Energy and overrides

Every section has one of seven ENERGY levels and can say how the band plays it. This page documents what each one actually changes during playback — not just what the labels suggest.

Energy levels

The drums follow their own lane — the feel, the preset's energy — in every energy; STOP is the one that gates them, to a single downbeat hit. The color layer sounds at BASE, HOLD and SPARSE too when the section (or a section before it, or the song) sets COLOR on; it used to join at LIFT only, and a song that never asked keeps it for LIFT.

RIFF is never a quoted melody: root, fifth, octave and the chord's own third, seventh or sixth, on a rhythmic shape per style — rock eighths, funk sixteenths with rests, a blues shuffle boogie — key-safe by construction like the walking bass. The guitar doubles it only in rock, blues, funk and metal. GROOVE, HOLD and RIFF name who plays, not how loud; LIFT plays a little louder and SPARSE a little softer. An older app that does not know a tag plays it as BASE.

What the band adds by itself

Part of the arc is never authored. The kit reads the song's form: it fills into a lift and settles out of one, turns a section around into itself, picks up into a sparse one, and crashes on a chorus's one — unless the section says otherwise with FILL IN and FILL OUT (below). A BASE section named INTRO, BREAK or OUTRO opens on kick and hat for its first repeat. A chord of two bars or more may get one bar of walking bass into the next chord — often in jazz and blues, seldom in pop and rock — and a chord shorter than a bar plays its root on its strike and nothing else. Since 0.81 nothing in a bar is drawn by chance: the fill into a chorus is the same fill on every pass, chosen once per kind of transition from the song's grooveSeed, and LIVE reveals authored detail rather than rolling dice. A shared song plays the same way on every Mac and iPad.

One band, one kit

Since 0.81 a song is one band with one kit. The STYLE and the KIT are set once, on the SONG tab, and never change mid-song; the drum genre follows from the style. What a section changes is how that band plays — the guitar teacher's finding behind it: a section that switches kits is not musically correct, a section that tightens up or crashes in is.

What a section says to the band

The BAND row of the SECTION block sums up what the section sets in one line — DRUMS 3 settings · JAM 1 setting — and EDIT opens two lanes. Every row starts on FOLLOW PREV (in the first section: FOLLOW SONG): the section then carries on from the section before it, and the first section takes the song's own lanes. Set only what differs. The rule is always the same, per field — the section, then the section before it, then the song. Your own DRUMS and JAM panels are not in that list: a song's band is complete, so it sounds the same for whoever opens it (see Song settings).

The DRUMS lane — what the section says to the kit:

A preset puts its four knobs on the section under its name. Move one knob by hand and the name comes off: the section reads CUSTOM, because the name is a label for exactly those four values — and it comes back when the four land on a preset again. FILL IN and FILL OUT win over the kit's own reading of the form: a chorus that the record crashes into gets CRASH, a verse that lands softly gets SPLASH or NONE, and FILL on the section before the arrival is the fill into it. Left on AUTO, the kit fills into a lift and settles out of one by itself. CHOKE and BREAK are words the file carries but the kit does not play yet.

The JAM lane — the band's flags:

Each lane's head counts what the section sets — "2 settings" — with RESET to clear the whole lane. In the row header on the chart, under ×2 · n bars, the same things read as short words in the module's colour, e.g. LIFT · HALFTIME · CRASH · FILL · TIGHT.

The SONG tab carries the same two lanes as what every section starts from, under STYLE and KIT. In the plain-text song format the lanes are tags on a section header — feel=, fillin=, fillout=, preset=, denergy=, swing=, humanize=, live=, intensity=, colorlayer=, rhythm=, drums=off — and the same words as header lines for the song; see Song text format.

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