Generate

The Generate page lays down a whole arrangement, melody, bass, drums and pad, and shows you all four at once. You reroll the parts you do not like, keep the ones you do, and nothing touches your song until you say so.

Open it from the Generate tab in the toolbar.

Before you start

Generation is built over your chord progression, which is the blueprint every layer is written against. With an empty chord strip the page says so and generates nothing, so lay in some chords first.

You also need a section to generate into. The page always works on the section you have open, named at the top.

The four layers

Each row is one layer. Pick which track it writes to, or leave it on None to leave that layer out. If you have no suitable track, the plus button creates one with a fitting instrument already loaded.

Melody writes the lead line, shaped to the section's place in the song. Bass writes a bass line from the chords, as roots, an arpeggio or chord stabs. Groove writes the drums, and only drum tracks appear in its picker. Background writes the sustained pad underneath everything.

The four are generated together rather than one after another in isolation. Each is written knowing what the others are playing, in the order a band would build the part: the drums lay down the grid, the bass locks onto the kick, the melody phrases against that groove, and the pad fills what is left.

That is why the bass and the kick land as one hit instead of near each other, why the drums fall in the gaps the melody leaves instead of doubling every note, and why the pad stays clear of both the bass's octave and whatever register the melody is already crowding.

Rerolling one layer at a time

The reroll button on a row regenerates just that layer and leaves the other three alone. Happy with the drums but not the tune? Reroll the melody and the groove does not move.

Regenerate all at the top rerolls every layer except the locked ones.

Locking what works

The lock button pins a layer, and a locked layer is skipped by Regenerate all.

Locking does more than protect a part. A locked layer still shapes the ones that get regenerated. Lock a melody you love and reroll the groove, and the drums are written around that melody. Lock the drums and reroll the melody, and the tune phrases with those drums.

It is the same idea as lock and reroll in the piano roll, one level up: there you lock individual notes, here you lock whole parts.

What the whole arrangement shares

The strip under the header covers the things that belong to the arrangement rather than to any one part.

The genre line says what is driving this generation and where each part will sit, naming the genre and the register given to bass, pad and melody. Those registers are not arbitrary: each part gets its own space, and the pad always starts above the bass so the two never sound the same root in the same octave and turn the low end to mud. Pick a genre and the whole layout moves with it; pick none and you get neutral defaults.

Feel is how far the bass and drums are allowed to drift off the grid. They share one setting, because a rhythm section that humanises separately stops sounding like a rhythm section.

Seed is the number behind the take you are hearing. Pin seed makes a reroll reuse it, which is how you find out what a dial actually does: pin the seed, move one dial, reroll, and the only thing that changed is what that dial controls. Left unpinned, every reroll is a fresh take.

Settings

The gear button opens the dials for that layer. The ones you reach for most are in front; the rest are folded under Advanced.

Melody. Freedom decides how far the line wanders, from decisive to roaming. Advanced adds Contour, the shape the tune traces, Peak, how big its climax is, and Motif notes, how many notes the idea it is built from has. Fewer is more singable.

Bass. Voice chooses root notes, an arpeggio or chord stabs, and Density sets how busy it is. Advanced adds Onsets per bar, Kick lock, which decides how hard the bass lands with the kick, and Root lock, which holds the chord root or lets the line walk the other chord tones.

Groove. Density, and whether the last bar gets a fill.

Background. Richness sets how full the pad sits. Advanced adds Colour, how readily it reaches for sevenths and ninths, plus pedal tones and a modal drone.

Several of these can be set to Auto, which means the genre decides. Leave them alone and a jazz profile will loosen the bass off the root and colour the pad, while a house one nails the bass to the root and keeps the pad plain. Untick Auto and the decision is yours, for this generation only.

The energy curve

The strip along the bottom is the song's energy curve, one bar per section, taller where the song is meant to lift, with the section you are generating into highlighted.

It is not decoration. Every layer is shaped by where its section sits on that curve, and all four read the same curve, which is what makes them sound written together. If your sections are all the same height, give them honest roles and both the curve and the music will get some shape. See song-aware generation.

Hearing it

Audition loops the section and plays the draft with the four layers soloed, so you hear the arrangement on its own.

You are hearing the real thing: your instruments, your effect chains, your tempo. The only difference is that the notes come from this page and do not exist in your song yet. Press it again to stop.

Rerolling a layer stops the audition, because otherwise you would be listening to the take you just rolled away from.

Nothing is written until you apply

What you see and hear is a preview, and your project is untouched while you roll. Apply to project writes all four layers to their tracks. Discard throws the preview away, and since the song was never changed there is nothing to undo.

That is what makes rerolling free. Roll and listen as often as you like before committing.

Switching to another section clears the preview, because a part generated for the chorus does not belong in the verse.

Getting the most from it

Start with the drums and the bass. Lock them once they groove, then roll the melody against them until something sings. Working one layer at a time like that is what makes the parts fit each other, and it beats regenerating everything and hoping.

Pin the seed while you are dialling settings in, and unpin it when you are hunting for ideas.