Adding notes
Last updated
Last updated
divide and join notes,
move between notes,
use the audio playback with ticks to roughly place your notes.
After the previous lesson you should already have a folder with the song's audio & txt file. You can also download it here:
If you are following the tutorial and haven't restarted the application after the previous lesson, your new song should look like this:
The brown color means that the note is selected. If your note is blue, just click on it.
The note is currently 3 beats long, you can either count it (beats are on the lower X axis of the grid) or look on the number on the left just below the note - it displays note's current duration in beats.
If your screen does look like in the screen above, you can skip the next section and go straight to the section about playback.
If you have closed the program, reloaded the song or if you are just starting from this lesson, the song will look a bit differently. Read the next section to learn more.
If you are not continuing from the previous lesson, you have to load this lesson's files. To do so start Karedi and open this lesson's txt file by any of the following methods:
File -> Open dialog
"Open..." button on the toolbar
ctrl + o shortcut
Drag & drop the txt file onto main window
Select the txt file and use "Open with" option from Windows/Linux context menu and choose Karedi app
After loading you should see the empty song with one note:
You can notice that the song looks a bit different than in the screenshot above. This is due to a different display mode, it will be explained in the next lesson.
For now, before reading the next section about playback, please go to the section called prolong the first note and prolong the first note as explained there. However use length 20 instead of 64 for now. The result should look like this:
This is a temporary change, just to achieve the same result during playback (described in the next section) as if you were following the tutorial from the beginning. Once we reach the step in which the first note is prolonged to 64 beats, you can continue the tutorial normally.
Before we start adding more notes let's hear the part that we already have.
In this tutorial we will use shortcuts whenever possible. You can also activate all actions from the menu (and some from the toolbar as well) but shortcuts are way faster.
There are 3 modes of playback in Karedi:
audio only - activated by pressing <base_key>
midi only - activated by pressing shift + <base_key>
audio & midi - activated by pressing ctrl + <base_key>
We currently do not care about the pitches so we will use audio only playback mode.
You can either play whole visible range or just the current note. To play the visible range use p as base key, to play current note use space as base key.
For example to play the visible range of notes in audio & midi mode press ctrl + p, to play current note in audio only mode press space.
If you press p to play the visible range in audio only mode, you should hear "Can we sta.." - the beginning of the first line "Can we start over".
If pressing p does not activate playback but opens Play menu instead, just press alt key one time. It should fix the issue.
If you listen closely, you will also hear a tick at the beginning of can. During audio playback Karedi will play a tick sound at the beginning of each note to help you position them correctly. This will be more obvious once we add more notes.
If you press ctrl + w to disable ticks and press p to play the visible time range, you will hear the difference. Press ctrl + w to reenable ticks as they are helpful when preparing roughly positioned notes.
Let's temporarily prolong our first note so that we can here all of the first phrase. To do so let's first select it by clicking on it (it should become brown). Now type 64. Just press 6 and immediately after that press 4 on your keyboard. The note should now have length of 64 beats:
When you press p now you should hear the whole line "Can we start over".
Remember that you can always undo & redo changes e.g. by pressing ctrl + z and ctrl + y shortcuts.
To divide the note in half you can use - key shortcut. Let's press it 3 times. You should have 4 notes now:
If you execute the visible area playback (remember to re-enable ticks by pressing ctrl + w if necessary), you will now hear that 3 first notes (corresponding to lyrics can, we, start) coincidentally begin roughly in the right place.
Currently our 3rd note is too long and contains not only "start" but also beginning of "over". To hear it properly let's first select the 3rd note. Instead of clicking on it like before, let's press right arrow key to navigate to it (previous note can be selected by using left arrow key).
Once the third note is selected, press space to hear only this note. You should hear "start o" as expected.
Let's once again divide the third note in half by pressing - key.
Now we have 5 notes for 5 syllables of the song (can, we, start, o, ver). If you activate visible area playback by pressing p, you will hear that the first 4 notes now begin in the right places. We still need to position the 5th note's beginning correctly.
We could just move the 5th note to the right place but in this lesson we are practising different ways of dividing and joining notes so let's do it that way.
Firstly, let's select the 5th note and play it using space key. You should hear "over", we would like to hear just "ver" instead. Let's once again use - key to split the note in half:
Now when you press p you will notice that the last note roughly corresponds to "ver" sound. The problem is that we now have 2 notes for "o" sound.
To join the 2 notes (4th and 5th) we can either:
select one of these notes by clicking on it, hold shift key and click on the other note to select both of them,
go back to the 4th note by pressing ← (left arrow) key and use shift + ↓ (down arrow) key to increase the selection to also include the next note.
You should now have both notes selected:
Now press = key to join them.
Now when you press p to play the visible range you will hear that our 5 notes' beginnings roughly correspond to their syllables of the first line of the song.
Awesome!
Remember to regularly save changes using ctrl + s shortcut
Let's summarize the shortcuts that we have learned in this lesson.
File related:
open the song - ctrl + o
save the changes - ctrl + s
Playback related:
play the visible range of beats in audio only mode: p
*play the visible range of beats in midi only mode: shift + p
*play the visible range of beats in audio & midi mode: ctrl + p
play the selected notes in audio only mode: space
*play the selected notes in midi only mode: shift + space
*play the selected notes in audio & midi mode: ctrl + space
disable/enable synchronization ticks - ctrl+w
fix playback if menu opens up instad of it - press alt key one time
*these modes will not be used until we start setting notes' pitches
Notes related:
divide notes: - key
join notes: = key
set note's duration: select the note and type out the duration (e.g. 3, 2 to set duration to 32 beats)
Navigation between notes:
select the previous note: ← key
select the next note: → key
Selecting notes:
select more notes: shift + ↓ key
select less notes: shift + ↑ key
hold shift and click on the notes with mouse to select all notes in between
hold ctrland click on the notes with mouse to select individual notes
That's a lot of shortcuts, but most of them are intuitive.
Actually, when we press p we can also hear the beginning of the next line - "can we start over o...". In the next lesson we will learn how to move this last "o.." sound that starts the phrase "or is this really the end" to the next line.
