After creating some instruments the next step is to actually compose a song. In Jaytrax a song is broken down into little components called patterns. You can have a pattern of a drum rythm and a pattern with a bassline for instance, these patterns can be repeated while other patterns with the main melody changes. This not only saves resources but it also makes it more efficient and easy to make the song. The little patterns can be saved to disk and used in other songs.

Classic Score vs The Sequencer

In the classical way of writing musical scores one scribbles little notes on 5 lines. The way the notes look decides on how long the note plays and how long one has to wait before playing the next note. In between the notes are bars at steady intervals. To learn just how this works is quite difficult and takes some time to master. Jaytrax uses a different approach to writing the musical data. The notes aren't drawn graphically but are entered as text in sequences of 64 steps. These 64 steps are called a pattern. The 64 steps can be seen as 1 measure worth of notes. So every 16 steps is the same as a bar. Look at the table in figure 5 to see how things relate to one another. Rests are converted similarly. A rest of 1 count is 16 steps. Notes are written down in a short notation with the name of the note and the octave. The first notes of 'Frere Jacques' played in the fifth-octave would be written down as: C-5, D-5,E-5 and C-5. Half notes are written with a #-sign. The half notes on the sixth octave would be written down as: C#6, D#6, F#6, G#6, A#6. But there is more one can do in a pattern. With the aid of controller-scripts you can control how a note is played or even change any of the parameters of the instruments which are playing. A commonly used controller script is the Pitch-Bend. With the pitchbend you can let a note gradually slide from one note to another. Other controller scripts allow you to change every individual parameter of the instrument. This also includes the special effect parameters allowing for unparalleled control.

Putting the Patterns Together

After making the individual patterns they have to be arranged to build a song. A song consists of 16 channels. A channel is a physical placeholder which can hold and play one sound at a time. If you want to play 3 sounds at the same time you'd need 3 channels. A channel can switch from instrument but it can never play multiple sounds at the same time. There is a maximum of 16 channels available but use them only if necesarry. The more channels you use, the more processor-power is needed to mix the channels into 1 sound, and more importantly, more processor power is needed to generate the sound on that channel. Every channel can play a pattern. You can line up patterns so that if one finishes the next begins. With a maximum of 16 channels you can play upto 16 patterns simultaneously. By allowing you to truncate patterns you can implement strange rythmic changes. The songspeed can be altered too, with aid of the aforementioned controller-scripts. By repeating certain patterns and changing some others it's easy to arrange a whole song. But this is not where it stops. You can make as many songs you want, with the aid of the same patterns. This can be usefull if you are going to use the music for a game for instance, and you need a 'highscore' song as well as a 'game over' and an 'in game' tune. If you want to make tiny variations or just want to try something without touching your main masterpiece it can also be useful to have other subsongs. Every song (or subsong) can have a starting point, an end-point and a looppoint. If the current playhead reaches the endpoint and the song has been set to be 'loopable' the current playhead snaps back to the looppoint, if it isn't set to loopable the playback will stop. Furthermore, every song has his own playbackspeed and groove, giving each subsong it's own feel.

Basic Program Navigation

Basic navigation in Jaytrax is done by the 5 big buttons at the bottom of the screen. In every window you can quickly use these buttons to navigate to another part of Jaytrax. The 5 screens are: The Song Editor, where you can arrange your composition; The Pattern Editor, where you can make the smaller components of your song; The Instrument Editor, where you can edit and design the instruments you will be using in your song; The Sample Editor, where you can edit samples used in instruments; The MIDI Module, where you can configure Jaytrax so that it will behave as a full featured MIDI module. If you click the 'About' button you can read which persons where responsible for this little gem and if you're not impressed you can click the 'Exit' button on the topright corner and leave. The 'prefs' button displays a little preferences menu where you can set some personal settings which will be remembered inbetween sessions. At the top of the Jaytrax window is a little help system which gives little and useful messages about the button or value you have recently pressed. These messages are especially usefull for the novice but can be disabled in the preferences window for the expert. The little popup help winows which are displayed if you hover over a button can be disabled as well in the preferences menu. The preferences menu let's you furthermore select if you want to play only over 1 channel if you play the keyboard with the 'keyboard polyphonic' toggle. 'The sound Latency' sets the responsiveness of Jaytrax. If you set it to a low value, Jaytrax will be very responsive (e.g. you will hear a note immediately if you play it) but this can result in crackling sound when Windows is doing other things in the background.

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