Getting started
Kiwisonic is a melody sequencer. You write parts, arrange them into a song, and mix the result, and it will generate material for you at every step if you want it to. Everything it generates is notes you can see and edit, not audio you have to accept.
This page is the first hour. Once you have a question about a specific control, the feature pages answer it, and every page here links to the ones it touches.
The first launch
Kiwisonic asks one question the first time you open it: whether you have used music software before. It is asked once and never again, and it only decides where you start.
Answer that you are new to it and projects open in the sections grid, with the genre you pick laying out the song's structure and adding a track per instrument, so there is something to fill in. Answer that you have used a DAW and projects open on the free-form timeline with nothing on it, and the genre only sets tempo, key and what the generators work from.
Neither answer hides anything, and nothing is locked to it. Both arrangement views carry a switch button in their top-left corner that changes your mind at any point, and the keyboard hints in the melody editor collapse and expand from their own bar. See arrangement views.
How the app is laid out
Four panels, normally all visible at once.
The track list runs down the left. One row per track, each with its own instrument.
The arrangement fills the centre. Time runs left to right, one row per track, and the blocks on it say what plays when.
The mixer sits along the bottom, one channel strip per track.
The melody editor opens below the timeline when you double-click a block, showing that pattern's notes on a grid.
Make some tracks
The rest of this page starts from an empty project. If yours came already built from a genre, the steps still apply, so skip to whichever part you want to change.
Click Add Track at the bottom of the track list, choose a type, and pick an instrument. A minimal setup is three tracks: one melodic track for the lead, one melodic track for bass or pad chords, and one drum track.
A fuller one might add a guitar track for strummed chords, a bowed strings track, or a wind track for a solo line. Wind and strings constrain themselves to ranges the real instruments can play.
For a bass part, add a melodic track and give it a bass instrument. Bass is not a separate track type.
Block out the shape before you write anything
Lay the section blocks out on the arrangement first, before a single note. A short song might be an intro, a verse, a chorus, a second verse, a second chorus and an outro.
Click the empty grid at each section's start for each track to create a block, then drag its right edge to the right length. You are deciding duration and structure here, not content.
This is worth doing first for a reason beyond tidiness. Generation reads your section structure and plans one energy curve across the whole song, so a song with honest sections gets parts that know where they sit. A song that is one long block has no shape for anything to follow. See song-aware generation.
Write the drums
Double-click the drum block in your first section to open the drum editor, and write a basic pattern. Ctrl+drag the block to copy it to the other sections, then open the chorus copy and make it slightly busier. A crash on the first beat and a busier hi-hat is enough.
Write the bass
Select the track with the bass instrument and double-click its verse block. You can draw notes by hand, or build a line from the section's chords: open Boilerplate on the compose toolbar, pick the bass-line source, and choose a shape.
Root Notes is the plainest starting point, one root per chord held for its full length. Root-Fifth and Walking give you something more active. Everything it writes is editable afterwards.
Out-of-scale rows are dimmed while you edit, so you can see which notes fit the key without being stopped from leaving it.
Write the melody
Open the lead track's chorus block. Set the quantise fine enough to place notes where you want them, then draw a short motif, four to eight notes, across the first couple of bars. Repeat it, vary it, or turn it upside down for the rest of the chorus.
Leave gaps. A melody with rests in it breathes; one that never stops does not. For the verse, write a simpler or lower version of the same motif so the chorus still has somewhere to go.
If you would rather start from something than from nothing, the compose toolbar will lay a part down and let you keep the notes you like and reroll the rest. See lock and reroll.
Balance it
Play the whole song and work the mixer while you listen. Get the drums to a solid level first, then set the bass just under them so the kick stays clear, then bring the lead above both, since it is the part the listener follows.
Use pan to spread things out before you reach for volume: a guitar slightly left, a pad slightly right, lead and bass down the middle.
Then refine
Loop a section on the arrangement ruler and listen to it repeatedly while you change things. The usual next steps are shaping velocities in the piano roll so the melody has some dynamics, adding a fill at the end of a bar in the drums, and making the second chorus slightly bigger than the first.
Where to go next
The sequencer page covers the four panels in full. Keyboard shortcuts is worth a look once the mouse starts feeling slow. And if you are on Linux, read the platform notes.