better than raising it.
• Accompaniment softer than the tune. The band is there to support the melody: it should be heard, not cover it.

The reverb

A reverb imitates a room: the sound comes back from its walls, later and softer, for a second or more. Without it, music made by a computer can sound as if it were played in a cupboard.

Tick Reverb to turn it on. It is one room for the whole song:

• Wet / dry: how much room is heard next to the sound itself. At 20% the room stays in the background; at 50% it is as loud as the music, as in a church.
• Decay: how long the room keeps sounding, in seconds.
• Damping: how soon the high frequencies die away. Soft walls and curtains damp a room; stone does not.
• Pre-delay: how long before the room answers, in milliseconds. A little pre-delay keeps the notes clear in a big room.

Each channel’s Reverb column says how much of it goes into the room. Drums and strings sound natural with a lot; a bass usually sounds better close and dry, with little or none.

Effects

Click a channel’s Effects to open its effects. They shape its sound before it joins the others:

• Equalizer: turns three bands of frequencies up or down, up to 12 dB: Low (below 200 Hz, the weight of a bass or a kick drum), Mid (around 1 kHz, the body of most instruments) and High (above 4 kHz, the air and sparkle of cymbals). Turning a piano’s lows down a few decibels leaves room for the bass. Flat puts every band back to 0 dB, and a double-click puts one back.
• Compressor: evens out how loud the part plays. Above the Threshold it turns the sound down, the more the higher the Ratio (at 4:1, a peak 8 dB over the threshold comes out 2 dB over). Gain brings the whole part back up. At a ratio of 1:1 it does nothing.
• Delay: plays the part again a little later, in time with the song, as an echo. Time is how long after, in notes of the song (from a sixteenth to a half note, dotted eighths and quarters included), so the echo follows the tempo. Feedback says how loud each echo is next to the one before, and Mix how loud the echoes are; at 0% the delay is off.

No effects turns them all off.

What the mixer changes

The mixer changes how the song sounds, not what it plays: the notes stay as they are. What you hear, and a WAV or a video you export, sound as the mixer says. A MIDI file you export leaves out the channels that are muted, or silenced by a solo, but carries no volumes, pans or effects: the program that opens it does its own mix.

MIDI keyboards and synths

MIDI is how electronic instruments and computers pass notes to each other: a keyboard says which key went down and how hard, and a synthesizer that receives it plays the note. Ferrous Lineup can listen to a MIDI keyboard, so you play along with the band or record into a pattern, and it can send its notes to a synthesizer outside the app.

You don’t need a MIDI keyboard to play: the computer’s own keyboard can be one.

Connecting a keyboard

Plug the keyboard in (most connect by USB) and open the MIDI menu. Under Input: a keyboard to play, it lists the keyboards it finds: click yours. The menu looks again each time it opens, so a keyboard plugged in after the app started shows up too. None disconnects it. The choice lasts until Ferrous Lineup closes.

What you play sounds on the selected channel, the one the piano roll shows: click a channel’s name in the channel rack to pick it. Each note keeps how hard you played it. While you hold keys, the status bar names what they make, as the piano roll does: the chord, and its number in the key.

If the menu says MIDI unavailable, the system gave the app no MIDI at all. On Linux, MIDI needs the ALSA sequencer; see Troubleshooting.

The computer keyboard

Tick MIDI > Typing keyboard to piano, and the letter keys play the selected channel, laid out as a piano:

The keys go by where they are on the keyboard, not by the letter printed on them, so the piano keeps its shape on any keyboard layout. While it is on, the number keys play notes instead of the harmony keys. The keys don’t play while you type in a text box or a menu is open, and Ctrl and Alt shortcuts such as Ctrl+Z still work.

Recording

The ● button, next to ▶, records what you play into a pattern:

1. Select the channel to record on, and the pattern to record into.
2. Click ●. It turns red, and the app switches to pattern mode.
3. Press Space to play the pattern, and play along. Each note goes into the pattern when you let go of its key.
4. Click ● again to stop recording.

The pattern goes round and round while you record, and every pass adds to it: play the bass notes on one pass and the chords on the next. Each note is moved to the nearest step of the grid, so a note a little early or late lands on the beat, and a quick tap still makes a note one step long. How hard you played is kept. A note still held when the pattern ends is cut there.

A take lasts until the music stops or you click ●, and Ctrl+Z takes the whole take back. With Snap notes you play on (right-click Snap to scale in the piano roll), every key records as the nearest note of the key. To make recording easier, slow the song down while you play (see Practising).

Playing chords to the band

MIDI > Accompaniment follows chords makes the band follow your left hand, as an arranger keyboard does: while the music plays, the chord you hold becomes the chord the accompaniment plays. The chords and the bass line keep their rhythm and move to your chord from their next note.

You don’t need to play the whole chord:

The last chord stays until you play another, and the status bar says which chord the accompaniment is in. When playback stops the written notes come back: the song itself does not change. The harmony keys can play chords to the band too.

Sending to a synthesizer

Ferrous Lineup can play its channels on a synthesizer outside the app, a hardware synth or a program, instead of its own sounds.

One channel at a time. Right-click a channel’s name in the channel rack, or click its instrument in the mixer, and open Send over MIDI:

• MIDI channel picks which of the sixteen channels of MIDI it plays on. A General MIDI synth plays drums on channel 10.
• Output, for every channel sent over MIDI picks the synth. It is the same output as in the MIDI menu.

The menu then says ● Sent over MIDI, channel 2, for example, and Play it here instead gives the channel back its own sound. + Add channel > MIDI Out (external synth) in the channel rack adds a channel that plays only on the synth.

The whole song. In the MIDI menu, pick the synth under Output: an external synth to play, and tick Send every channel. Every channel then plays on the synth instead of the speakers, on the channels an exported MIDI file uses: drums on channel 10 as a General MIDI drum set, the others on 1, 2, 3 and so on. Each channel’s General MIDI instrument goes with it. Untick it to hear the app’s own sounds again.

Nothing is sent while the app has no sound card: the MIDI menu says so.

Saving, opening and recovering

A song is saved as a .lineup file: its patterns and notes, the chord sheet, the band and its style, the song form, the tempo, the mixer, and the instrument of every channel. One file holds the whole song.

The File menu

The Import and Export items are in Opening MIDI files and recordings and Exporting.

The window’s title names the song, with a * after it while it has changes that are not saved. Ctrl+Z back to where it was saved takes the star away again. A new song is Untitled until you save it, and the first Save asks where, as Save as… does. The file always gets the .lineup ending, even when you leave it out.

A song that no longer opens, because it was moved or deleted, drops out of Open recent when you click it.

Demos are read-only

A demo says (demo, read-only) in the title. Change it as much as you like, but Save asks for a new file: the demo itself stays as it was, and your version is a song of your own from then on.

Before your changes are lost

When an action would close a song with unsaved changes (New, Open…, a demo, or closing the window), Ferrous Lineup asks Save changes? first:

• Save saves the song and goes on;
• Don’t save throws the changes away and goes on;
• Cancel goes back to the song as it is.

The style editor asks the same about a style, with Save style, Don’t save style and Cancel. Closing the window while an export is running asks whether to Stop it and quit or Keep exporting.

Opening files in other ways

• Drop a file on the window from your file manager. A .lineup file opens; a MIDI file, a text chord sheet or a recording (MP3, FLAC, Ogg, or a WAV longer than ten seconds) is imported. Drop one at a time: with several, none is opened. A shorter WAV file is a sound: it becomes a channel that plays it, or, dropped on a channel of the rack, that channel’s sound (see The channel rack).
• Open a file with Ferrous Lineup from your file manager, or give it to the program on the command line, as in ferrous-lineup song.lineup. A .lineup file opens, a MIDI file is imported, a text file is imported as a chord sheet, and a sound file is imported as a recording.

Recovering unsaved work

While a song has unsaved changes, Ferrous Lineup keeps a copy of it on the side, brought up to date within about half a minute of each change, even if you then leave the app alone. The copy is not your file, which only Save changes, and it is removed once the song is saved or the app closes normally.

If the computer crashes or the app is closed without the chance to ask, the next start offers the copy back:

Recover it opens the song as it was, still unsaved: save it to keep it. Discard it throws the copy away. Each window keeps its own copy, so when two were open, both are offered.

The copies live in Ferrous Lineup’s data folder, in recovery:

The SoundFont downloaded in Sounds lives in the same folder, in soundfonts.

Sharing a song

A .lineup file opens on Linux, macOS and Windows alike. What it doesn’t hold are the sound files it uses: a WAV played by a channel, or an imported recording, stays where it was, and the song only says where. To give someone a song that uses them, send the sound files too, and put them back on the channels on the other computer.

A song made only with things an older version of Ferrous Lineup knows is saved so that the older version opens it too. A song that uses something newer tells the older version that it was made by a newer one, instead of opening with parts missing.

Opening MIDI files and recordings

Ferrous Lineup can open music that was made somewhere else: a MIDI file of a piece, a chord sheet saved as text, or, as an experiment, a recording. Each becomes a new song, with its chords on the chord sheet and its key on the harmony keys, so you can study it as you would a demo. When the song open before has unsaved changes, you are asked first.

MIDI files

A MIDI file holds the notes of a piece, not its sound: which note starts when, how long it lasts, how hard it is played, and which instrument should play it. Many pieces can be found as MIDI files, and most music programs can write one.

File > Import MIDI file… opens one (.mid, .midi, .kar or .rmi). You can also drop it on the window, or open it with Ferrous Lineup from your file manager. The song that comes out:

• has a channel for each part of the file, named after its track or its instrument, with the instrument the file asks for, and its volume. The drums become one channel per drum, as in the channel rack of a new song;
• keeps every note as it was played: how hard, and exactly when, even between two steps of the grid;
• is cut at bar lines into patterns, laid one after another in the playlist; a passage that comes back note for note plays the same pattern again;
• takes the file’s tempo changes, time signatures and key signatures. A file with no key, or one that says C major when its notes are plainly in another key (many programs write C major when nobody chose), gets the key its notes fit best;
• gets on its chord sheet the chords the app hears in it.

The status bar sums it up, as in canon-in-d: 3 channels, 77 notes, 9 bars, 4/4, 72 BPM, D major:

From there it is a song like any other: play it, slow it down, look at each part in the piano roll, change its sounds in the mixer, try a style from the Library on it, and save it as a .lineup file.

Getting the chords right

The app hears chords as a musician would hear them over a stretch of music, not note by note, and it gets most of them right. Where a piece moves fast, or its harmony is unusual, check what it heard: click a bar and type the right chord (see The chord sheet).

Chord sheets as text

File > Import chord sheet… opens a chord chart saved as text, as in | C | Am7 | Dm7 G7 |, and the band plays it. Such a text is what File > Export chord sheet… writes, and what you find in songbooks and on websites. The format is in The chord sheet.

