Every lyric block can carry a melody note. Click to play a pitch, type it on the home row, type frets on the tab lane, or sing it into the mic. The note sticks to the syllable wherever it moves.
What you'll learn
- How melody notes attach to lyric blocks and syllable segments
- How to enter notes with the inline piano, Musical Typing, the tab lane, or your voice
- How Follow Chord mode remaps your keyboard to chord tones
- How to nudge, navigate, and delete notes after they're placed
- How pitch detection turns a sung take into notes you can drag onto the timeline
- How the Mellotron voice options shape melody playback
Chapter 9 covered building chord progressions. This chapter covers the other half of the harmony layer: the melody notes that live inside your lyric blocks. Every method of input described here produces the same result, a pitch label sitting on a syllable, so you can mix and match freely. Play the first phrase on the piano, type the second with Musical Typing, and sing the bridge.
10.1 How melody notes work
To add a melody note, three quick ways:
- Click a lyric block to open the inline piano, then click any key to set the pitch. This is the most common path, walked through in detail in §10.2.
- Single-click empty space in the lyric lane to create a melody-only block (a note on the grid with no text). Set its pitch from the piano that opens.
- Double-click empty space instead if you want a lyric block.
Other input methods (Musical Typing, Follow Chord, the Melody Tab lane, recording from a mic) all produce the same result — a pitch label on a syllable — and are covered in §10.3 onward.
The rest of this section is background on the data model and how notes display on the timeline.
A melody note is a pitch attached to a syllable segment inside a lyric block. If a block has no syllable splits, it has one segment and one note slot. If a block has two splits, it has three segments and three note slots. Each slot holds either a pitch (like "E4" or "A4") or nothing.
On the timeline, melody notes appear as small pitch badges below each lyric block: light terracotta text showing the note name and octave. These badges move with the block when you drag it, and they follow syllable splits when you adjust dividers.
Melody notes are optional. A block can hold lyrics with no melody, a melody with no lyrics (a melody-only block), or both.
10.2 The inline piano
The simplest way to add a melody note is to click a lyric block and play it on the inline piano.
Select a lyric block by clicking it. A small piano keyboard appears as a floating popover, centered on the block. The keyboard spans two octaves and shows both white and black keys. Click any key to set that pitch on the current syllable segment. The note previews through the Mellotron synth immediately.
If the block has syllable splits, use Left/Right arrow keys to move the cursor between segments. Each segment highlights as you navigate, and clicking a piano key sets the pitch for whichever segment is active.
The piano auto-shifts its visible octave range when you click a note near the edges. To jump octaves manually, use the Z and X keys (down and up) or the octave buttons on either side of the keyboard.
Press Enter to confirm and close the piano. Press Escape to close and revert to the previous note. Or just click somewhere else on the timeline to deselect.
10.3 Musical Typing
For faster input, toggle Musical Typing by pressing K. A thin indicator bar appears showing "Musical Typing: On" with the current octave number.
Musical Typing maps your QWERTY keyboard to a chromatic scale, matching the layout used by GarageBand and other DAWs. The home row plays naturals, and the row above fills in the sharps:
| A | W | S | E | D | F | T | G | Y | H | U | J | K | L | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Note | C | C# | D | D# | E | F | F# | G | G# | A | A# | B | C | D |
Z shifts down one octave (minimum 1), X shifts up one octave (maximum 7). The default octave is 4, so pressing A plays C4.
Musical Typing works in two contexts:
- With the inline piano open, keys play through the piano and set the note on the active syllable segment.
- During recording, keys create notes on the timeline at the playhead position, quantized to the current snap division.
While Musical Typing is on, the mapped keys are consumed for note input. Other keyboard shortcuts still work through modifier keys (Cmd, Ctrl). Press K again to toggle it off and return all keys to their normal shortcut functions.
10.4 Follow Chord
Follow Chord remaps the home row to chord tones instead of a chromatic scale. Toggle it from the right-click context menu, the toolbar input settings, or the input section of the timeline.
When Follow Chord is active:
- Song Cage finds the chord at the current playhead position (or the selected block's beat).
- It builds a pool of 9 ascending chord tones starting from the chord root.
- Keys A through L map to those 9 tones in order. A is the root, S is the next chord tone up, and so on.
The inline piano switches from a full two-octave keyboard to a chord tone strip: a row of buttons showing only the available chord tones. The strip updates automatically as the playhead crosses chord boundaries.
Follow Chord is useful when you want every note to fit the harmony without thinking about which notes are in the chord. It's especially powerful during recording: play along with the accompaniment and every note you hit is guaranteed to be a chord tone.
Z and X still shift octaves in Follow Chord mode.
