Practice
Play along
The stage — the chord strip big enough to read from across the room, with the band's lanes, the tempo and its own chord detector at your feet.
PLAY ALONG is the chord strip at playing size: the shape to form now, the chords going past, the beat — one screen you can read from the couch. Press P or click the strip; ESC or a click beside it closes. It is a viewer, not a task: nothing changes when it opens or closes. It is the same session, seen large.
The stage
Three shape cards, PREV · NOW · NEXT — the tonic chord in the KEY colour, PREV and NEXT dimmed, an empty card (a rest, nothing loaded) reading –; under them the road, the chords of the progression as blocks with the playhead ▲ fixed in the middle and the section band under it ("VERSE 2/2" on a song); and under that the beat rail, MONITOR's own cells, the downbeat accented.
Beside the title, the session in one quiet line: the key and mode, the tuning, "sounds …" while a tuning or a capo shifts the pitch, the FX preset, the tempo, the meter, the drums' genre, the JAM style, the looper's state while it has something (● REC 4 BARS, ▶ LOOP 4 BARS) and the song's name. Present, not competing — a fact you can check, not one you have to read.
The stage is a fixed drawing that scales to the room: on an 11" iPad on its side, or a short Mac window, the whole thing draws smaller so the title row and the footer stay inside the plate.
The footer: the lanes and the tempo
The bottom bar carries the band, so a player away from the keyboard can change the mix without leaving the stage.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| DRUMS [D] · JAM [J] | The PLAY pads of the DRUMS and JAM plates — the same control, the same face, the same key. With a preset playing they start and stop a lane; it comes back in on the one. Under a song they mute and unmute it instead: a stopped lane would lose its place in the song's sections and fills, a muted one keeps it. The face reads PLAY, STOP, MUTE, MUTED or HELD from the plate's own state. |
| METRO [M] | The click, on or off. SPACE never starts or stops it. |
| ‹ 120 › | GRID's tempo stepper: a tap steps 1, a hold repeats, ⇧ steps 5, + and − on the keyboard do the same. Under a song whose tempo you have changed it reads 96 · SONG 120; a click on it returns to the song's tempo. Pinned while the looper holds a take, with GRID's own reason. |
| CHORD DETECT [C] | The stage's own detector — see below. |
SPACE holds the band where it is and carries on from there, as everywhere; RETURN stops it. A mute is something you did to this song in this sitting: it lifts when the song goes, when another comes, and when a practice that set it closes. A song never loads silent.
CHORD DETECT on the stage
Since 0.73 the stage listens too. CHORD DETECT in the footer, before METRO, or C while the stage is up, puts the chord detector's reading top left of the road under a CHORD DETECTOR caption — the chord, its confidence, "or X" — and turns NOW's ring green while what you play is NOW's chord: root and third, so an Em for an Em7 counts. Strum the next chord and the ring goes back to the JAM hue.
The key is remembered between openings and disabled without an input, with the reason on it. It follows the capo, like the detector in the rack.
While the stage or a practice is over the rack, the transport's own TUNER and CHORD DETECT are dimmed — both show something in the rack, behind the window — and T waits; C is the stage's detector there. METRO is the same switch on the stage and in the transport, on purpose.
In a practice
Scale practice and chord practice have the same footer with the same three lane keys in the same place. A practice opens with the band held — SPACE's own hold, so nothing sounds until you ask — and under a song every lane starts muted. When it closes the band is still held and the mutes lift; PLAY brings back the band you had.
On an iPad with the built-in microphone as its input the three keys are disabled, and the footer says why: the band stays silent, so nothing it plays reaches the signal. A guitar through an interface is a line signal and the case does not arise.