Recordings (experimental)

File > Import recording… opens a sound file (MP3, WAV, FLAC or Ogg) and tries to play along with it. You can also drop the file on the window, or open it with Ferrous Lineup from your file manager. (A WAV file of ten seconds or less dropped on the window is taken as a sound for a channel instead: see The channel rack.) It listens for a few seconds (Listening to … in the status bar), then makes a song with two tracks:

• Recording: a channel that plays the whole recording;
• Harmony: a chord on every beat, on the chords it heard.

It also guesses the tempo, the time signature, the key and the key changes, so the bar lines, the chord sheet and the harmony keys follow the music. The song’s key is the one the recording stays in longest. The recording plays wherever you start: from the beginning, from a bar you click, or after a jump. The status bar says what it found, as in canon-in-d: 63.9 BPM, 4/4, D major, chords on 43 of 43 beats.

Hearing a full recording is much harder than reading a MIDI file, and the result is often wrong: the tempo may come out at half or double speed, and chords may be heard where a passing melody note sits. Treat it as a starting point to correct, and trust your ears over it.

The recording is saved again as a WAV file next to the original, named like song.ferrous-lineup.wav (or in the system’s temporary folder if that folder can’t be written to), with a little silence in front so its first downbeat falls on a bar line. The song plays that file and only says where it is, so keep it with the song.

Exporting

To take a song out of Ferrous Lineup, the File menu writes it as a sound file, a video, a MIDI file or a text chord sheet. A song with nothing in the playlist has nothing to export: the items are greyed out, with Put some clips in the playlist first.

Each asks where to save, and adds the file’s ending if you leave it out.

A sound file

Export WAV… saves what you hear when the song plays, from start to end, as a WAV file: CD quality (44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo), with every repeat, the band, the mixer’s volumes, pans, reverb and effects, and a couple of seconds at the end for the last notes and the room to die away. It is always at the song’s own tempo, even when you practise at a slower speed.

It is made in the background, faster than the song plays, while you go on working: the status bar says Exporting and the file’s name, with a Stop button. Any music player can play the WAV, and any audio program can turn it into an MP3.

A video

Export video… makes an MP4 video of the song, with views of the app following the music, ready to post or to show a class:

• The views. Tick the ones to show: Chord sheet (the bar playing framed), Lead sheet (the tune on a staff with its chords), Playlist, Piano roll and Harmony keys (the chord playing lit). Each has a zoom, from 50% to 250%; the lead sheet instead grows with its box.
• The picture. The preview shows one frame. Drag a view to move it, drag its corner to make it bigger or smaller, and scroll over it to zoom. Stack puts the views one above the other again. Preview at shows the picture at another place in the song.
• Size: 1280 × 720 or 1920 × 1080.

A line along the top names the song, and shows the bar and beat, the key, the time signature and the tempo as they change. The video is an MP4 file, with H.264 pictures, 30 a second, and MP3 sound, which plays almost anywhere; nothing else needs to be installed to make it. The window remembers your choices for next time.

A MIDI file

Export song as MIDI… writes the notes of the song, for another music program, a notation program, or a synthesizer:

• each channel gets a track of its own, with its General MIDI instrument, so the file opens with the right sounds;
• the drums go on channel 10, as General MIDI drums; a channel you send over MIDI keeps its channel, and the others take 1, 2, 3 and so on;
• every repeat is written out, with the song’s swing in the notes, and the tempo, time signature and key are written as they change;
• muted tracks and channels, and channels silenced by a solo, are left out, as they are when the song plays. The mixer’s volumes, pans and effects are not written: the program that opens the file makes its own mix.

Export pattern as MIDI… writes only the selected pattern, from its first step: a beat or a part to use somewhere else.

Ferrous Lineup can open the file again (see Opening MIDI files and recordings), and keeps the exact key it was in.

A chord sheet as text

Export chord sheet… writes the song’s chord sheet as a text file, bar by bar, as in | C | Am7 | Dm7 G7 |. Paste it in a message, print it, or open it again with File > Import chord sheet… (see The chord sheet). It always uses letter names, which every musician can read.

Lead sheets and printing

The lead sheet, the tune on a staff with its chords, is printed or saved as a PDF from its own window, in concert pitch or for a B♭, E♭ or F instrument: see Lead sheets.

Notes, intervals and scales

This part of the manual is a short course in harmony, with Ferrous Lineup as the instrument. Each chapter explains an idea, then shows where the app shows it or lets you hear it. Nothing here needs more than the piano roll and the harmony keys; the music glossary has every word in one place.

Twelve notes

A piano has 88 keys, but only twelve different notes, which repeat in every octave:

 C  C♯ D  D♯ E  F  F♯ G  G♯ A  A♯ B  C
 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 11 12

The distance from one key to the next, white or black, is a semitone. Twelve semitones make an octave: the same note again, higher. A note’s name without its octave (C, rather than “the C in the middle of the piano”) is its pitch class. Harmony mostly works with pitch classes: a C major chord is C, E and G, in any octave and in any order.

The piano roll writes the octave after the name: C4 is middle C, C5 the C an octave above it, A4 the A an orchestra tunes to.

Sharps, flats and spelling

Each black key has two names. The key between C and D is C♯ (“C sharp”, a semitone above C) and also D♭ (“D flat”, a semitone below D). Which name is right depends on the music around it, and the rule is simple: a scale uses each of the seven letters once.

• F major is F G A B♭ C D E: it already has an A, so the fourth note is B♭, not A♯.
• F♯ major is F♯ G♯ A♯ B C♯ D♯ E♯: it already has an F (F♯), so the seventh note is E♯, which sounds like F but is written as a kind of E.
• D harmonic minor raises its seventh note, C, to C♯, even though its key signature has a flat.
• Some notes need two sharps or two flats: the seventh of G♯ harmonic minor is F𝄪 (F double sharp, which sounds as G), and the seventh of a C diminished seventh chord is B𝄫 (B double flat, which sounds as A).

Ferrous Lineup spells every note this way, in the piano roll, on the chord sheet, on the harmony keys and in the lead sheet. A note from outside the key is written the way musicians most often meet it, counted from the key’s first note: a flat second, third, sixth or seventh, and a sharp fourth.

Letters or solfège

English-speaking musicians name notes with letters, C D E F G A B. Spanish, Italian and French musicians use solfège: Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si. Ferrous Lineup can show either: Edit > Settings… > Harmony > Note naming. Chord symbols follow the same setting, so Am7 is written Lam7 in solfège. Until you choose, the app follows its language: letters in English, solfège in Spanish.

Intervals

An interval is the distance between two notes. Musicians name it with two words: a number, counted in letters, and a quality, counted in semitones.

The number counts the letters from the lower note to the upper one, both included: C up to E is a third (C, D, E), C up to G a fifth. So C up to D♯ is a second (C, D), even though D♯ sounds the same as E♭, and C up to E♭ is a third.

The quality says which kind of that number it is:

The ear training window asks you to name intervals by ear, and explains each answer with its notes (see Practising).

Scales

A scale is a choice of some of the twelve notes, starting from a first note called the tonic. The major scale is the white keys from C: C D E F G A B. In semitones above the tonic, that is 0 2 4 5 7 9 11: steps of two semitones, except between the third and fourth notes and between the seventh and the octave. The same pattern started on another note gives the major scale of that key: from D, it is D E F♯ G A B C♯.

The scales the app knows:

The modes, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian and Locrian, are the major scale started on another of its notes. Keys and modes explains them, and how a scale becomes a key.

Seeing and hearing it in the app

• The piano roll has Key menus above its grid. Pick a key, and its notes get a dot on the keyboard at the left of the grid and are written next to the menus: C D E F G A B for C major. Snap to scale makes the notes you draw, move or play land on the key’s notes. See The piano roll.
• The harmony keys at the bottom of the window show the key’s chords; What chords do explains them.
• Any note you click in the piano roll’s keyboard plays, so you can play a scale with the mouse, or with the computer’s keys (MIDI > Typing keyboard to piano: Z X C V B N M are C D E F G A B).

Keys and modes

A key is a home note and the scale around it. C major is the major scale on C: its notes are C D E F G A B, and C is home, the note the music comes back to and rests on. Most songs stay in one key, or move to another for a while and come back.

The key of a song

A song in Ferrous Lineup has a key, shown at the left of the harmony keys along the bottom of the window and at the top of the piano roll. The key is what the harmony keys, the Roman numerals on the chord sheet, the hints and the band all read the music in.

Picking another key in the Key menus moves the song, the way a band plays the same song in another key when you ask it to:

• A new tonic moves every note by the same distance. From C major to D major, the chords, the bass and the tune all go up a tone. The song moves the shorter way: C to G is five semitones down, not seven up, so it stays about where it was on the keyboard.
• A new kind of scale moves each note to the same step of the new scale. From C major to C minor, the third, sixth and seventh notes go down a semitone (E, A and B become E♭, A♭ and B♭), and C, D, F and G stay.
• The drums stay as they are, and Ctrl+Z puts everything back in one step.

Try it: open File > Demos > Songs, find Frère Jacques, play it, and pick D in the key menu, then minor.

Major and minor keys

Every major key has a relative minor, the minor key that uses the same notes and starts on the sixth note: A minor has the notes of C major, E minor those of G major. They share their key signature, the sharps or flats written at the start of each line of a score. You tell them apart by where the music comes home: on C or on A.

Every major key also has a parallel minor on the same tonic: C major and C minor. Songs often borrow chords from the parallel key; see Chords from outside the key.

A minor key has three forms, and Ferrous Lineup counts all three as one key (see What chords do):

• natural minor: A B C D E F G, the notes of the relative major;
• harmonic minor: the seventh note raised (G♯ in A minor), so it leads up to the tonic. It makes the dominant chord major (E, or E7), which pulls home much harder than Em;
• melodic minor: the sixth and seventh raised going up (F♯ and G♯), for a smooth line.

Keys with two names

On the piano, F♯ and G♭ are the same black key. So F♯ major, six sharps, and G♭ major, six flats, are the same seven keys of the piano written two ways. A composer picks the name that fits the music around it: Debussy writes the middle of Golliwogg’s Cakewalk, a piece in E♭ major, in G♭ major, to stay in flats.

Three keys of the piano have two names in major, and three in minor:

The key menus list both names, fifteen keys in all for major. Picking the other name of the same key renames it and moves no note: the chord sheet is written again, so F♯, D♯m7, B and C♯7 in F♯ major become G♭, E♭m7, C♭ and D♭7 in G♭ major.

The modes

The modes are the major scale started on another of its notes. The white keys from D are D Dorian, from E E Phrygian, and so on. Each has its own colour, because the half steps fall in other places:

The key menus offer the five modes besides major and minor. In a mode, the chord sheet and the harmony keys give Roman numerals, but they do not colour chords by function, since tonic, subdominant and dominant belong to major and minor keys.

