What NØISE can and cannot do

The capabilities tool returns this list. It exists because a model with no constraints will happily promise a guitar solo, a tempo change in the bridge, or the lyrics — and a NØISE song can carry none of those.

It can

• up to 24 sections, each with its own name, colour and repeat count (1–16)
• one band for the whole song: a JAM style (bass, pad and rhythm-guitar patterns) and a kit, set once on the song; the drum genre follows from the style
• per section, what the kit does: the groove (feel), the cymbal on its one (fillIn: crash, splash, none), the fill on its way out (fillOut: auto, always, never, or a named fill from the genre's bank), the drums OFF for solo space
• per section, how the drummer plays: a preset — STOCK, TIGHT, DRIVING, LAID BACK, LOOSE, SMOKY, QUIET — or the four knobs themselves: energy, swing, humanize, live
• per section, the band's intensity, colour layer and rhythm guitar
• every section field follows the section before it, then the song, when left out — so a chorus that only hits harder sets one field
• seven energies, in cycle order: base (the normal groove), lift (the colour layer joins), groove (bass and drums only, room for a solo), hold (one held chord per change, one long bass note per bar), riff (bass and guitar play a chord-tone riff), sparse (pad only), stop (stop-time)
• a groove seed (grooveSeed), the author's seed for every choice the band makes by itself — which bars, which fills, the approach notes — so the song plays the same way everywhere. The site keeps it on round-trip and never invents one.
• chords as key-relative degrees, which transpose when the player changes key, or as absolute chords, which do not
• rests, repeats, held chords, and chord changes inside a bar — chord lengths in beats, so ["C(3)", "G(1)"] changes on beat 4
• 24 chord types with alterations
• a slash bass the band actually plays — inversions (C/E) and pedals (C/D), on absolute chords and on degrees ({"degree": 1, "bass": "3"} is I/3)
• anticipated chords: a chord pushed an eighth or a sixteenth early ("^G", "^^G"), struck early and held over the bar line
• a chosen guitar grip per chord — the library holds open grips for the common slash chords
• a tuning, which the app applies when the song loads
• a capo (0–9), which the app applies when the song loads; the chart stays in the shape key and the band sounds that many frets up
• looping forever, or playing once and stopping

It cannot

• lyrics — there is no field for them, and the content rules forbid them
• note-level tablature — a song carries no written notes: no licks, melodies or solos. A RIFF section plays the band's own chord-tone riff, and a GROOVE section leaves room for a solo the player plays; the notes are never the author's to write. A song is a chord grid with a grip per chord.
• a tempo change per section — the tempo is one value for the whole song
• a time signature — that is session state in the app, not part of a song
• a different style, kit or drum genre per section — a song is one band with one kit (since app 0.81); what a section changes is how that band plays
• a variation with a name — the field is carried by the file, but the app has no words for it yet
• more than 24 sections, 32 chords per section, 256 bars in total, or a 512 KB document
• notes longer than 150 characters
• guitar grips from the library for chord qualities outside maj m 7 m7 maj7 sus2 sus4 add9 dim aug 5, or for open tunings — though a grip you state yourself is always drawn

What loading a song actually changes

This is the one most easily got wrong.

Applied to the session: the chord chart, the tempo, the written key, the tuning and the capo.

The band travels with the song: the style and the kit are the whole song's; the DRUMS lane (off, feel, fillIn, fillOut, the preset's four knobs) and the JAM lane (intensity, colour, rhythm guitar) are what the band plays per section, resolved per field SECTION → THE SECTION BEFORE IT → SONG, never the listener's own settings. A model that leaves them out gets fixed defaults (style rock, the style's first kit and feel, fillOut auto, the STOCK preset, intensity 0.5, colour off), not the player's choices; write them when they matter.

A section's settings last for the section: a section that sets nothing carries on from the section before it, and the first section from the song. A section's swing and live land on the app's clock while the song plays. When the song is put down, the player's own settings come back — GRID's swing and LIVE too.

How to use the band

The song_format guide carries a chapter on this, because it is where a model most easily over-does it. The band has a good arrangement of its own; the lanes exist to make a song recognisable, and the rules are about restraint: energy first (who plays is the biggest difference between sections); let the verse follow (most sections should set nothing); mark the arrivals with a crash on the chorus's one, never on every section; the fill is the way out, on the section before the arrival; a preset per kind of section, not per section, and one knob rather than four when no preset says it; feel changes are rare and audible; drums off is a real silence, not room for the guitar in every verse — groove is what that needs.