Arrangement views

There are two ways to lay out a song, and they work on the same tracks and patterns underneath, so switching between them never costs you a note. The switch button sits in the top-left corner of the arrangement, and your choice is remembered between sessions.

Which of the two a new project opens in comes from the question Kiwisonic asks the first time you run it. That answer only sets the starting point. The switch button overrides it whenever you like, and the new answer is what sticks.

Sections

The song is a grid: sections across the top, Intro, Verse, Chorus and so on, tracks down the side, and one pattern in each cell.

Everything stays aligned to the song's structure, which makes this the fastest way to sketch a song with a clear form. Drag a section header to reorder it, double-click a cell to edit its pattern, right-click a cell to copy a part to every section of the same kind.

A new project that opens here arrives already built. The genre you picked lays out the sections, adds a track for each instrument it calls for, and puts a starting pattern in every cell. There is a grid to fill in rather than a blank page, which is why a genre is required when you create a project this way.

Free-form timeline

A continuous timeline with no sections at all, just a bar grid and your tracks. Each pattern is a clip you place where you want it. This is the better choice when the arrangement does not fit a neat grid: a fill that lands half a bar early, a one-off riff, a pad that runs wherever it likes.

A new project that opens here arrives empty: one track, and nothing on the timeline. Picking a genre is still worth doing, because it sets the tempo and key and it is what the generators work from, but it does not place anything for you and it does not add tracks you would have to delete. You can also create a project with no genre at all here.

Working with clips

Double-click an empty spot in a track row to create a clip. It appears at that bar and its editor opens so you can add notes. Double-click an existing clip to reopen that editor.

Drag a clip left or right to move it, and it snaps to the nearest bar. Hold Alt while dragging to drop an independent copy and leave the original in place. Right-click for rename, duplicate and delete; a new clip is named after its track until you rename it.

Click the bar ruler at the top, or drag the playback cursor, to set where playback starts.

Clips never overlap. If a move would land on top of another clip it snaps back. A new clip is four bars long, trimmed to fit when there is a clip soon after.

Writing past the end of a clip

Open a clip and the note grid ends where the clip ends, marked by a faint line, with a few empty bars beyond it. Play into those bars and the clip grows out to cover what you wrote, a whole bar at a time, and widens in the arrangement to match. There is no boundary to work up against and nothing to set first: the clip is as long as the music you put in it.

The one thing that stops it is the next clip on the same track, because clips never overlap. Move that clip further along, or start a new one, if you want more room.

In Sections this works the other way round, and deliberately so: a pattern is exactly as long as its section, the grid dims out past the end and marks it Next section, and notes cannot be written there. Give the section more bars if you need them.

Playing a short pattern for longer

Drag a clip's right edge to the right. The clip grows a bar at a time and the pattern repeats to fill the new length, so you do not have to copy it over and over. The repeats show as tiled previews inside the clip, and editing the clip once changes all of them.

You cannot drag it shorter than the pattern you wrote, and it stops before it would run into the next clip.

Switching between them

The two views are windows onto the same song. Sketch in Sections, switch to free-form to place clips freely, switch back, and the music plays back identically either way. Sections you made still exist; the free-form view just does not draw them.

This holds for a project that started free-form as well. Its genre's sections were laid out even though nothing was placed in them, so switching to Sections shows the song's structure with empty cells waiting. Nothing is lost by starting in one view and finishing in the other.