Key changes in a song

A song can change key partway through: Mozart’s Turkish March goes from A minor to A major and to F♯ minor and back. Each change is a key marker on the playlist:

• The bar numbers at the top of the playlist write the key at bar 1 and wherever it changes, in blue.
• Right-click a bar number and choose Key from bar N to change key there, picking a tonic and a scale, or Remove this key change. Bar 1 is the song’s own key, which the Key menus change.
• While the song plays, the harmony keys follow the key at the playhead. When it is not the key the song starts in, Now in A major appears under the Key menus, and the seven chord keys are that key’s chords.
• The chord sheet writes “→ G major” in the bar where the key changes.

Musicians call a real change of key, one the music settles in, a modulation. A few bars that only lean on another key, such as a chord with its own dominant before it, are a tonicization, and the song stays in its key; see Chords from outside the key.

Finding the key (experimental)

🔍 Find the key, under the harmony keys, listens to the notes and says which key they fit, bar by bar. It compares how often each note sounds with how often it sounds in each key: in C major, C, E and G sound most, then the other white keys, and the black keys hardly ever.

When the answer is clear, it shows one key. When it is not, the best key is shown brightest and up to two others fainter after it. C major and A minor have the same notes, so a tune that stays on the white keys may fit both; modes are the hardest case, because they share their notes with a major and a minor key. Each key shown says what the chord playing is in that key: G7 is V7 in C major, ♭VII7 in A minor and I7 in G major.

It also works while you play on a MIDI keyboard or the computer keyboard, from the bars you have played so far. In song mode, Mark on the playlist writes the key changes it heard as key markers, which is how you give an imported MIDI file or recording the key changes it really has. No note moves, and Undo takes them back.

It is right on most bars of the demo songs, but it often misses short visits to another key, and it can mistake a key for its relative major or minor.

Chords and their names

A chord is three or more notes sounding together. Most chords in the music you know are built the same way: start on a note, the root, and stack thirds on it, skipping every other note of the scale. C, skip D, E, skip F, G: the chord of C.

This chapter goes through the chords, how their names are written, and how Ferrous Lineup names what it hears.

Triads

Three notes stacked in thirds make a triad: the root, the third above it and the fifth above that. A third is either major (four semitones) or minor (three), so there are four ways to stack two of them:

Major and minor triads have a perfect fifth between root and fifth (seven semitones). The diminished triad squeezes it to six, a tritone; the augmented one stretches it to eight.

A key gives each of its notes a triad from its own notes. In a major key they come out major on the 1st, 4th and 5th notes, minor on the 2nd, 3rd and 6th, and diminished on the 7th: C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bdim in C major. In harmonic minor, the raised seventh gives an augmented triad on the 3rd note too:

To hear them, open the piano roll, pick Draw > Chord in key (triad), and click a note: it draws the triad the key gives that note. The chord buttons above the grid play each one.

Suspended chords

A sus chord leaves the third out and puts the note next to it in its place: Csus4 is C F G, Csus2 is C D G. With no third it is neither major nor minor, and the fourth of a sus4 pulls down to the third: Csus4 to C is one of the oldest sounds of a cadence.

Seventh chords

Stack one more third, and the chord gets a seventh above the root. Jazz and most popular music use sevenths all the time:

The dominant seventh is called that because it is the chord on the dominant, the fifth note of the key. Its third and seventh (B and F in G7) are a tritone apart and want to move by a semitone each, to C and E: that pull is why G7 leads to C. What chords do explains it.

Two sixth chords add a sixth instead of a seventh: C6 (C E G A) and Cm6 (C E♭ G A).

Ninths, elevenths and thirteenths

Stacking further thirds gives the ninth (the second, an octave up), the eleventh (the fourth) and the thirteenth (the sixth):

Players rarely play all of these notes: they leave out the fifth, and in a thirteenth chord the eleventh, which clashes with the third (the app’s C13 has no eleventh either).

Writing chord names

A chord name is the root and a few letters for its kind. Musicians write the same chord in several ways, and Ferrous Lineup reads them all; it writes each back in one way:

Sharps and flats in a name are typed with # and b: F#m7, Bb13. A name is case-sensitive where it matters: CM7 is a major seventh, Cm7 a minor seventh.

Slash chords and inversions

A chord’s notes can be stacked in any order. The note at the bottom, the bass, changes how it sounds:

• with the root at the bottom, the chord is in root position: C E G;
• with the third at the bottom, it is in first inversion: E G C;
• with the fifth at the bottom, second inversion: G C E;
• a seventh chord has a third inversion, with the seventh at the bottom.

A chord name shows the bass after a slash: C/E is C major with E in the bass, and G7/F is G7 in third inversion. When the note after the slash is not in the chord, as in F/G, it is a chord over a bass note, a sound of its own (F/G is a softer way to play G11).

The Roman numerals under the chords show inversions as classical harmony does, with the numbers of figured bass: I⁶ for a first inversion, I⁶₄ for a second, and V⁶₅, V⁴₃ and V⁴₂ for the inversions of a seventh chord.

In the piano roll, the list next to Draw picks the inversion of the chords you draw (Root position, 1st inversion and so on), and Tools > Invert chords up or down turns the chords you already have. Inversions make a smoother bass line: C, G/B, Am, G steps down the scale instead of jumping.

Two chords at once

An orchestra can play two chords at once, one over the other: a polychord. Ferrous Lineup writes it with the upper chord first and a bar between them. The chord that opens Stravinsky’s Augurs of Spring, which the strings hammer for pages, is E♭7|F♭: E♭7 above, F♭ major below.

Type a polychord on the chord sheet the same way: Eb7|Fb.

How the app hears chords

The piano roll names chords in two rows over the grid: the chord the channel plays, and under it, on All, the chord all the channels make together. The chord sheet, the harmony keys and Write the chords the song plays name them the same way.

The app listens as a musician does, over a stretch of music rather than note by note:

• an arpeggio, a chord played one note at a time, is heard as its chord;
• a tune counts for less than the chords under it, so a melody note passing over C doesn’t turn it into Cadd9;
• a bass note between two chords counts as a passing note, so a walking bass doesn’t change the chord on every beat;
• where no chord name fits, as in much music of the 20th century, the notes are named as a pitch-class set instead (see Beyond keys: sets, rows and micromodes).

Pointing at a step tells you more, as in “Am: A minor, chord vi of C major”: the chord, its full name, and what it does in the key.

What chords do: numerals and functions

A chord’s name says what it is: G7 is G, B, D and F. Its numeral says what it does in the key: in C major, G7 is V7, the chord on the fifth note, the one that pulls the music home. This chapter is about that second kind of name, and about how chords pull on each other.

Roman numerals

Number the notes of the scale from 1 to 7, and name each chord by the note it is built on, in Roman numerals: uppercase for a major chord, lowercase for a minor one, with ° for diminished and + for augmented. In C major:

With sevenths, the numeral takes the chord’s figure: Imaj7, ii7, iii7, IVmaj7, V7, vi7, viiø7.

The point of numerals is that they don’t depend on the key. ii, V, I is Dm, G, C in C major, Em, A, D in D major and Gm, C, F in F major, and it does the same thing in all of them. Learn a progression by its numerals and you know it in every key. On the chord sheet you can even type numerals: ii7 V7 Imaj7 in B♭ major is written Cm7, F7, B♭maj7 (see The chord sheet).

Home, away and tension

The seven chords of a key do three jobs, which harmony books call functions. Ferrous Lineup shows them on the harmony keys, in a word and a colour:

Why these groups? Chords that share notes do similar jobs. vi (A C E) shares two of its three notes with I (C E G), and so does iii (E G B); that is why a song can end a phrase on vi and still sound nearly at home. ii (D F A) shares two notes with IV (F A C). And vii° (B D F) is V7 (G B D F) without its root.

The dominant pulls because of two notes. Its third, B in G, is the leading tone, a semitone below home, and it wants to rise to C. In G7, the seventh F wants to fall a semitone to E. B and F are a tritone apart, the most restless interval there is, and moving inward to C and E settles it. That pull is the engine of most music in major and minor keys.

Cadences

A phrase of music ends on a cadence, the way a sentence ends on a full stop or a question mark:

The Classical cadence demo in File > Demos plays two of them in a row: I, IV, V7, I, then vi, ii, V7, I. In the second phrase each root falls a fifth: A to D, D to G, G to C.

Roots that fall a fifth

A chord whose root is a fifth above the next one leads to it most strongly: V to I, ii to V, vi to ii. Chain them, and the harmony walks home around the circle of fifths: vi, ii, V, I is Am, Dm, G, C. Jazz lives on the last three, ii, V, I. The Circle of fifths demo goes through every chord of the key that way, as Baroque music does: I, IV, vii°, iii, vi, ii, V, I, or C, F, Bdim, Em, Am, Dm, G, C, each root a fifth below the one before (F to B is the one diminished fifth, so the chain stays in the key).

Some progressions you will hear everywhere:

Minor keys

A minor key uses three forms of its scale (see Keys and modes), and its chords come from all three. Most music in minor keys plays the chord on the fifth note major, from harmonic minor, so that it has a leading tone and pulls home the way V does in major. In A minor:

Pop and jazz books number the third, sixth and seventh chords from the major scale, so C in A minor is ♭III; classical harmony books count them from the minor scale, so the same C is III. Settings > Harmony > Roman numerals in minor keys picks either (see Settings).

What often comes next

Pointing at a chord, holding it on the harmony keys or a keyboard, or hearing it while a song plays, frames the chords that often follow it, the most usual one the brightest. The hint next to the harmony keys names the move: “V to I: the strongest ending. The leading tone rises to the root.” Detailed, Short and Minimal, next to the hint, choose how much it explains.

These are not rules. They are the moves that centuries of music, and most pop songs, use most often, because of how chords pull on each other. Knowing them helps you guess what comes next in a song you are learning by ear, and choose on purpose when to surprise. Try it: play a demo, watch the harmony keys, and before each change guess which framed chord comes next.

Chords from outside the key, such as a ♭VII in a major song or a V7/V that leads to the dominant, are the subject of the next chapter, Chords from outside the key.

Chords from outside the key

Most chords of a song are the key’s own, built from its seven notes. The ones that are not are often the ones you remember: the minor iv that darkens the last line of a ballad, the D7 that leads into the bridge of a standard. Harmony has names for why they are there, and the chord sheet writes them under the chords, each in a colour:

The key’s own chords stay grey. Point at a numeral and its tooltip explains what the chord does and which of its notes are from outside the key.

To try it, make a new song, open the chord sheet and type these sixteen bars: C, Fm, Ab, G7, C, E7, Am, D7/F#, G, C, Db/F, G, C, Am, D7, G. Then right-click bar 15 in the playlist’s bar numbers and choose G under Key from bar 15. The chord sheet colours the numerals as in the picture.

