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:
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Name | the style’s name in the Library |
| BPM | its usual tempo |
| time signature | its meter |
| Bars | how long the pattern is, 1 to 16 bars |
| Swing | its swing (see Swing and feel) |
| Progression | a chord progression it brings, as Roman numerals or chord names, bars separated by ` |
| Description | a sentence, shown when you point at the style in the Library |
| Part assignments | which player each lane is: drums, piano, bass, guitar and so on |
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.