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Transcript:

Once we have recorded some touch drums we can edit by double tapping and then tap edit and then the whole world opens up with a piano roll. If I scroll in by using two fingers and spreading them I can literally drag any midi note, for example the snare drum, anywhere I want in the grid. Back in the olden days this was known as piano roll view but rather than having the black and white keys on the side because this is a drum machine we actually get to see the instrument. You used to have to know that f sharp two was a hi-hat. One last thing is that you can drag and drop up and down there to get your different sounds as well and up the top there you can see we're in pencil mode which means that we actually tap on any of those open boxes and we'll get a note so we can actually just paint in like you would have in any other DAW back in the day. It’s worth noting that you can toggle pencil mode two ways. 1. you can swipe and just leave pencil mode on or 2. You can hold with your left thumb while using the tool which is kind of like muting and unmuting yourself in zoom with the spacebar.

Syncopation

From a music education point of view there's just loads and loads and loads of opportunities to have musical conversations here an a big one that sticks out for me is the opportunity to talk about syncopation and what happens if we take some of those notes away in the hi-hat that would be really interesting experiment and use the undo key undo button to experiment and if you don't like it just undo it and it will come back.

Velocity

The other way that we can syncopate is through emphasis which brings us to velocity and so because you just played that in using your fingers on the screen there'll be a human element in your velocities so how hard you struck each note which is really cool from a human perspective but you don't have to stop there. You can tweak your velocities by double tapping a note and use the velocity setting to increase or decrease that midi note. Something that is really beautiful is that the velocity also changes the timbre and depending on the instrument there's a whole bunch of different timbres that you can get depending on where you put the velocity slider. I really love that you get that audio feedback as you are adjusting the velocity and so you're not just making it up from a number but you actually get that real-time audio feedback. Even better is that you could audition at the same time and just jam in this view.

Lasso

If we want to deal with a bunch of notes at the same time, and this is across all of the editors, then we need to lasso. First step is to tap a grey bit of the screen and then by tapping again but holding down this time you can drag your finger across to select multiple notes. Say if I wanted to delete a whole bunch of stuff I could lasso them and delete. It does take some practice to get precise at this.

Structure

Let’s do some housekeeping. So when you click that plus button we can now duplicate the intro and that will become our verse groove and we'll write a bass line over the top of that. Also when we want to be focused on our b section we can have the b section on it’s own but when we want to listen to the song in its entirety we can hit all sections and see all sections in one view. I think that's a really cool feature and really helps us to just hone in and be thinking about the section we're working on and just frees up lots of screen for us as well.