Borrowed chords

C major and C minor share their tonic, C, and their dominant, G: they are parallel keys. Music in a major key often takes a chord from its parallel minor for a moment without leaving the key. This is borrowing, or modal mixture:

The ♭ in ♭VI says the chord is built on a lowered sixth note: A♭ where C major has A. A borrowed chord darkens the major key without leaving it. iv to I, Fm to C, is the minor plagal cadence: the A♭ falls to G. ♭VII to I, B♭ to C, is the rock cadence. The Minor plagal demo is built on the first.

Borrowing goes the other way too. A piece in A minor that ends on A major borrows its last chord from A major: that bright ending is the Picardy third, and has a demo of its own. The tooltip names it when a minor piece ends that way.

Secondary dominants

In C major, G7 is the dominant: its B is a semitone below C and pulls up to it, which makes C sound like home. Any major or minor chord of the key can get a dominant of its own. D7 is the dominant of G: its F♯ is a semitone below G and pulls up to it. F♯ is not in C major, so for a moment G sounds like a home of its own. This is a tonicization, and D7 in C major is written V7/V, “five seven of five”.

C7 is the odd one: its leading tone, E, is in C major already, and it is the seventh, B♭, that makes it sound like a dominant.

An inversion’s figures go on the V: D7 with F♯ in the bass is V⁶₅/V, and the F♯ in the bass rises straight to G. A secondary dominant doesn’t always go where it leads: E7 going to F instead of Am is a deceptive move, like V to vi, and the tooltip says so.

A diminished chord can do a dominant’s work too. F♯dim7 is built on F♯, the leading tone of G, so it pulls into G: it is written vii°7/V.

In a minor key

A minor key takes its chords from all three of its scales (natural, harmonic and melodic), so in A minor, C, Dm, E7, F, G and G♯dim7 are all its own. A secondary dominant there brings a note none of the three has: C♯, D♯ or A♯. A7 going to Dm is V7/iv.

In a mode, such as D Dorian or E Phrygian, the chord sheet writes numerals only. Borrowed chords and secondary dominants are names from major and minor keys, and a mode’s chords do other things: E major in E Phrygian is the home chord of much flamenco, not the dominant of A minor.

The Neapolitan sixth

The Neapolitan chord is a major chord on the lowered second note: D♭ major in C, where the key has D. It is named after the opera composers of Naples in the 1700s, who used it often. It is usually played with its third in the bass, D♭/F, and so is called the Neapolitan sixth, written N⁶. It leads to the dominant, and its D♭ falls to B, the leading tone: a striking step down. The Neapolitan demo plays it in a minor key, where it is most at home.

Pivot chords: changing key

A modulation is a move to a new key that the music stays in. The smoothest way there goes through a chord the two keys share. In C major, Am is vi; in G major, it is ii. When the music goes C, Am, D7, G, the ear hears Am as vi in C. Then D7 comes, which C major doesn’t have, and the ear hears that Am was really ii in G. Am is the pivot: the chord sheet writes both numerals, the old key first, vi = ii · pivot, and → G major where the key changes.

Not every key change has a pivot:

• a direct modulation goes straight into the new key, as a song does when it moves up a semitone for its last chorus;
• a change of mode keeps the tonic and changes the scale, from C major to C minor, and needs no chord to lead there.

The tooltip on the key change says which it is. Key changes themselves are set on the playlist’s bar numbers: see Keys and modes.

Hearing them in the demos

The demos under File > Demos > Styles > Classical include short progressions that show these chords: Minor plagal (iv to I), Picardy third, Neapolitan and Chromatic mediants (major chords a third apart, as in film music). Songs are full of them too. Open the chord sheet of a jazz standard such as Rhythm changes and look for the yellow numerals.

Voice leading and how parts move

The chord names say which notes sound together. Voice leading is how each part gets from its note in one chord to its note in the next. A part, or voice, is one line of notes: a singer, an instrument, or one line inside a pianist’s chords. Two pieces can use the same chords and sound very different, smooth or clumsy, because their parts move differently.

Harmony courses teach it with four-part writing: soprano, alto, tenor and bass, as a choir sings a hymn or as Bach wrote his chorales. A few rules keep each of the four a line of its own. The piano roll can check them for you, and show how each part moves, as a teacher would mark an exercise.

Checking an exercise

Tick Voice leading next to Ghost notes at the top of the piano roll. The piano roll then shows:

• A Voices row under the chord names, with a block over each chord where something classical part writing avoids happens: 5ths and 8ves for parallel fifths and octaves, 1sns for parallel unisons, LT for a leading tone that doesn’t rise, and 7th for a seventh that doesn’t fall.
• A line of colour for each part, from each of its notes to the next, so you can follow one part through the pattern as on a score. The moves into the chord you point at are drawn bolder.
• A dashed outline where a leading tone or a seventh should have gone.
• A line over the chord names that sums up the check, as in “Voice leading, 4 parts: parallel fifths (1), seventh not falling (1).” Pointing at a chord with a finding says what happens there instead.

Point at a block in the Voices row to read why part writing avoids it:

To write this exercise yourself, add an empty pattern, open the piano roll, and draw these notes a beat each, the bass first:

It has two slips, on purpose. From C to F, the tenor and the bass are a fifth apart and both rise a fourth into another fifth. From G7 to C, the soprano’s F, the seventh of G7, rises to G instead of falling to E.

Here is the same progression written well:

The line now reads “Voice leading, 4 parts: nothing classical part writing avoids.” Look at what changed: wherever two chords share a note, a part keeps it (C5 from C to F, F4 from F to G7, G4 from G7 to C), and the other parts move by step. The seventh, F4, falls to E4, and the leading tone, B3, rises to C4. That is most of the craft.

Which notes make a part

A track that plays one note at a time is one part. A track that plays chords holds several: the top note of each chord goes to the top part, the next one to the next part, and so on. The messages call them by place, “voice 3 of 4” or “lowest voice”, as in the picture, where all four parts are on one track.

With Ghost notes on, the other tracks are checked too, each by its name, so the bass can be on a track of its own. Drum tracks are left out. A rest of a beat or more ends a line. Two parts that play in octaves all the time, as basses doubling the cellos, are one line made louder, and are counted once.

The rules

No parallel fifths or octaves

Two parts a perfect fifth apart that both move the same way into another perfect fifth make parallel fifths. The same goes for octaves and unisons. These intervals blend so well that the two parts sound like one for that moment, and the music loses a line. A fifth plus an octave still counts as a fifth.

Moving the opposite way from a fifth to a twelfth makes fifths by contrary motion. Each part moves differently, but the ear still hears two fifths in a row, so strict part writing avoids those too. A held or repeated note doesn’t count: both parts have to move.

The leading tone rises

The leading tone is the note a semitone below the tonic: B in C major, G♯ in A minor. When a dominant chord (V, V7, vii°) goes to the tonic, the leading tone rises to the tonic. The rule holds in the top part and the bass, where the ear follows the line. An inner part may drop to the fifth of the tonic chord instead, so that the chord gets all its notes, and the check leaves inner parts alone.

The check also expects the leading tone to rise in a deceptive cadence, V to vi, and in a secondary dominant: in D7 to G, in C major, the F♯ rises to G (see Chords from outside the key). Classical part writing never doubles the leading tone, and the message says so when two parts have it.

A seventh falls

In a seventh chord such as G7 (G B D F), the seventh, F, is a dissonance, and it falls a step into the next chord: F to E in G7 to C. The textbook exceptions are not marked:

• the next chord has the same note, and the seventh holds it;
• a suspension: the seventh is held into the next chord and falls a little later;
• a short passing or neighbour note that comes and goes by step;
• V⁴₃ to I⁶, where the seventh may rise while the bass rises a tenth below it.

What it doesn’t check

Hidden fifths and octaves (two parts moving the same way into a fifth or an octave), the spacing between parts, parts crossing, and which note of a chord is doubled are left to you. And these are the rules of one style, the hymns and chorales of the 1700s and the harmony exercises built on them, not of all music: jazz, pop and Debussy move in parallel fifths on purpose.

The band keeps the first rule where it holds long chords, as a choir sings them: in styles such as Hymn, Romanesca or Ambient, each chord takes, of the voicings nearest the last one, the first that moves no two parts, the bass among them, in parallel fifths or octaves or in fifths or octaves by contrary motion, when there is one. From C E G over C, D minor comes as A D F, the upper parts going down while the bass goes up. Styles that play their chords in rhythm take the nearest voicing, as a pianist’s hands do.

Where the key is a twelve-tone row, the check uses the rules of twelve-tone writing instead, and a Row line shows the forms of the row it reads in the notes: see Beyond keys: sets, rows and micromodes.

How each part moves

The check is a teacher’s red pen: it says nothing when the parts move well. To see every move, good or not, point at a chord. The line over the chord names lists each part from the top down with where it goes, and then the motion of the outer parts. Pointing at G7 in the exercise:

Lineup Osc: top A4→F4 · 2nd F4→D4 · 3rd C4→B3 · lowest F3→G3; outer parts in contrary motion

Its tooltip says each move in words, with the interval spelled in the key, “down a major third from A4 to F4, a skip”. How far a part moves has a name:

And two parts move together in one of four ways:

Good part writing moves the inner parts mostly by step or holds them, lets the bass leap from root to root, and keeps the top part and the bass in contrary or oblique motion, because the ear follows those two most. Parallel thirds and sixths are welcome anywhere: they sound sweet and keep the two lines apart.

Rhythm and meter

Harmony is which notes sound; rhythm is when. This chapter covers how music counts time, how the grid of Ferrous Lineup counts it, and the meters that don’t go in twos and fours.

Beats and bars

Most music has a beat, the pulse you tap your foot to. The tempo says how fast it goes. Beats come in groups, with the first of each group leaned on a little: those groups are bars (or measures), and the meter says how they are made. Count along with almost any pop song and you count 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4: four beats to the bar, the first the strongest, the third a little strong too. A waltz counts 1 2 3.

The time signature writes the meter as two numbers: how many notes to the bar, and which note (see Time signatures).

Note values and steps

Notes are named by their length, each half the one before:

A dot after a note adds half its length again: a dotted quarter is three eighths, 6 steps; a dotted eighth is three sixteenths, 3 steps.

The piano roll and the channel rack count in steps, and a step is a sixteenth note: a bar of 4/4 has 16, a bar of 3/4 has 12 and a bar of 7/8 has 14. Time, in the harmony keys, says how many steps a bar has, and Length in the piano roll draws the lengths in the last column; drag a note’s right end for any other length.

A triplet fits three notes in the time of two: three eighths in a beat instead of two. Their starts fall between the steps of the grid. Demos and the MIDI files you open keep them exactly where they are played.

Two and three

In 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4, each beat is a quarter note that splits into two eighths: count 1 and 2 and 3 and. These are simple meters.

In 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8, the beat is a dotted quarter that splits into three eighths: 6/8 is two beats, counted 1 2 3 4 5 6, or 1-and-a 2-and-a. These are compound meters. A slow blues or a doo-wop ballad is often in 12/8: four beats, each a group of three.

