Phrase Contour
The phrase contour is a hand-drawn shape — a spline curve laid over the piano roll — that tells the melody generator the arc you want the line to follow. You draw a high point, a low point, and the engine generates notes that climb and fall with the curve.
It's the Contour peer in the Compose toolbar.
When to reach for it
- You have a clear sense of the shape of the phrase (a slow rise, a peak in the middle, a fall away) but you don't want to write every note.
- You've generated a draft melody and want to nudge a section higher or lower without re-rolling the whole thing.
- You want a long phrase to feel coherent — phrases that rise and fall together breathe better than flat ones.
The overlay
Click Contour in the compose toolbar and an overlay appears on top of the note grid:
- A smooth curve connecting all your control points
- Control points as draggable handles on the curve
- (When notes already exist) the active notes are still visible underneath so you can see how your shape relates to them
The horizontal axis of the curve is time across the section (0 = start, 1 = end). The vertical axis is pitch within the playable range (0 = bottom of the range, 1 = top).
Drawing the shape
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Add a point | Click an empty spot on the overlay |
| Move a point | Drag the handle |
| Delete a point | Right-click the handle |
| Cancel without applying | Click **Cancel** in the contour pane |
The curve uses Catmull-Rom spline interpolation, so dragging one handle smoothly affects the curve segment around it without moving the others. Two points give you a straight rise or fall; three points give you an arch or a valley; more points let you draw multi-peak shapes.
While the contour overlay is active, clicks on the grid go to the overlay first — adding/moving/deleting curve points takes priority over normal note editing. To get back to editing notes directly, close the contour pane (click the Contour icon again).
Presets
The contour pane offers six built-in shapes you can load with one click:
| Preset | Shape |
|---|---|
| **Arch** | Rise into the middle, fall toward the end — the classic phrase shape |
| **Rising** | Steady climb from start to end — building a phrase |
| **Falling** | Steady descent — releasing a phrase |
| **Wave** | Two arches — a long phrase that breathes twice |
| **Late peak** | Slow climb, peak in the last third — pushes the climax late |
| **Plateau** | Rise, hold, fall — a sustained high section between rises and falls |
Pick a preset to drop those control points onto the overlay. From there you can drag the handles to fine-tune.
Generating notes from the contour
Once you've drawn (or loaded) a shape, click Generate in the contour pane to produce notes that follow it. Under the hood:
- The active generator (rule-based, by default) writes notes at rhythmic positions chosen from the genre's rhythm weights.
- Each note's pitch is sampled from the curve at that time position.
- The pitch is snapped to the nearest scale tone (preferring chord tones when you're over a chord).
Notes that would extend past a pitch change in the curve are shortened so they don't bridge across a turn — natural durations are preserved on flat sections.
You can switch the generator before clicking Generate (rule-based, Markov, call-and-response, custom seed) to get different rhythmic feels under the same shape.
Refining
The pane has a Refine button next to Generate. Refine keeps the same control points but re-rolls the rhythm and the in-between notes — useful when the shape is right but the specific notes feel a little off.
Click Apply to write the result into the section's pattern. Until you click Apply, the notes you see are a preview — closing the pane discards them.
Working with locked notes
Locked notes survive contour generation. Alt+Click any notes you want to protect, draw or load a contour, click Generate — the locked notes stay where they are and the generator writes around them. This lets you anchor the start and end of a phrase, draw an arch between them, and let the engine fill in the middle.
Tips
- Start with a preset — Arch is the most common phrase shape, so it's a strong default.
- Keep it simple — two or three control points usually beat ten. The curve smooths between them, and big shapes read better than busy ones.
- Draw across multiple chords — the shape works just as well across chord changes; the engine still snaps to chord tones, so the contour gives you the direction and the harmony gives you the colour.
- Combine with Lock & Reroll — generate from a contour, lock the peaks you like, refine.
- Use Plateau for "soaring" feels — a hold at the top of a melodic range tends to read as a climax even with very few notes.