Note tapping

How to add roughly positioned notes quickly?

Note is the base building block of your songfile. For each vocal track you will probably have to map several hundreds of them. Of course the songs are usually pretty regular - they have a repeating chorus (with same melody and lyrics in every occurence) and verses (with same melody but different lyrics). Therefore you can speed up your work by utilizing various copy-paste modes.

However, you still need to map at least the first verse and the first chorus, which means that you need to add the first several dozens of notes.

Although you can do it manually one by one as described in this article, there is also a quicker way if you know the song well - tapping.

What is note tapping?

In this mode you hear the audio file and whenever you want to add a note - you just press some key e.g. space. You can start with the first verse - after one playback you will have all notes added in their rough positions. The result won't be perfect and that's fine - you still need to finetune the notes' positions anyway e.g. using auxiliary note playback mode. They key is that you already have almost all the notes you need which saves you time.

The notes you add will all be part of one line - so if you tap a long part of the song, you will have a very long line which needs to be broken up into smaller lines. You can either do it during tapping as described below or afterwards - in lyrics editor or in the main editor - in the last case just switch the display mode to free view to avoid too many notes on the screen at once.

How to prepare for note tapping?

Note tapping will playback the audio from the beginning of the timerange visible in the main editor till the end of the song (or until the mode is exited manually). Therefore make sure that you have some margin to prepare - basically that the first note that you want to add will appear in the playback after at least 1 sec.

How to start note tapping?

To activate note tapping either go to the menu Extras -> Tap Notes or press the ctrl + t shortcut.

You will hear the playback but the time marker will be red instead of the usual green color.

How to actually add notes?

To add a note you can press almost any key. The most comfortable way for beginners will be probably using the spacebar.

How to stop note tapping?

If you want to exit the mode before the song ends, you can either press Esc key or click anywhere in the editor with your mouse.

Advanced note tapping

At the beginning you can just quickly press and immediately release the key - this way you will add all the notes as short ones. You can adjust the length later anyway. However, once you get the hang of tapping, you can try more advanced tapping features to get the most out of this mode.

Adding longer notes

To add a longer note just press the key and hold it. Release it when the note's syllable ends.

Dividing into lines

You can divide the lines into notes during tapping as well. Whenever you want to finish the line just use enter key.

Switching tracks

You can switch tracks during tapping - by pressing tab (next track) or shift + tab (previous track) shortcuts. This may be useful in duet songs when the singers sing alternatively long parts of the song - in this way you can add all notes in one playback. If the singers sing at the same time or switch back and forth all the time, it will be probably easier to just tap one track and later tap the other one.