3/4 and 6/8 both have six eighths to the bar, and that is where the fun starts:

• 3/4: three beats of two eighths: 1 & 2 & 3 &;
• 6/8: two beats of three: 1 2 3 4 5 6.

Much music of Spain and Latin America moves between the two, or plays both at once. The zamba and the chacarera of Argentina are written in 6/8, but their bombo drum plays 6/8 on its skin and 3/4 on its rim at the same time, and the tunes cross from one to the other, often in the bar before a cadence. That shift is the hemiola, the sesquiáltera of Spanish and Latin American music. Listen for it in the demo Zamba de mi esperanza, or try the Chacarera style in the Library. Leonard Bernstein built “America”, in West Side Story, on it: a bar of 6/8, then a bar of 3/4, “I like to be in | A-me-ri-ca”.

Strong beats, weak beats and syncopation

The beats of a bar are not equal. In 4/4 the first is the strongest and the third next. Rock, pop, soul and funk put the snare drum on the weak beats, 2 and 4: that is the backbeat, the clap of gospel music, and what makes a song groove.

Syncopation is an accent where the meter doesn’t expect one: on the “and” between beats, or a note that starts just before a strong beat and holds through it. A chord that arrives an eighth note early, before the bar line, is a push or anticipation: the band plays it with ^ on the chord sheet (see Shots, holds, rests and pushes). Latin music is built on syncopated patterns that repeat every bar or two, like the clave of Cuban music and the tresillo, three notes spread over eight eighths as 3 + 3 + 2.

Swing is the other great rhythmic idea of jazz: the eighth notes of each beat played long-short, closer to the first and third notes of a triplet than to two equal halves. See Swing and feel.

Odd meters

Some meters count their eighth notes in groups of two and three mixed. A group of three is half as long again as a group of two, so the beats are long and short, and a dance on them seems to limp: Turkish musicians call these meters aksak, “limping”.

The same 7/8 can limp two ways, so Ferrous Lineup writes the groups in the time signature: 3+2+2/8 is a lesnoto, 2+2+3/8 a rachenitsa. The drums, the bass and the chords all follow the groups. In the channel rack, each beat is shaded on its own, so you can see the long and short beats:

To hear it, open the demo Ajde Jano and count along with the kick: 1 2 3, 1 2, 1 2. To set an odd meter yourself, open Time and choose Any other: the top number, the bottom one and Beats grouped as, such as 3 + 2 + 2. The Library’s checkbox In 3+2+2/8 then shows the styles in that meter.

5/4 doesn’t always split 3 + 2. Take Five’s piano vamp goes 1 2 3 4 5, but the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, a waltz in five, goes 1 2 3 4 5, a short beat cutting in before each waltz step.

Meters that change

Some music changes meter as it goes. The Promenade from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition puts a bar of 5/4 next to a bar of 6/4, phrased like speech. A Bavarian zwiefacher, such as the demo Süsserl, mixes bars of two and three beats in an order the tune fixes, and the dancers know it by heart. In Ferrous Lineup each bar can have its own time signature: right-click a bar number in the playlist and choose under Time signature from bar (see Changing time signature partway through).

Beyond keys: sets, rows and micromodes

Everything in the chapters before assumed a key: a home note, and chords that lean towards it. Much of the music of the 20th century has no key at all, and chord names don’t fit its harmonies. Composers and theorists found other ways to think about it, and Ferrous Lineup has three of them:

• pitch-class sets, a name for every group of notes, chord or not;
• twelve-tone rows, all twelve notes in an order that a whole piece is made of;
• micromodes, the twelve colours of three notes that the composer Francisco Kröpfl taught in Buenos Aires.

Each has a window in the piano roll’s toolbar (Row…, Sets…, Micromodes…), and each can be the key of a song.

Pitch-class sets

Pitch classes. Number the twelve notes from C: C is 0, C♯ is 1, up to B, 11. Octaves and spellings don’t count: every C is 0, and C♯ and D♭ are both 1. A set is a choice of some of the twelve.

Moving a set. Moving every note up n semitones is Tn: C E G moved up 3 is E♭ G B♭. Turning every interval upside down is inverting: C E G, up four semitones and then three, becomes C A♭ F, down four and then three. That is F minor: upside down, a major triad is a minor triad.

Set classes. A set with all its transpositions and inversions is a set class. All 24 major and minor triads are one class. The 4,096 possible sets fall into 224 classes, and each has a Forte number, from the list the theorist Allen Forte made in 1973: 3-11 is the class of major and minor triads (3 notes, the 11th class of 3 notes). A class is also written by its prime form, its most compact shape moved to start on 0: [037] for 3-11, C E♭ G.

(T stands for 10, so that each number is one character.)

The interval vector counts the intervals between every pair of notes in a set: how many minor seconds, major seconds, minor thirds, major thirds, fourths and tritones. A fifth counts as a fourth, being a fourth upside down. For the triad 3-11 it is <001110>: one minor third, one major third, one fourth. It is a fair summary of how a set sounds.

In the app

The piano roll names the set of the notes under the pointer, or of the notes you select, on the line under the chord buttons:

Set: 3-11 · normal form C E G · prime form [037] · intervals <001110> · major or minor triad · micromode Acorde menor-mayor

Sets… opens a list of every class of the size you choose, with its number, prime form, interval vector and, for the famous ones, a name. Search it by number or name (“4-Z15”, “octatonic”), or click Show it for the class of the selected notes. Pick one, then Move it up and Inverted (I) choose which of its forms: T3 is the set three semitones up, T3I its inversion moved up three. ▶ Hear it plays it, Draw with it puts the whole set down with each click in the piano roll, and Use as the key makes it the song’s key. On the chord sheet, a set is typed by its name or its notes: 3-11 T2, {D F A} or {0,1,4}.

One harmony, four names

A set is another way to name notes, not other notes. C major’s chord C is C, E and G however you name it. The chord sheet’s Show menu writes the same harmony four ways, without changing a note: As written, as Chords, as Pitch-class sets or as Micromodes.

How to read them:

• Tn is the prime form moved up n semitones: 3-11’s prime form is C E♭ G, a C minor triad, so 3-11 T2 is D F A, D minor.
• TnI is the prime form turned upside down first, then moved up: C E♭ G upside down is C A F, and moved up 7 it is G E C. So every major triad has an I in its name, and no minor triad has one.
• A micromode is always three notes, so G7, with four, keeps its set name in the Micromodes view.
• Chords names a set as a chord when its notes make one, and keeps the set’s name when they don’t.

For sets and micromodes, a second menu chooses which notes make each group: The sheet’s harmonies, Notes together (vertical), or Notes in a line (serial), with how many notes each group holds and which track to read. That reads the song’s own notes, so you can look at a tune as a chain of three-note groups.

The key works the same way. Pick pitch-class set in the Key menu of a song in C major, and nothing moves: the key is now named 7-35, and the harmony keys show the same seven chords with their set classes, six of them 3-11 and B D F 3-10. Notes move only when you pick a different set.

Twelve-tone rows

Around 1921, Arnold Schoenberg looked for a way to write music in which no note is home. His answer was to use all twelve notes in a fixed order, chosen for each piece: the row, or series. No note comes back until the other eleven have sounded, so none becomes the centre. This is the row of his Suite for Piano, Op. 25 (1925):

E F G C♯ F♯ D♯ G♯ D B C A A♯

A row comes in four forms:

Each can start on any of the twelve notes, which makes 48 forms. They are named by a letter and the number of the note they start on, with C as 0: Schoenberg’s row is P4, because it starts on E. An R form takes the number of the form it reverses, so R4 ends on E. (Some books number the forms from the row’s own first note instead, so that the row as written is always P0. The forms are the same; only their numbers move.)

The Row window

Row… in the piano roll opens it. Type a row in the box at the top, as note names (in letters or in solfège) or numbers, and click Use; or draw twelve notes in the piano roll and click From the notes; or take one from 🎲 Random, 🎲 All-interval or Famous and example rows: Schoenberg’s Suite, Berg’s Lyric Suite, Webern’s Symphony and Concerto, and four rows written for Ferrous Lineup.

The matrix holds all 48 forms in a square. Each line, read left to right, is a P form, and right to left an R form; each column, read down, is an I form, and up an RI form. The labels around the square say which: click one to choose that form. The diagonal from the top left is the same note all the way down, a quick check that the square is right.

Under the matrix, the window says what the row is made of: its steps in semitones, its groups of three notes, and which forms are combinatorial with it, whose first six notes are the six the row leaves out, so the two played together give all twelve notes in each half.

Then write a form into the pattern: Together says how many of its notes sound at once, as a chord; Then what comes after the form, Once, Repeat or P, R, I, RI; the register, Close (all in one octave), Smooth (each note near the one before) or Wide (leaping over three octaves, as in Webern). Serialism goes further, as Messiaen, Boulez and Babbitt did around 1950: it lets the row choose the Durations, Dynamics and Octaves too. Write P0 into current pattern replaces the channel’s notes, and Save to new pattern puts them in a pattern of their own.

A row as the key

Pick twelve-tone row in the Key menu, or click Use as the key in the Row window for the form you chose, and the row becomes the key. The piano roll numbers its notes 1 to 12 on the keyboard, in the row’s order, so you can draw the row by following the numbers. The harmony keys play the row’s groups instead of chords: 3 notes gives four keys, 1–3, 4–6, 7–9 and 10–12; 4 notes three, and 6 notes two.

With Voice leading ticked, the piano roll checks the rules of twelve-tone writing as Schoenberg’s students learnt them: the notes follow forms of the row, each in its order; notes next to each other in the row may sound together as a chord, and a note may be repeated straight away, but it comes back only after the other eleven; a form is played whole; no note is doubled in octaves; and no chord sounds like tonal harmony, such as a major or minor triad or a dominant seventh. A Row line under the chord names shows the forms it reads in the notes.

The Library’s Twelve-tone rows group has seven styles, and File > Demos > Twelve-tone plays each as a short piece.

Micromodes

Francisco Kröpfl (1931–2021) was an Argentine composer, a pioneer of electronic music who founded the first university studio for it in Latin America, in Buenos Aires in 1958, and a teacher of composition for decades. He taught his students to hear groups of three notes by their colour. Any three notes have three intervals between them, and those intervals give the group its sound, in any order, octave or spelling, moved up or turned upside down. By those rules, which are the rules of pitch-class sets, there are exactly twelve groups of three. Kröpfl called them micromodes (micromodos):

They come in three families. The menores all have a minor second, a semitone; the mayores have a major second and no semitone; and the rest are the three triads, named after them. The minor and the major triad are one micromode, Acorde menor-mayor, because each is the other upside down: every chord of a I, IV, V, I is the same colour, and tonal music works with which forms it uses.

