Wind editor
The wind editor is for trumpet, saxophone, flute, clarinet and similar instruments. It is a piano roll with wind-specific controls layered underneath it.
Why wind gets its own editor
A wind player blows air through the instrument and uses their tongue to shape how each note starts. That is tonguing: a gentle tap for a clean attack, a sharp push for an accent, or no tongue at all for a smooth connection between notes.
Wind players also breathe, which is why the editor is built around phrases rather than loose notes. And each instrument has a real range it cannot leave, which the editor knows.
Header toggles
FX switches on humanization, small timing and velocity variations that stop notes sitting exactly on the grid.
Ripple resize makes growing or shrinking a note shift the later notes so they stay contiguous.
Guides shows the note guides: scale focus, melody hints and chord emphasis over the grid.
Phrases
A phrase is a group of notes played in one breath. Where a player would breathe is where one phrase ends and the next begins, and phrases are drawn as blocks with an arc above them.
Click empty space in the timeline to start a new phrase, and drag a phrase boundary to move where the breath falls. Notes you add join the current phrase. Dynamics are set per phrase, described below.
Real wind phrases run a couple of bars at most, and longer ones stop sounding playable. Leave a real gap between them: a whole-note rest is a comfortable breath, and a part with no breaths in it is the fastest way to sound synthetic.
Each wind track is monophonic, one note at a time, so a horn section is several tracks.
The note grid
Time runs left to right and pitch bottom to top, with a key strip on the left showing the note names. Click to place a note, drag to move it, drag its right edge to resize.
Playable range
The grid constrains itself to what the instrument can actually play, and notes outside that range are dimmed.
| Instrument | Range |
|---|---|
| Trumpet | F#3 to C6 |
| Alto sax | Db3 to Ab5 |
| Tenor sax | Ab2 to Eb5 |
| Flute | C4 to C7 |
| Clarinet | D3 to Bb6 |
An instrument not in this list gets a sensible default range covering three octaves from C3.
Tone modes
The buttons in the header set the tone colour of the whole pattern.
| Mode | Sound |
|---|---|
| Full | Open, bright, normal playing. The default. |
| Subtone | Soft and breathy, the sound of a jazz ballad saxophone. |
| Muted | Dampened, as if played into a mute or with reduced air. |
| Flutter | Flutter-tonguing, a rapid tremolo made by rolling the tongue. |
The tone mode applies to the whole pattern, so different sections can use different patterns with different modes.
Tonguing presets
The preset picker in the header loads a set of per-note articulations from the catalog, setting the tonguing for every note in the phrase.
| Tonguing | Effect |
|---|---|
| Slur | No tongue, just air. A smooth connection into the next note. |
| Tongue | A clean, distinct attack. The default. |
| Accent | A strong attack, so the note pops out of the phrase. |
| Staccato | Short and detached, cut with space before the next note. |
Presets are tagged by genre and section type, so you can find ones that suit the song.
The articulation strip
Below the grid, the articulation strip shows one cell per note with its tonguing. Click a cell to cycle through the four, which is how you adjust individual notes after loading a preset.
Start with everything tongued, then add slurs to connect the notes that should flow together. That is the order a player thinks in, and it keeps a phrase from turning into one long smear.
Pitch bend
The pitch bend lane below the articulation strip is where you draw slides between pitches.
Bend up into a note from below for a scoop, which is everywhere in jazz and blues. Bend down away from a note at its end for a fall. Or connect two notes with a glide.
Dynamics
The dynamics strip shapes breath pressure across a phrase, from a start level to an end level, using standard musical dynamics from pp up to ff.
Drag the endpoints to make a crescendo or a diminuendo. A slight crescendo into the peak of a phrase is what makes a line sound played; flat dynamics across a whole part are what make it sound entered.
Fingering view
At the bottom, a reference view shows the fingering for the current note on the selected instrument. It is informational, and it is how you spot a passage that would be awkward for a real player.
VST winds and articulations
With a VST wind instrument, the tonguing and tone mode you set here have to be converted into whatever the plugin expects. Most libraries listen for dedicated MIDI notes, some for a control-change message, and a few for program changes.
The mapping is filled in from the shared catalog whenever one exists for your plugin, including per-instrument mappings inside packs that bundle several winds. Normally there is nothing to do.
If the catalog has no entry for your plugin, you can add a mapping file to the articulation maps folder under your local application data. Copying a similar catalog entry as a template is the quickest way to start.
Articulations the plugin does not support show greyed out in the tonguing menu, so you can see what it can do before you write for it.
Keyboard shortcuts
The arrow keys move between notes, Delete removes the selected one, Space plays the track, and the plus and minus keys change the snap resolution. See keyboard shortcuts for the full reference.