10.5 The Melody Tab lane
If you read guitar tab faster than staff notation, every line on the timeline has a Melody Tab lane sitting directly under the lyric lane. It's pre-collapsed by default. Click the chevron next to the MELODY TAB label to expand it, and a six-string staff appears (high e on top, low E on bottom) at the same width as the lyric lane above so each beat lines up vertically.
Existing melody notes show up as fret-number chips on whichever string the pitch sits most comfortably on. Standard tuning is assumed, and a capo offset is shown in the lane header when one is set.
To place or change a note, click a beat at the string you want, then type the fret number. Multi-digit frets work the way you'd expect: type 1 then 2 for fret 12. The cursor sits on the cell as a stripe across the active string, and the typed digit shows in orange until you commit it.
Once a note is on the lane, the keyboard takes over:
- Arrow Up / Down moves the cursor between strings.
- Arrow Left / Right moves the cursor between beats at the current snap.
- Tab or Enter advances to the next beat (commits any in-flight digits).
- Backspace clears the digit buffer, then clears the note on a second press.
- Escape dismisses the cursor.
If the cell already lives inside a multi-syllable lyric block, typing a fret updates that segment's pitch in place. If the cell is empty or sits inside a melody-only block, a snap-sized melody-only block is added at the cursor and any wider block that used to cover the cell is trimmed to make room. This is the same DAW-style cell-replace behavior the rest of the timeline uses.
The pitch shown on the lane and the pitch played on the synth are derived from the (string, fret) pair, so picking a different string for the same pitch is a stylistic choice about where you'd finger it. The choice is saved with the note and survives reload.
10.6 Editing notes
Nudging pitch
With a lyric block selected, press Arrow Up or Arrow Down to nudge the melody note by one scale degree. The nudge respects the current key and mode, so in C major, nudging up from E4 lands on F4 (not E#4). If Follow Chord is active, the nudge moves to the next chord tone instead of the next scale degree.
Each nudge plays the new pitch through the synth so you hear the change immediately.
Navigating between notes
Arrow Left and Arrow Right move the cursor through syllable segments within the current block, then jump to the adjacent block. Each note plays as the cursor lands on it, so you can arrow through a phrase and hear the melody in sequence.
Deleting a note
Press Delete or Backspace with a syllable segment selected to clear its note. The segment keeps its lyric text; only the pitch is removed.
10.7 Recording and pitch detection
When you have a melody in your head but not on a keyboard, sing it.
Arming and recording
Each section has a track panel with three rows: Chords, Melody, and Audio. Each row has M (mute) and S (solo) buttons, and Melody and Audio also have an R (arm) button for recording.
Click the R button on the Melody or Audio track to arm it. Press the global R key (or click Play) to start recording. The playhead advances and the mic captures your voice.
Notes played via Musical Typing during recording land on the timeline in real time, quantized to the current snap division. When you stop, the recorded notes are committed as lyric blocks (melody-only if no text exists at that beat, or added to existing blocks if they overlap).
Detecting melody from a take
If you sang or hummed into the mic, Song Cage can pull the pitches out of the take and turn them into notes you can place on the grid.
When the section's audio chrome is expanded, a Detect melody button appears in the bottom-left corner of the take's waveform. Click it. The button changes to "Analyzing…" while the detector runs, then a staging strip mounts directly above the section's lines with one row per line and a chip per detected note. The detector is a TypeScript port of librosa's pYIN (probabilistic YIN) and runs entirely in the browser; nothing leaves your device.
The strip's grid lines up with the chord and lyric grid below, so you can read each chip's beat directly against the timeline. The strip's header band shows:
- A Drag to lyric/melody line pill (the commit handle, covered below) with a grip on the left and a down-arrow on the right so the drag direction is unambiguous.
- Play / Stop to audition the detected melody through the Mellotron. While Play is firing, a thin transport cursor sweeps across the strip in sync with the audio so you can see exactly which chip is sounding.
- Re-detect to rerun analysis (useful after retrimming the take).
- Clear to remove all detected notes.
- Oct − and Oct + to shift every detected note by an octave in one click. Disabled at the MIDI edges.
- A Snap picker: an Off pill plus the top three candidate keys the detector ranked over the raw pitches (e.g. A maj, F♯ min, D maj). Click a candidate to snap every detected pitch to that scale. Click again to switch candidates, or Off to revert to the raw detection. Snap is non-destructive — Song Cage keeps the raw snapshot so you can cycle freely without losing accuracy.
Notes that span a line break render as two chips: a head on the line where they start and a tail on the next line, with flat-edge cuts at the break.