Micromodes… in the piano roll shows the three families, each micromode drawn on a clock of the twelve notes, with its prime form, its intervals, its set and where it is heard:

Select some notes in the piano roll, and the window lists the micromodes inside them: the seven notes of C major hold 35 groups of three. Move it up and Inverted (I) choose a form; ▶ Hear it, Draw with it and Use as the key work as in the Sets window, and the set’s button opens the Sets window on the same class. On the chord sheet, type a micromode by name: Menor 3, or Menor 3 T4I for one of its forms.

The four groups of three in the row of Webern’s Concerto, Op. 24, in the picture of the Row window, are all Menor 3. The Library’s Micromodes (Kröpfl) group has seven styles, and File > Demos > Micromodes plays each of them.

Practising

A band that plays your chords is most useful when you play along. The chord sheet’s practice row has what a musician reaches for when practising with a recording: a count-in, a metronome, a slower speed, tap tempo, looping the bars you are working on, a speed trainer, and taking a part away from the band to play it yourself. The ear training window then trains you to hear harmony without looking.

Count-in and metronome

• Count-in: when you press Play, one bar of clicks comes first, and the music starts on the next “one”. Start in the middle of a bar and the count runs on to where you start, so the beat never jumps.
• Metronome: a click on every beat while the music plays. The first beat of each bar is higher, so you always know where “one” is.

The metronome clicks the beats you feel, not every note of the time signature: twice a bar in 6/8, three times in 2+2+3/8 (see Rhythm and meter). Both are in the toolbar too, so they work with any song or pattern, and both are remembered for next time.

Speed and tap tempo

Speed plays the band slower or faster than the song, from 25% to 200%. The song keeps its own tempo: the TEMPO box still shows it, with the speed over it, as in “TEMPO 70%”, and a saved song or an exported WAV is at full speed. The speed goes back to 100% each time the app starts, so a song is never slow by surprise.

Tap sets the song’s tempo to yours: click it on the beat a few times, in time with a recording or with the tempo in your head.

Looping bars

Click a bar, Shift+click another (or hold Shift and press an arrow key), and click Loop bars 3–4: those bars play over and over. They are shaded on the sheet, and the playlist’s toolbar says Looping bars 3–4. Stop looping plays the whole song again from where you are.

The speed trainer

A passage you can’t play at full speed is learned the same way on every instrument: slowly until it’s right, then a little faster, and again. The Speed trainer does it for you. Click it, and four boxes appear beside it:

• from: the speed Play starts at;
• to: the speed to get to. 100% is the song’s tempo; 110% goes past it, to have some room to spare;
• by: how much faster each new speed is;
• every: how many times round at each speed before the next one. With every 2 passes you play each speed twice: once to get it, once to check you have it.

Press Play, and each time the loop comes round the band plays a little faster, until it reaches the speed you are aiming for and stays there. The loop is whatever playback goes round: the bars you loop, the whole song when nothing is looped, or the pattern in pattern mode. Stop (⏹) sets the speed back to where it started, ready for the next run; Pause (❚❚) keeps it, so Play carries on at the speed you got to. Clicking Speed trainer again turns it off and leaves the speed where it got to.

The trainer’s numbers are remembered, and Edit > Settings… > Playback has them too, next to the count-in, the metronome and the practice speed.

Playing a part yourself

You play, in the same row, takes one player away from the band so you can play that part, with your keyboard switched to that player’s sound. See Locking a track, and playing your part.

Ear training (experimental)

Musicians need to hear harmony too: to tell a minor third from a major one, or the V of a song from its IV, without looking. View > Ear training opens a window that plays something and asks you to name it, and tells you at once whether you were right, and why:

It has three tabs:

• Intervals: two notes play, and you name the interval. Choose which intervals can come up and how they are Played: Up, Down or Together. Start with a few that sound very different, such as a third, a fifth and the octave, and add the others one at a time.
• Chords: a chord plays, and you name its kind: major, minor, diminished, augmented, or one of the seventh chords. With Inversions, its lowest note is not always the root; Note by note plays it one note at a time from the bass up.
• Progressions: the band plays a few chords in a key, one bar each, and you name them by their numerals on a row of harmony keys with the names hidden. The first chord is always I, so you know where you start, and Hear the key plays a cadence that says where home is. Choose the Keys, the chords that can come up, Sevenths, the Players, the Length and the Tempo.

After you answer, the right answer turns green, a wrong one red, and a box explains it: the notes, the full name, how many semitones and, for an interval going up, a tune that starts with it. Click any answer button to hear it next to the right one. ▶ Play again repeats the question as often as you like, and Next ▸ asks another (before you answer it is Skip ▸, and a skipped question doesn’t count). The line at the bottom keeps the score, for each tab; Start again sets it back to zero.

The window changes nothing in the song, and the song pauses while a question plays.

Lead sheets, also for B♭, E♭ and F instruments

A lead sheet is what a band reads from: one staff with the tune (the “lead”), the chords written above it as chord symbols, and the song’s key, time signature, sections and repeats. The bass line, the drums and how the piano voices its chords are left for the players to make up. Jazz, pop and folk musicians carry whole books of them.

Ferrous Lineup writes one from your song: the tune is the notes of one channel, and the chords are those of the chord sheet.

The Lead sheet window

View > Lead sheet opens it. The sheet is laid out on pages as it will print, and the bar that plays lights up while the song plays.

Along the top:

• Melody: the channel whose notes are the tune. Auto takes the channel called Lead, which every song demo has, or else the channel whose notes are highest. Pick another for another part, the bass for a bass player. None: chords only writes a slash for every beat under the chord symbols, as a rhythm section reads its part.
• Clef: Auto writes a low tune in the bass clef and the others in the treble clef; Treble and Bass choose one.
• For: who reads it (see below).
• Paper: A4, used almost everywhere, or Letter, in the USA and Canada.
• − and + zoom the pages.
• Export PDF… saves the sheet as a PDF file.
• Print… opens the PDF in your PDF viewer, to print it from there with your printer’s own settings.

The window only reads the song: nothing in the song changes. The paper, the zoom and the choice under For are remembered.

Reading a lead sheet

On the first line, from the left:

• the clef: the treble clef curls around the G line, the second from the bottom; the bass clef’s two dots sit around the F line;
• the key signature: the sharps or flats of the key, so they need not be written on every note. Two flats, B♭ and E♭, are B♭ major or G minor; a note outside the key gets its own sharp, flat or natural, which lasts until the bar line;
• the time signature, only on the first line and where it changes;
• the tempo, as in “♩ = 176”, 176 quarter notes a minute.

Above the staff, each chord symbol stands where its chord starts, and lasts until the next one. The small number at the start of each line is the bar number of its first bar, so a band can say “from bar 21”. Further on, a lead sheet can have:

• rehearsal marks, the name of a section in a box where it starts; each section starts a new line, so the form of the song shows at a glance;
• repeat signs, a thick and a thin bar line with two dots, around a section played twice, and “×3” when it is played three times or more;
• a double bar line before a new section and before a change of key, where the new key signature is written;
• the final bar line, thin and thick, at the end.

The app chooses how each note is written as an engraver would: a note of the key as the key spells it, a note of the chord as the chord spells it (G♯ over E7 in C major, A♭ over Fm), and a note that moves a semitone by the way it goes (F♯ going up to G, B♭ going down to A). Notes are split and tied so that the beats of the bar can be seen.

For B♭, E♭ and F instruments

Ask a pianist and a trumpet player to play the first note of a song in C together, from the same sheet, and they won’t agree: the pianist plays C, and the trumpet, reading the same C, sounds the B♭ a tone lower. The trumpet is a transposing instrument. Wind instruments come in families of different sizes, and on all the saxophones, for instance, the same fingers play the note written C. So music for them is written for the fingers, and each instrument is named after the note that sounds when it plays a written C: a trumpet in B♭, an alto saxophone in E♭, a horn in F. Music written as it sounds is at concert pitch.

So a song in C is written in D for every B♭ instrument, in A for every E♭ instrument and in G for every F instrument. Choose one under For and the sheet changes at once: the key signature, the tune and the chord symbols move together, the top of the first page says who the part is for, and Export PDF… puts it in the file name, as in “I Got Rhythm (Bb instruments).pdf”, so the parts of a song don’t overwrite each other. The kind of key stays, and a key never gets more than six sharps or flats: a part that would be in C♯ major is written in D♭ major.

The picture shows why so many jazz tunes are in flat keys: I Got Rhythm is in B♭ major, two flats, and the part for B♭ instruments is in C major, with no sharps or flats at all. Concert E♭ is C for the alto saxophone, too.

The lead sheet can also be shown in a video of the song: see Exporting.

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.

Folk music of South America, and the Misa Criolla

The folk music of the Andes and the Pampas is in Songs > Latin American folklore. Much of it moves in 6/8 and 3/4 at once, the hemiola explained in Rhythm and meter: listen for the bars where the tune stops going in two and goes in three.

Zambas

The zamba is the slow dance of the handkerchiefs from the north of Argentina, in 6/8. A zamba in a minor key often leans on its relative major for a couple of bars before V7 brings it home.

• Zamba de mi esperanza, by Luis Profili, in F major: the zamba that Jorge Cafrune’s record made known all over Argentina.
• Alfonsina y el mar, by Ariel Ramírez and Félix Luna, written for Mercedes Sosa about the poet Alfonsina Storni, here for a choir in four parts in C minor. Each verse turns to the relative major, E♭, through B♭7 and B♭ augmented, whose F♯ rises to G; the chorus ends on D major and G7, where the A and B of the melodic minor climb to the tonic.
• Balderrama, by Cuchi Leguizamón with words by Manuel J. Castilla, about the all-night bar in Salta where the musicians and poets met. It is in E minor, and one turn of its tune, heard six times, falls from D through C♯ to B over a G chord: a chromatic passing note.
• Zamba por vos, by the Uruguayan singer Alfredo Zitarrosa.

The chacarera and its cousins

Short pieces written for Ferrous Lineup show the dances of the region, each with the hemiola its own way. They are good to study, because they are short and plain:

Each dance is also a style in the Library, so the band can play it under your own chords (see Styles and the Library).

The Andes

The huayno is the dance of the Andes of Peru, Bolivia and northern Argentina, in a quick 2/4, written here two bars to one bar of 4/4. Its tunes often use the minor pentatonic scale (A C D E G in A minor) and fall to the same cadence again and again, long, long, short.

• El cóndor pasa, by Daniel Alomía Robles, from his zarzuela of 1913: a slow theme on A minor and its relative major, C, then the fuga, a fast dance running up and down the same scale, where the drums come in.
• La Quebrada de Humahuaca, a traditional huayno in E minor: its second strain starts on D, the flat seventh, and there is no D♯ anywhere.
• Carnavalito de la quebrada: the carnival dance of the Quebrada de Humahuaca, for quena, charango and bombo, on five notes only.
• Vidala de la quebrada: the slow song of the north-west over a hand drum. Its chords never use a dominant: G and C, ♭VII and ♭III, lead home instead.

