Songs

The song list opens when tapping the hamburger menu button in the top left corner of our main view. It extends all the way to the bottom and comes prepopulated with a couple of demo pieces we made to demonstrate ScalePlay. There is a red lock icon next to the menu button and the song list sports a bunch of locks as well. Why is that?

Well, on an iPad things are easily touched and sometimes we want to keep a song as it is. The lock is a simple mechanism to prevent unintentional editing. There are two places where songs can be locked/unlocked. One of them is the lock button at the very top left of the screen. Additionally there is a lock switch in the Song tab of the app's settings window. The lock's influence extends beyond the drawing in ScalePlay matrices. It effectively disables the Quick Edit button and other chord editing as well. Things that are not disabled by the lock are tempo, line mode and pattern lock.

 

Editing Songs

The song list has two orange buttons at the top. An edit button and a + button for adding a new song. The Edit button turns into a Done button when tapped as shown above. Tapping any of the minus buttons shown show a delete button that allows to delete a song. The names of our songs are outlined as well in edit mode and tapping on either of these names brings up the keyboard for editing.

You are maybe wondering what the letters Oc stand for. They refer to the octave set for the piece. Octaves are assigned in the Song tab of the app's settings window and are a convenient way to predetermine a specific range for a piece. We want to keep our phrases bite sized and not have to revert to a huge 128 row grid. But if we want to write a piece for bass for example, like the Jaco sample song, we need to be able to specify a lower octave than maybe for a flute song. Later on having this information readily available in our song list is a great mnemonic aid for those cases where out title doesn't reflect the specific purpose of a piece.

 

Renaming Songs

Here we tapped on a previously added new song and renamed it to Test. Note that it doesn't have a lock icon.

 

Summary

Well, we are way past the middle of this somewhat lengthy documentation. Kudos to you if you made it this far. We touched on all the basics and are good to go to start writing some music with ScalePlay. In the following chapters we are going to touch on a bunch of side issues like the notation view, instruments and things like TouchPlay.