Playing with sounds

The drum machine and the melody are for hearing sounds together before you take them to your music app. They share the project tempo in the toolbar, one play button (Space), undo, and the volume slider in the status bar. Both are remembered between launches.

Kit builder

Build Kit suggests a snare, clap, hats and more around a chosen kick, by character, level and pack, with alternatives for each slot. Try in Drum Machine loads each pick with a starter rhythm for its kind of sound.

Drum machine

The toolbar's grid button, or ⌥⌘D, opens an 8-track sequencer with sixteen steps in each 4/4 bar.

• Add sounds with Add to Drum Machine in the right-click menu, or drag samples over it: a line shows where the sound goes, and dropping on the middle of a track swaps its sound instead.
• Grooves: the groove menu has House, Techno, Drum & Bass, Hip-Hop, Trap, Breakbeat, Reggaeton and Electro. Picking one sets the tempo and swing and gives each sound a rhythm that fits it. Save Pattern as Groove… keeps your own.
• Try other sounds: each track's dice swaps in a similar sound, its back arrow returns to the one before, and its lock keeps it. Shuffle Kit swaps every unlocked track; Sound variety sets how far a swap reaches, from Similar to Adventurous.
• Length and mixing: set Length to any number of bars. Each track has mute, solo and volume; swing is per pattern. Clear Steps empties the steps and Remove All Tracks takes the sounds out too.
• MIDI: File > Open Drum MIDI File… (⌥⌘O), or a MIDI file dropped on the drum machine, replaces the beat: each track with notes becomes a row, notes snap to sixteenths, and pitch and velocity are ignored. MIDI files are only read.
• Keep the sounds: Save Sounds to Collection puts every sound in the drum machine and the melody into a collection.

Melody

The toolbar's piano button, or ⌥⌘M, opens a piano roll that plays in time with the drum machine. It holds up to four sounds, each a track with its own colour.

• Click a key to hear that note. Click the grid to add a note, drag it to move it, drag its right edge to stretch it, and click it again to remove it.
• Shift-click notes, or Shift-drag a box, to pick several; ⌘A picks all of a track's notes and Esc drops the picks. ↑ and ↓ move picked notes a semitone (with Shift, an octave), and Delete removes them.
• Add Selected, Add to Melody in the right-click menu, or dragging samples onto the melody adds sounds. Dropping a sample on a track's name swaps its sound and keeps the notes.
• A sample plays as recorded at its own pitch (C4 when it has none) and other notes are tuned from it like tape, so pitch and length change together, up to two octaves either way.
• The melody is 1, 2 or 4 bars long, or as long as a MIDI file needs. Open MIDI…, or a MIDI file dropped on the window, replaces the melody with the file's notes, one melody track per file track.

Every step, note, track and sound change is one step of Edit > Undo (⌘Z) and Redo (⇧⌘Z). Trims and sound edits apply here as everywhere else. A sound that leaves the library, or sits on a USB stick that is not plugged in, keeps its steps or notes and waits for a new sound.