The Misa Criolla

Ariel Ramírez’s Misa Criolla (1964) is a Mass sung in Spanish, each of its five movements set to a rhythm of Argentine and Andean folklore. All five are demos:

The Kyrie shows in a few bars how much a bass line can do:

From bar 3 the bass climbs A, B, C, C♯, D, E♭, E, a step or a semitone at a time, and each chord is chosen to fit over it. A7 over C♯ is a secondary dominant, the V of D minor, and its C♯ rises to D (see Chords from outside the key). A minor over E, in bar 7, is the cadential six-four, which sits on the dominant’s bass and leads to E.

Elsewhere in Latin America

• Mexico: La bamba goes round C, F and G7 without stopping, as a son jarocho does; La Llorona, a slow son from Oaxaca in D minor, walks down the Andalusian cadence, D minor, C, B♭, A7; Cielito lindo is a mariachi waltz.
• Venezuela: Alma llanera, a joropo in a quick 3/4, the arpeggio standing in for the harp and the cuatro.
• Colombia: La gata golosa, a quick pasillo in A major.
• Uruguay: the candombe of Montevideo. Candombe del barrio moves in 3 + 3 + 2, the tresillo the milonga and the tango lean on too; Rubén Rada’s Candombe para Gardel keeps changing mode, from G major to G minor and back.
• Brazil: the songs of the gaúchos of Rio Grande do Sul, such as Boi barroso, and Luar do sertão, a toada about the moonlight of the backlands.

Tango and Latin America

One rhythm runs through this chapter. The Cuban habanera goes long, short, long, long. Tie its two middle notes together and it becomes the tresillo, three notes spread 3 + 3 + 2 (see Rhythm and meter). In the 19th century it crossed to Spain, to Brazil and to the River Plate, and each place made its own music on it. The demos are in Songs > Tango, Latin and Flamenco.

The habanera

• La Paloma, by Sebastián Iradier, written about 1860 after a visit to Cuba, went round the world. Only two chords, C and G7: the tune hangs on F, the seventh of G7, for a whole bar before each cadence.
• Habanera, the aria from Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875), slides down one semitone at a time over the habanera rhythm in D minor, then turns to D major for its refrain.

Tango

The tango grew up in Buenos Aires and Montevideo around 1900, out of the habanera, the milonga and the Spanish tango. Most tangos are in a minor key, and the dominant seventh, E7 in A minor, whose G♯ comes from the harmonic minor, gives them their drama. Listen to the piano and the bass: in the marcato style they hit every beat, short and hard, while the tune pulls between long notes and quick runs.

El Choclo, by Ángel Villoldo (1903), is the oldest tango still played everywhere, and its chord sheet holds a whole lesson. The first strain runs up and down A minor and E7; A7, a secondary dominant, leads to D minor; the second strain leans on the relative major, C, through its own dominant, G7; and the third turns to A major, the tonic major, and walks round the circle of fifths, F♯7, B minor, B7, E7. Villoldo’s tangos were still half milonga, so the bass plays the 3 + 3 + 2.

More to hear:

The vals criollo is the tango’s waltz. Desde el alma, by Rosita Melo (1911), starts on the dominant, F♯7, and only reaches B minor in its third bar.

Brazil

In Rio de Janeiro the habanera and the polka became the maxixe, the tango brasileiro and the choro, the instrumental music of the city around 1900, for flute, guitar and cavaquinho. These are in 2/4, written here two bars to one bar of 4/4.

• Tico-Tico no Fubá, by Zequinha de Abreu (1917): a rondo, A A B B A C C A, with A in A minor, B in its relative major, C, and C in its parallel major, A.
• Apanhei-te, cavaquinho, by Ernesto Nazareth (1914): runs down G major in sixteenths, each beat leaning on the semitone below it.
• Carioca, by Nazareth (1913): a tango brasileiro whose first strain cadences through the Neapolitan chord.
• Atraente, a polka by Chiquinha Gonzaga (1877), and her Ó abre alas (1899), counted the first carnival march.

Sixty years later, the bossa nova slowed the samba down and filled it with jazz chords. Garota de Ipanema, by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes (1962), surprises at its second chord: E♭7, the dominant of the dominant, where E♭ minor 7 would be expected. Its bridge jumps up a half step, to D major, and comes home through a long chain of chords.

Cuba and Mexico

• El manisero, by Moisés Simons (1928): the peanut seller’s cry made into a Cuban son, the first Cuban hit around the world. The clave takes two bars, and the bass plays no note on the first beat: it plays on the “and” of 2 and on 4, where it already plays the root of the next chord.
• Boleros, the slow love songs of Cuba and Mexico: Quiéreme mucho, Aquellos ojos verdes, María Elena, and Lecuona’s Siboney, in F minor, whose C7 has a flat ninth.

Flamenco

Three demos show the harmony of Spanish flamenco:

• Rumba del sur: the Andalusian cadence, Am, G, F, E, under a sung line, each line a step lower than the one before.
• Noche frigia: the Phrygian mode of the Spanish guitar, E F G A B C D, with a major chord on E; F major, a semitone above home, keeps pulling back down to E (see Keys and modes).
• Asturias (Leyenda), by Isaac Albéniz (1892), written for piano in imitation of the flamenco guitar: every other sixteenth note is the same B, a pedal, while the tune moves under it.

The Andalusian cadence turns up far from Spain, too: in Hit the Road Jack, by Percy Mayfield, and in La Llorona from Mexico.

Jazz, blues, gospel and pop

Jazz, the blues, gospel and the popular music that grew from them fill several submenus of File > Demos > Songs: Jazz, Blues, Soul, funk and R&B, Pop, Rock and more. This chapter follows the harmony from ragtime to the big bands, and then looks at the songs everyone knows.

Ragtime

Ragtime is the piano music jazz grew out of, around 1900. The left hand keeps a steady oom-pah, bass then chord, while the right hand pushes against it, landing between the beats and holding on across them: that is syncopation (see Rhythm and meter). Rags come in strains, like marches, often A A B B A C C D D, with the third strain, the trio, in the key of IV.

• The Entertainer and Maple Leaf Rag, by Scott Joplin. In the Maple Leaf Rag, listen for the F♭ chord, ♭VI, that darkens the third bar.
• Golliwogg’s Cakewalk, by Claude Debussy (1908): a cakewalk with a blue note, a C♭ that keeps falling onto B♭. In the middle it quotes the opening of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, marked “with great emotion”, and the cakewalk’s chords answer it each time.

To play your own chords this way, pick Ragtime in the Library’s Jazz group: the pianist’s left hand alone, a bass note on each beat and the chord after it. Ragtime band adds drums, a banjo and a tuba, and Stride piano is the faster Harlem piano that grew out of ragtime.

New Orleans and the twenties

• When the Saints Go Marching In: the brass band classic, the tuba on two beats to the bar.
• Tiger Rag (1917): four strains, and the key drops a fifth twice, B♭, E♭, A♭, each new key reached through a dominant seventh on the old tonic. The second strain stops dead for two-bar breaks, left for a soloist.
• Charleston (1923): a chain of dominants, D7, G7, C7, F7 (III7, VI7, II7, V7), each the V of the next, under a rhythm that gave its name to a comping pattern: a note on beat one and another just before beat three, held over.

The standards and the big bands

Most standards are built on one move, ii, V, I: Dm7, G7, Cmaj7 in C (see What chords do). Two-Five Walk, written for Ferrous Lineup, spells it out in sixteen bars. Then hear how the songwriters played with it:

• Take the “A” Train, by Billy Strayhorn (1939): the second chord is D7, the dominant of the dominant, where C major’s own ii would be D minor, under a long G♯ in the tune, its raised eleventh. It settles to Dm7 and G7, a ii-V back to C. For the bridge, Gm7 and C7, a ii-V in F, lead to F major 7.
• Tea for Two, by Vincent Youmans (1924): one little figure, long-short, turned over a ii-V twice; then the same game a major third higher.
• I Got Rhythm, by George Gershwin (1930): its chords became rhythm changes, the progression jazz musicians wrote most new tunes on, after the blues. The A section turns I-vi-ii-V twice; the bridge is a chain of dominants falling by fifths.
• In the Mood (1939): a riff, a B♭ arpeggio, over a twelve-bar blues.
• Sing, Sing, Sing (1936): a minor-key riff tune on i and V7, E minor and B7.

The big-band demos have a horn section behind the saxophone’s tune, a brass section punching the chords in the Charleston rhythm (see A bigger band and the horns). For your own chords, the Library’s Big band style brings the whole band: a walking bass, the guitar four to the bar, and the horns riffing together over a jazz blues. Big band ballad holds the chords on the saxophones.

The blues

The twelve-bar blues is three lines of four bars: the first on I, the second starting on IV and the third on V, each of those two coming home to I. A singer sings a line, the same line again over the IV chord, and an answer. The blue notes, such as the flat third and the flat seventh, clash with the major chords under them, and the clash is the sound of the blues.

• Midnight Shuffle, written for Ferrous Lineup: the twelve-bar blues as a shuffle, the A blues scale over major chords.
• Trouble in Mind (1924): an eight-bar blues in 12/8; the tune falls onto B♭, the blue third, over G7.
• St. Louis Blues, by W. C. Handy (1914): a blues in strains, like a rag, with a tango introduction and a strain in the habanera rhythm.
• Hit the Road Jack (1960): four chords walking down, C minor, B♭, A♭, G7, under a rhythm-and-blues shuffle.

Spirituals and gospel

The African-American spirituals of the 19th century are under Soul, funk and R&B, dressed in styles from gospel to funk. Many use the major pentatonic scale, five notes with no semitones: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is all G A B D E, and so is the hymn Amazing Grace. Wade in the Water sits on its minor home chord and rocks to iv; the leading tone comes only at the cadences.

Two short demos written for Ferrous Lineup show the harmony of soul and funk: Sunday Seventh, seventh chords with two secondary dominants, E7 to A minor and C7 to F; and Dorian Strut, two chords in E Dorian, whose IV chord, A7, is major.

Songs everyone knows

The Pop, Rock, Electronic, Hip hop and lo-fi, Reggae and ska and Country and folk submenus hold folk songs, carols, nursery rhymes and famous classical tunes, often dressed in a modern style. They are short and well known, so they are good for hearing one idea at a time:

The jazz demos in odd meters, Take Five and the Mission: Impossible theme, are in Odd meters and the Balkans.

The concert hall

Songs > Classical and film holds music from Bach to Stravinsky. Some demos are a whole piece or a whole movement, others its opening or its best-known tune. In the orchestral demos each instrument of the score plays on its own channel, with its own sound, so you can follow one part, mute it, or open it in the piano roll. The notes about each demo say what was left out, or moved to another octave, when a piece had to be shortened.