Editing detected notes
Detected notes are not yet on the timeline; they're in the staging strip, where they're cheap to nudge and reshape before you commit.
- Click a chip to select it. Shift-click extends a range, Cmd/Ctrl-click toggles, and click-and-drag on empty strip background draws a marquee.
- Drag a chip horizontally to retime it. The drag snaps to a 1/32-beat grid. With several chips selected, the whole selection moves in lockstep, and any chip that crosses a line break visibly re-slices into a head and a tail as it crosses, the same way it would after committing.
- A piano keyboard popover opens above the selected chip — the same control the timeline uses for lyric blocks. Click any key to set that chip's pitch absolutely, or type the home row (A–L for naturals, W/E/T/Y/U for sharps). Z / X shift the keyboard's visible octave window. Setting a pitch this way drops the active Snap candidate, since you've broken the snapped-scale invariant.
- Arrow Up / Down nudge the selected chip's pitch by one semitone.
- Arrow Left / Right move the selection to the previous or next detected note (audible as you go), so you can walk through the take note by note without touching the mouse.
- Delete or Backspace removes the selected chips. Escape clears the selection.
Committing to the timeline
Drag the Drag to lyric/melody line pill from the strip onto any lyric or melody lane below. The first note snaps to the drop beat, and the rest preserve their relative timing using the take's tempo. Note durations come straight from the detection (a 1/16 sung note lands as a 1/16 lyric block, not stretched up to the active snap grid), so back-to-back short notes don't overlap on drop.
On drop, the ghost notes become real lyric blocks (melody-only, no text) in the target section. You can shift the lyric in afterward, drag the blocks around the grid, or open the inline piano on any of them to nudge a pitch.
Detected melodies on idea-inbox clips work the same way: open the idea, promote it, and the same drag-to-lane commit appears in the promote modal.
What happens to the audio take itself
The mic recording is also saved as an audio take on the Audio track, not just consumed by pitch detection. A few details that matter when recording against a looped section:
- The clip keeps the full length you recorded. If you let the loop cycle twice and recorded a two-bar idea over a one-bar section, the saved take is two bars long, not one. Nothing gets truncated on save.
- During loop playback, the take plays once from its anchor while the chords and metronome keep looping underneath. The take doesn't retrigger on every wrap.
- During linear (full-song) playback, the take is clamped at its section's end so it can't bleed into the next section.
- Trim handles appear at the edges of the take's waveform when expanded. Drag them to pick the portion you want to keep. Trimming doesn't rewrite the audio, just sets in/out points that can be moved back any time.
- Overhang indicator. If the take extends more than a beat past the section boundary, an amber tint on the waveform shows the overhanging portion. If that overhang is at least half a section, a "Double section to fit" shortcut appears so you can extend the section and duplicate its existing content in one click.
10.8 Mellotron voices
Melody playback uses sampled Mellotron instruments. Right-click any lyric block and choose from the Mellotron Melody Voice options:
- Female: chamber vocal sample
- Male: chamber vocal sample
- Flute: the tape-based flute sound from classic recordings
- Violins: string ensemble sample
- Off: disables melody playback entirely (notes are still stored, just silent)
The voice applies globally, not per block. Switching voices takes effect on the next note played or on the next playback start. Volume is adjustable from the transport controls.
10.9 Melody and chord suggestions
Chapter 9 described the Fits Melody section in the chord palette. Here's the other direction: the melody you write shapes the chords the palette suggests.
Every time you place, nudge, or delete a melody note, the chord palette recalculates its Fits Melody rankings for any beat range that overlaps the change. Add an A4 to a beat and the palette boosts chords that contain A as a chord tone (Am, F, Dm, A). Remove it and the rankings shift back.
This feedback loop means melody and harmony develop together. You don't need to finish one before starting the other. Place a few chords, sing a phrase over them, check whether the palette's suggestions still make sense, adjust a note, watch the rankings respond. The two layers are always in conversation.
10.10 Melody shortcuts reference
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Toggle Musical Typing | K |
| Play note (Musical Typing) | A–L (naturals), W/E/T/Y/U (sharps) |
| Octave down | Z |
| Octave up | X |
| Nudge pitch up (scale degree) | Arrow Up |
| Nudge pitch down (scale degree) | Arrow Down |
| Move to next syllable/block | Arrow Right |
| Move to previous syllable/block | Arrow Left |
| Delete note | Delete / Backspace |
| Confirm and close piano | Enter |
| Cancel and close piano | Escape |
| Arm recording | Shift+R |
| Record (arm + play) | R |
That covers melody input, from a single click on the piano to a full sung phrase run through pitch detection. The next chapter covers what happens when you want the key itself to change mid-song: modulation routes and key shifts.