Music Composer

Notes, parts and groups

Notes

Draw notes with the Quill Q. A note has a start, a length, a pitch, and a velocity from 0 to 1: how hard it's played. A pitch can fall between semitones, for microtonal music.

Arrow keys move selected notes: left and right by the snap grid, up and down by a step of the scale. With ⌘, up and down move by a semitone instead; Up and down arrows move notes in the editor's Settings swaps the two. With ⌥, they move by a bar or an octave.

A step of the scale goes to the next note of the scale around each note. The scale is read from the notes around each note, so it follows a key change, even one in the middle of a bar. Where those notes don't settle it, the reading looks further out, and the composition's key decides only what the notes leave open. A note outside the scale moves onto it. A declared scale of another size, such as a pentatonic or the blues, holds while the notes fit it, so a step walks its own notes; in a chromatic or atonal piece, a step is a semitone.

⌘← and ⌘→ swap the selection with what's next to it inside the same container: a note with the next note, a group or replica with the note or group beside it. Notes that start together count as one, and pitches don't change.

The same moves are buttons under Arrange in Properties, each showing its shortcut.

The pin in Properties' title bar opens a second panel held to the note, container, shape or bar selected: it shows its name, keeps editing it whatever you select next, and stays open until you unpin it.

Parts

Every note belongs to a part: a voice in a fugue, or one hand at the keyboard. The name "part" can be changed in the Composition panel.

The part dock down the left edge has a chip for each part. Click one to make it the part new notes go into, double-click it to configure it, and drag to reorder. Parts can be muted, soloed and grouped, and each has its own colour and instruments. ⌘1 to ⌘9 move the selected notes to that part, or, with nothing selected, make it the part new notes go into. A selected replica moves whole; a note selected inside one moves alone, as a change of that replica's.

Groups

⌘G groups the selection so it's easy to pick up again, and ⌘⇧G ungroups it. Group a chord's notes to handle them as one.

A group is drawn as a box round its notes, and a click anywhere in the box selects it. A group that covers a large stretch of the piece can then get in the way of the notes under it. Turn on Select by label only in Properties, and only the group's label picks it up. Patterns, replicas and ornaments have the same switch.

Turn on Phrase in a group's Properties to tell the score that its notes belong together. A beam breaks at the phrase's first and last note, so a quick note leading into the next beat can stand apart from the notes before it. A phrase changes every score of the composition.

Ornamentation

Select a note and press Add ornament in Properties: it adds one like the ornaments nearby. The arrow beside it, or Add ornament in the right-click menu, chooses the figure instead: appoggiatura, slide, mordent, turn, short trill or trill. The ornament's notes are written out, and you can adjust them. Its neighbouring notes follow the key: the one set in Composition, or, where none is set, the key the notes themselves suggest, worked out bar by bar.

An ornament is read from its notes, not from a stored type: edit the notes on the canvas and its name and sign follow. A shape the editor can't name is shown as a circle; it still plays, and its notes can still be adjusted. A gap left between two of its notes is a rest.

An ornament that ends on its note held, such as a mordent, a short trill, a turn or a slide, can be played Before the beat: its quick notes come ahead of the beat and the note itself lands on the beat for its whole written length. The note before is played shorter to make room; its written length doesn't change.

An ornament already written out as plain notes can become one: select its notes and choose Make ornament in Properties or the right-click menu. If none of them lasts through the others, a main note is made over the whole group, at the last note's pitch.

Adjusting a run of notes

Select notes that follow one another and handles appear over them, on whichever side has fewer other notes. Each handle is the boundary between two notes. Drag it and the two notes either side share the change; hold ⇧ and everything after it moves along instead, keeping its length. ⌥ turns the snapping to note values off.

A gap between two notes is a rest with handles of its own. The bar between two handles is the note (or the rest) itself: drag it along the row to move it before or after its neighbours.

The brackets at the row's two ends are grips. The start grip moves every note while the run keeps its end, so the last note gets longer or shorter by what the start moved. The end grip changes only the last note's length. On an ornament's own row, the start grip moves the whole ornament and its held note takes the difference, and the end grip changes the held note's length.

With a group or an ornament in the selection, every note inside it counts. An ornament is one note at the outer row, and gets a row of its own nearer the notes for the notes inside it. These edits change the written values of the notes, not how they are played: for that, see Played in the ornament's section of Properties.