Splitting notes into lines

In this lesson you will learn how to

split notes into lines,
navigate between lines,
select and view notes from multiple lines,
recognize and switch between view modes.

Before you start

After the previous lesson you should already have a folder with the song's audio & txt file with first notes of the song.

You can also download it from here:

3MB

David Amber - Second Time Around [split-lines].zip

Splitting notes into lines

At this point you should have mapped the first 5 notes:

If you've just opened the downloaded song, it may look like this instead:

Let's ignore this small difference in display for now, it will be explained in a moment.

As you probably know Ultrastar displays lyrics & notes line by line. When mapping the vocal track we need to specify which notes belong together. Before we can do that, we need to add at least one note that will be a part of the next line.

Split last note

Select the last note and play it using space key. You should be able to hear that the "o" sound from the next line begins at the end of the note. Let's split it.

Previously we were splitting notes in half by pressing - key. Let's do it differently this time. To split note in custom place you can hover the mouse over its top border in the place where you want the second note to begin. Once the cursor changes to Ｉ symbol, just click in the right place. In our case it will be 2 beats before the current end of the note - in beat 62 (red drawing visualizes where the cursor should be placed)

After the mouse click you should now have 6 notes:

Move last note to next line

Let's now move the last note to the next line. To do let's select it and press enter.

You will notice that several things have changed in the display but before we dive deeper into this let's prolong this note by typing 64 again (again just press 6 and quickly after press 4, make sure the note is selected first).

Active line display

Let's now take a look at the UI. First of all we can see that our song indeed has 2 lines. It is visible both in the lyrics editor:

and in the song fillbar (one rectangle represents one line):

Currently we see only notes from the second line. This is because the 2nd line is currently active. You can easily check the active line number by looking below the piano keyboard on the left side of the lyrics displayer:

Changing active line

To change the active line, you can use ↑ (up arrow) key - to switch to the previous line, or ↓ (down arrow) key to switch to the next line.

You can also scroll up/down using the mouse wheel or just click on the rectangle that represents the given line in the song fillbar above the main editor.

Line display mode

When some line is active, Karedi works in line display mode. It means that the area visible in the main editor - the range of visible beats and pitches will automatically adjust to active line's notes.

That's why when you changed the length of the last note to 64 beats, the visible area was automatically increased. If you changed the duration to sth shorter e.g. 16 beats or added more notes, the visible area would be automatically adjusted again.

Switching to free view mode

Line display mode is great while working on the song line by line, but what if we want to see some customly chosen part of the song?

Displaying multiple lines at once

To display 2 or more lines at once you need to select notes from multiple lines. It can be done in a variety of ways.

Use track fillbar Hold shift and click on the rectangle representing some other line - the view will be automatically expanded to show everything in between the selected lines.
Use lyrics editor Just click on the lyrics editor and select lyrics from two or more lines e.g. using mouse drag, or shift + <arrow> keys.
Select notes from the main editor Make the first line active by e.g. scrolling mouse wheel up, select the last note and then increase selection by using shift + ↓ shortcut.

Regardless of the method the result should look like this:

How to recognize that you are in free display mode?

The most obvious difference is that the active line number is no longer displayed below piano. Lyrics from different lines displayed below main editor are separated by "/" character.

Moving visible area in free display mode

Since you are in a free mode, you can decrease and increase the visible area as you wish. This can be done either by selecting notes as explained above, but also by using scroll together with one of the modifier keys - shift, ctrl or alt or some combination of them.

You can also use the song fillbar to quickly move to some other place in the song as explained here.

How to switch back to line display mode?

Just scroll the mouse wheel up/down or use up or down arrow key.

To split or not to split

How should you divide the lyrics into lines?

Firstly make sure that the line is not too long. Usually you should have like 5-15 notes on the line, but it depends on the tempo. The quicker the song, the more notes you may have. The singer takes pauses between parts of the lyrics - that's usually a good place to split the line. If you are not sure if it's better to split some line into 2 smaller lines or not, test it. Sing it in Ultrastar and decide what is more comfortable for you.

Your lines do not have to correspond to sentences, you can even break the line in the middle of a phrase or expression if that's what the singer does. It's more important to make them short enough that the player can actually remember them after reading them once while singing and at the same time not too short - so that the player is not forced to constantly check the lyrics every 3 words.

Video

Shortcuts summary:

Let's summarize the shortcuts that we have learned in this lesson:

toggle whether the note starts new line or not: enter
set the previous line as active: ↑ or mouse scroll up
set the next line as active: ↓ or mouse scroll down
manually adjust the visible area & switch to free mode: shift, ctrl, alt or some combination of them + mouse wheel