Phrase contour
A phrase contour is a shape you draw over the piano roll to tell the melody generator what arc the line should follow. Put a high point here and a low point there, and the notes it writes climb and fall with the curve.
It is the Contour peer in the compose toolbar.
When to reach for it
When you know the shape of the phrase, a slow rise, a peak in the middle, a fall away, but you do not want to write every note. When a draft melody needs a section pushed higher or lower without re-rolling the whole thing. And when a long phrase needs to hang together, because a line that rises and falls as one breathes better than a flat one.
The overlay
Clicking Contour puts an overlay on top of the note grid: a smooth curve through your control points, with the points themselves as draggable handles. Any notes already in the section stay visible underneath, so you can see how the shape relates to them.
Left to right is time across the section. Bottom to top is pitch within the playable range.
Drawing the shape
Click an empty spot on the overlay to add a point, drag a handle to move one, right-click a handle to delete it. Cancel in the contour pane leaves everything as it was.
The curve smooths itself between the points, so dragging one handle bends the curve around it without disturbing the rest. Two points give a straight rise or fall, three give an arch or a valley, and more let you draw a shape with several peaks.
While the overlay is active, clicks on the grid go to it first, so adding and moving curve points takes priority over normal note editing. Close the contour pane to edit notes directly again.
Presets
The pane offers six shapes you can load with one click.
| Preset | Shape |
|---|---|
| Arch | Rise into the middle, fall toward the end. The classic phrase. |
| Rising | Steady climb from start to end. Builds a phrase. |
| Falling | Steady descent. Releases a phrase. |
| Wave | Two arches, for a long phrase that breathes twice. |
| Late peak | Slow climb with the peak in the last third. |
| Plateau | Rise, hold, fall. A sustained high between the two. |
A preset drops its control points onto the overlay, and you drag from there.
Generating notes from it
With a shape in place, click Generate. Notes are written at rhythmic positions chosen from the genre's feel, each note taking its pitch from the curve at that moment, then snapped to the nearest scale tone, preferring chord tones where you are over a chord.
A note that would run past a turn in the curve is shortened, so nothing bridges across a peak. On flat stretches the natural durations are kept.
You can change the generator before clicking Generate to get a different rhythmic feel under the same shape.
Refine keeps your control points and re-rolls the rhythm and the notes in between, which is what you want when the shape is right and the notes are not.
Until you click Apply, what you see is a preview. Closing the pane discards it.
Working with locked notes
Locked notes survive contour generation. Alt+click the notes you want to protect, draw or load a shape, then generate: the locked notes stay and the generator writes around them. That is how you anchor the start and end of a phrase, draw an arch between them, and let the engine fill the middle. See lock and reroll.
Getting the most from it
Start from Arch, because it is the shape most phrases want. Keep the number of points low: two or three usually beat ten, since the curve smooths between them and a big shape reads better than a busy one.
Draw across chord changes freely. The contour gives the direction and the harmony gives the colour, because the notes still snap to chord tones as they go.
Plateau is worth knowing. A hold near the top of the range reads as a climax even with few notes in it.