7. Shaping performance

Brushes

The brush shapes a performance the way you’d shade a drawing. Paint over the notes in an Editor pane and it nudges one of their values, velocity, timing, length or detune, up, down or toward the middle. It works most at its centre and less toward its edge, so a few passes build a smooth swell, push a fill a touch late or even out a strummed part, across several tracks at once.

Brushes

Available on every platform.

Take up the brush

Brush (E) (E) takes up the brush, in an Editor pane. Brush (E) again, Done in its palette, or Esc puts it away, back to editing.

While the brush is out, the notes wear the lens of the value it paints, and a circle follows the pointer, with a ring on each note it would reach. When you put it away, the pane’s lens goes back to what it was.

The brush paints in Editor panes only: a Score pane doesn’t offer it, and keeps the E key for itself.

The palette

A palette at the foot of the pane holds the brush’s settings; the View menu has them too, under Brush Paints and Brush Does:

• What it paints: Velocity, Timing, Length or Detune. The brush starts on Velocity, then comes back with the value you used last.
• What it does:
  • Raise: louder, later, longer or sharper.
  • Lower: softer, earlier, shorter or flatter.
  • Soften: evens things out. For velocity, it pulls the notes under the brush toward their average; for the others, toward as written: on the grid, filling their room, in tune.
• Size: − and + on either side of ⌀, from 8 to 160 points; Smaller Brush ([) ([) and Larger Brush (]) (]) do the same.
• Strength: − and + on either side of the percentage, from 10 % to 100 %, a tenth at a time; ⇧[ and ⇧] do the same.

In a narrow pane, the palette shortens its labels to Vel, Time, Len, Tune and +, −, ≈. Each pane keeps its own brush settings.

Paint

Drag over the notes. Each note in the circle moves a little with every dab, most at the centre; go over a passage again to move it further. Small strokes near the edge add up rather than vanish.

The brush reaches the notes of every track the pane shows, in each track’s active voice, or in every voice when its voices are shown as lanes (see Voices). Timing never moves a note more than half a grid step from its nearest grid line.

Each stroke is one step to undo.

Related

• Value bars show one track’s values as stems you can drag one by one.
• For exact values, use the note inspector or the Inspector pane.