Music Composer
The tools
| Select | V | Selects and moves notes, and everything else. ⌥-drag duplicates, ⇧-drag keeps to one axis and ⌃-drag turns snapping off. |
| Quill | Q | Draws notes. The bar above the keyboard sets the velocity of new notes, and how much it varies. |
| Text | T | Adds text to the canvas. |
| Shape | N | Draws lines, rectangles and ellipses. |
| Pen | P | Draws paths. Enter, a double-click or Esc finishes the path; Esc also deselects it. |
| Hand | H | Pans. Hold Space to pan with any tool. |
Selecting
A click on a group, pattern or replica selects it; click again inside it to reach what it holds. ⌘-click reaches the deepest thing under the pointer at once. A rectangle dragged across the canvas selects what it reaches as whole containers; ⌘-drag selects the notes inside them. Enter selects what a selected container holds, and Esc steps back up a level, then deselects.
⌘⇧O turns on outline mode, drawing notes as lines so what a long note covers stays easy to click.
The snap grid
[ and ] make the snap grid finer or coarser. They step through the even grids, and also the thirds once the piece has a triplet, and any other grid its notes use, such as a quintuplet's 1/5. ⇧Q quantises the selection to it, or every note when nothing is selected. ⌥⇧Q quantises and keeps the feel: the notes are written on the grid, and the current interpretation still plays them where they were.
⇧Enter opens Transform selection, which moves or stretches the selection by bars, beats, semitones or octaves. With several notes selected, a right-click anywhere inside their box opens the selection's menu and leaves the selection as it is, whatever lies under the pointer there.
Playing and bars
Space plays and pauses. With notes selected, it plays just their stretch of the piece.
To keep coming back to one passage, make it the work region: right-click a bar, or a selected run of bars, and set it as the work region. Playing from inside the region plays to its end, and loops round it when the loop is on; playing from outside it plays the whole piece. Clear work region, in the same menu, removes it.
The same menu inserts, duplicates, cuts, copies, pastes and deletes whole bars, and everything after them moves along. A note held across an inserted bar keeps its length, and a pattern or an ornament that started before it stays whole where it was.
Note handles
A selected note has two kinds of handle, and they change different things.
The grips at its ends resize the note as written: drag one to change the note's length in the composition. Like any edit to the notes, it snaps to the snap grid; hold ⌃ to place it freely.
The small circles above it interpret the note, in the current interpretation: drag them to change when it starts, shift it, or change how long it sounds, leaving what's written alone. They don't snap at all, so a note can come a touch early or linger a little. Double-click a circle to reset it.