Baroque

• Canon in D, by Johann Pachelbel: three violins play the same line, each two bars behind the last, over a bass of eight notes that repeats from start to end, a ground bass.
• Air on the G String, by Bach: long held notes in the first violin, each breaking into quick figures, over a bass in steady octave leaps that walks down the D major scale.
• Prelude in C, by Bach, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, played as a hip hop beat in Hip hop and lo-fi: no tune at all, one chord to a bar, broken into the same rising figure, and each chord changing as few notes as it can. From bar 5 the chords lead to G major, the dominant, which bar 11 reaches with D7 to G: a modulation.
• Hallelujah Chorus, from Handel’s Messiah.

The piano

• Für Elise, by Beethoven, the whole rondo: the theme rocks between E and D♯, the leading tone of A minor; the stormy second episode reaches B♭ major, the Neapolitan chord of A minor (see Chords from outside the key).
• Moonlight Sonata, the opening of the Adagio, in C♯ minor: D major, the Neapolitan chord again, comes in the third bar.
• Funeral March, from Chopin’s second sonata: one note, again and again, over a bass rocking between two bare fifths, with no third.

The orchestra

Ravel’s Boléro

Boléro (1928) is one long crescendo, a quarter of an hour of it. The snare drum plays the same two bars from the first bar to the last, while two tunes pass from instrument to instrument, each time a little louder and fuller. The demo plays the whole piece with the instruments of Ravel’s score, which the mixer sets out in sections, as a score does:

• The first tune stays in C major. The second is in C Mixolydian, C major with a B♭, and borrows D♭, A♭ and E♭ from the Phrygian mode on C.
• Listen for Ravel’s mixed colours: a horn plays the tune with the celesta and two piccolos above it, on the notes of the horn’s own overtones, so that they blend like the stops of an organ.
• In the last statement the music leaves C for the first time: eight bars in E major, a jolt, then back to C and the final crash.

Debussy and Stravinsky

Early in the 20th century, composers left the major and minor keys behind, and the chord sheet’s other views come into their own (see Beyond keys).

• La Mer, by Debussy, the opening of From Dawn to Noon on the Sea: no chords in the usual sense, only a held B in the bass and, above it, notes of a pentatonic scale, B, C♯, F♯ and G♯. The chord sheet hears G♯m7 over B in B, F♯ and G♯, and its Pitch-class sets view calls them 3-7.
• The Rite of Spring, by Stravinsky. In The Augurs of Spring the strings hammer a polychord, E♭7 over F♭ major, written Eb7|Fb (see Chords and their names), while eight horns accent it where no beat leads the ear to expect it. In the Ritual of Abduction the meter changes all the time, 9/8, 6/8, 7/8, 3/4, 2/4, and most notes come from the octatonic scale, half step and whole step in turn.
• Petrushka, by Stravinsky, in five demos from the four tableaux of the ballet: Russian folk tunes in the modes over drones, and Petrushka’s own chord, C major and F♯ major at once, two triads a tritone apart that share no note.

Mussorgsky’s Promenade, from Pictures at an Exhibition, and the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, a waltz in five, are in Odd meters and the Balkans.

Odd meters and the Balkans

The dances of Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Romania and Turkey count their beats in groups of two and three eighths mixed, long and short (see Rhythm and meter). They are in Songs > Balkan and Turkish, and the Library has a style for each meter. Count along, a number for every eighth, leaning on the first of each group.

Dances in five, seven, nine and more

Open Ajde Jano and watch the channel rack: each beat’s steps are shaded together, six, four and four (see the picture in Rhythm and meter).

Makam hicaz

Many of these tunes use a scale with a step and a half in it: A, B♭, C♯, D, E, F, G. Turkish musicians call it the makam hicaz; it has the notes of the Phrygian mode with a raised third, and its augmented second, B♭ up to C♯, gives it its eastern colour. Listen for it in:

• Entarisi ala benziyor, a Turkish song from Istanbul, in the raks aksağı, 2+3+2+2/8;
• Çayeli’nden öteye, from Rize on the Black Sea, in the devr-i hindi, 3+2+2/8;
• Geamparaua de la Murfatlar, a Romanian geampara, 2+2+3/8, whose strains all end on B♭ falling to A;
• the fifth strain of Svatbarska rachenitsa.

In the Turkish songs, singers and players go in unison over a drum, and the chords in the demos are added from the notes the tune leans on.

Five beats in the concert hall and in jazz

Meters that change

Some music changes meter as it goes:

• Süsserl, a Bavarian zwiefacher: bars of three, danced with a waltz step, and bars of two, danced with a pivot, in an order the tune fixes, 2 2 3, 2 2 3, 2 2 3 3. The beat stays the same; only the bars change, so the band plays oom-pa in the bars of two and oom-pa-pa in the bars of three.
• Promenade, from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874): bars of five and of six quarter notes, phrased like speech.
• The Rite of Spring, Ritual of Abduction, by Stravinsky: 9/8, 6/8, 7/8, 3/4, 2/4, and towards the end bars of 5/8, 3/8 and 2/8.
• Desarma y sangra, by Charly García: a ballad in 6/8, with whole passages in 3/4.

To change the meter partway through a song of your own, see Changing time signature partway through.

Keyboard shortcuts

Help > Keyboard shortcuts, or F1, opens the app’s own list of every key it answers to, window by window. This page is the same list, to read or print.

The tables write Ctrl, as on Linux and Windows. On a Mac, read ⌘ for Ctrl and Option for Alt; the F1 list writes whichever your computer uses.

Anywhere

These work wherever you are, except while you are typing in a text box.

Windows

Each key shows a window or a panel, or hides it.

File and Edit

Zoom

The keys zoom what is under the pointer: the playlist, the piano roll, the channel rack, or the whole window anywhere else (see Undo, zoom, windows and settings).

On most keyboards = is the + key without Shift, so Ctrl+= and Alt+= zoom too.

Chord sheet

These work after you click a bar (see The chord sheet).

Piano roll

These act on the selected notes, or on all of the channel’s notes when none is selected (see The piano roll).

Playlist

These act on the selected clips (see Patterns and the playlist).

Channel rack

These work after you click a channel’s name (see The channel rack).

Harmony keys

Typing keyboard

These play notes while MIDI > Typing keyboard to piano is on (see MIDI keyboards and synths).

Style editor

The style editor has its own undo, apart from the song’s (see Your own styles).

With the mouse

Troubleshooting

The app does not start

See Installing it: the AppImage must be allowed to run and may need the FUSE 2 library; Windows asks once before it runs an unsigned program; macOS asks you to allow the app once in System Settings > Privacy & Security.

No sound

Look at the left of the status bar, at the bottom of the window:

• Audio: Default Audio Device · 48000 Hz · 2 channels, or the name of your sound card: the app has a sound card, so the silence is somewhere in the song. Check the toolbar’s VOL slider and the mixer’s Main level (F9), a Mute or a Solo in the mixer, a channel’s light in the channel rack and a track’s light in the playlist: a light that is not green is muted.
• Audio unavailable, and a reason: the app could not open a sound card. Plug in your headphones or speakers, close any program that may hold the sound card for itself, and press Try again in Edit > Settings… > Audio.

The app plays through your system’s default output. If you plug in headphones while it runs, or change the default output, press Restart audio in Edit > Settings… > Audio to move the sound there.

The instruments sound like simple synthesizers

That is the Lineup Osc, the app’s own synthesizer, which plays until a SoundFont is chosen. If you chose Not now when the app offered GeneralUser GS, or the download failed, open Edit > Settings… > Audio and tick SoundFont instruments: the offer comes back. Choose SoundFont… there picks a .sf2 file you already have (see Sounds). If the download fails, the window says why; you can download GeneralUser-GS.sf2 with a browser from its page and choose it.

The sound stutters

A slow or busy computer can fall behind while it plays a big arrangement, such as an orchestral demo with every instrument of the score. Close other programs, and close the windows you don’t need while it plays. File > Export WAV… is never affected: it makes the file apart from what you hear, note by note, so the file never stutters (see Exporting).

MIDI

• The MIDI menu says MIDI unavailable. The system gave the app no MIDI at all. On Linux, MIDI needs the ALSA sequencer: the kernel module snd-seq. Load it with sudo modprobe snd-seq, then start the app again.
• My keyboard is not in the list. The MIDI menu looks for keyboards each time it opens: plug the keyboard in, switch it on, then open the menu again. A keyboard that another program has taken for itself may not show.
• I play, but nothing sounds. What you play sounds on the selected channel: click a channel’s name in the channel rack. Check that channel is not muted.
• See MIDI keyboards and synths.

The keys don’t work

• Space doesn’t play, and the other keys do nothing: a text box has the keyboard, such as the Library’s search or a bar of the chord sheet you are typing in. Click an empty place first.
• The letter keys play notes instead of doing what you expect: MIDI > Typing keyboard to piano is on.
• On a Mac, the shortcuts use ⌘ where this manual writes Ctrl. See Keyboard shortcuts.

Saving and files

• Save asks for a new file every time. You opened a demo, which is read-only: save it once under a name of your own, and Save writes to that file from then on (see Saving, opening and recovering).
• The app closed without saving. Start it again: it offers to recover the unsaved work (see Recovering unsaved work).
• On a Mac, double-clicking a .lineup file doesn’t open it. Use File > Open… in the app.

The band and the chords

• The band plays something different from what I wrote. When you change the chords or the style, the band writes its parts again. To keep a part as it is, lock its track (see Locking a track, and playing your part).
• The chords of an imported MIDI file are wrong. The app guesses them from the notes, and the guess can be wrong where the music is thin or moves fast. Correct them on the chord sheet (see Opening MIDI files and recordings).
• The chord names are not what I expected, such as Do instead of C, or the other way round: Edit > Settings… > Harmony > Note naming chooses letters or solfège.

The window

• Everything is too small, or too big. Hold the pointer over the menus or the toolbar and press Ctrl++ or Ctrl+−, or change Interface size in Edit > Settings… > Appearance. Ctrl+0 over anything takes it back to 100% (see Undo, zoom, windows and settings).
• A window is gone. Its key brings it back: F5 to F9, or View. A window folded up to its title opens again with the ▼ at its top left.
• Starting afresh. The app keeps its settings, and where its windows were, in the file app.ron in its data folder (see Saving, opening and recovering for where that is). With the app closed, rename or delete that file, and the next start is like the first one: in English, with the default settings, the windows where they first open, and no recent songs. Your songs, your styles and a downloaded SoundFont are not touched; if you had chosen another folder for your styles, choose it again with Styles folder… in Edit > Settings… > Library.

Reporting a problem

Help > About Ferrous Lineup has Report an issue, which opens the project’s list of known problems, where you can look for yours or describe a new one. Say which version you run (the About window shows it) and on which system, and what you did, step by step, so someone else can see the same thing. For a problem with what the app plays, turn on Edit > Settings… > Playback > Write a trace while playing, play the passage, and attach the trace file: it lists every note the app played, and the setting says where it writes it.

Music glossary

The words of music this manual uses, each with a short meaning and the chapter that explains it with examples you can hear in the app.