Song Structure

Chain scenes into a full arrangement — verse, chorus, breakdown — that plays itself.

Scenes let you switch every instrument at once. The Song strip takes the next step: chain those scenes into an ordered arrangement, give each one a repeat count, and press play to hear the whole piece rather than driving it by hand.

The strip sits below the scene rail. Until you add anything it reads "No arrangement — every instrument loops its clip", and the track behaves exactly as it did before — an empty Song changes nothing.

Building an arrangement

Pick a scene from the dropdown in the dashed + ADD STEP card and it is appended to the chain. Each step points at a scene row rather than copying it, so editing a scene updates every step that uses it.

From there:

  • Drag step cards to reorder them.
  • × in the corner removes a step.
  • − / + adjust how many times that step repeats, shown as ×N (1 to 99).
  • Click a step's name to rename it. Because steps reference scenes, this renames the scene, so every step pointing at it relabels together. A blank name falls back to "Scene N".

The strip shows the total length of the arrangement in bars.

Playing a song

There is no separate song transport — the normal play button and the spacebar run it.

On play, the song launches its first step immediately and counts that step's repeats in bars. When the count is satisfied it advances and launches the next scene. Launching a step does exactly what launching a scene by hand does: filled slots swap each instrument to that clip, and empty slots stop that instrument. The currently-playing step is highlighted and pulses so you can follow along.

Bar length

The BAR — N BEATS stepper sets the global bar the song counts against, from 1 to 16 beats (4 by default). This is the grid the arrangement advances on, independent of any individual instrument's loop length.

At the end

The END: LOOP / END: STOP toggle decides what happens when the chain finishes. The label always states what will happen; click it to flip. LOOP returns to the first step; STOP halts the transport.

Starting somewhere else

Click a step card to make it the starting step — it gets a green rule down its left edge. Clicking the same step again clears the selection back to step 1. This is a working convenience for auditioning the back half of an arrangement without sitting through the front.

Note: The start step is session-only. It is not saved with the track and is not shared with collaborators.

Overriding a song while it plays

Launching a scene by hand while a song is running is treated as an override. You hear the change immediately, but it does not move the song's position: the current step carries on counting its bars, and the song reclaims the instruments at the next step boundary.

This is what makes the strip usable as a performance tool. You can drop into a scene for a few bars over a running arrangement, and the song picks up where it always would have been rather than being knocked out of place.

Tip: The song's position is derived purely from elapsed bars, never from which clips happen to be playing. That is why an override can never leave the arrangement in a confused state.

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