7. Shaping performance

Lenses

Notes are drawn in their track’s colour. A lens colours them by one of their values instead, so you can see how a part is played without opening a note at a time: which hits are loud, which notes rush, which ones ring over the next.

Every lens uses the same scale: grey for a note as written, blue for less, red for more. The further from grey, the further from as written.

Colouring notes by velocity, timing, length or detune

Available on every platform.

Choose a lens

Choose one from Colour Notes By, in the View menu or the pane’s ⚙ menu:

• Track: the track’s colour (the usual look).
• Velocity: grey at 100, the velocity a new note gets; redder up to 127, bluer down to 30 and below.
• Timing: how far each note starts from the nearest line of the pane’s grid. Early is blue, late is red, at full colour half a grid step away. On the grid is grey.
• Length: how much of its room a note fills, its room being the time up to the next note in its clip. Grey fills it exactly; a note held for half of it is fully blue, one ringing half again over it fully red.
• Detune: flat is blue, sharp is red, at full colour 50 cents away. In tune is grey.
• Confidence: for music read from a PDF or a photo, how sure the reading was; sure is grey, red is worth checking. Notes that weren’t read from a page keep their usual ink. See PDFs and Read Music.

Timing depends on the grid: with a 1/16 grid, a note a 32nd late is fully red; with a 1/8 grid it’s half way.

In the Editor and the Score

Lenses work in Editor and Score panes. Each pane has its own, saved with the song’s layout, so one pane can show velocity while another, on the same music, shows timing.

Change what you see

A lens only shows. To change the values:

• Value bars show the lens’s value as a stem under each note of a track, to drag or paint.
• The brush raises, lowers or softens the value over the notes you paint across. While it’s out, the notes wear its lens.
• The note inspector and the Inspector pane set the selected notes’ velocity, length and detune directly.