Writing Melody

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, hold a button and sing one in, or record a take and detect a whole phrase. 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 to sing a single note straight onto a syllable, and when to record a take instead
• How Follow Chord mode remaps your keyboard to chord tones
• How to nudge, navigate, and delete notes after they're placed
• How to give one syllable more than one note
• How pitch detection turns a sung take into notes you can drag onto the timeline
• How the Mellotron voice options shape melody playback

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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, or hold Hold to sing underneath it (or just hold M) and sing the note. 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 (singing a note in, Musical Typing, Follow Chord, the Melody Tab lane, recording a take and detecting it) all produce the same result (a pitch label on a syllable) and are covered in §10.2 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.

A syllable is not limited to one note, though. Press N and the syllable you're on gains a second slot without the word being cut: "run" stays spelled "run" and holds two pitches, or three. That's §10.6.

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 and opening just below it, so the chord lane sitting above the lyric row stays readable. (Near the bottom of the window it flips above instead.) 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.

Across the top of the card is the chord you're writing against: the chord sounding under this syllable, with its Roman numeral, and the chords either side of it dimmed. The keys belonging to that chord light up in the same colour as the chord's name, and each lit key is labelled with what it's doing in the chord: R for the root, 3, 5, ♭7 and so on. So you can see at a glance whether the note you're about to pick is a chord tone or a passing note, without looking away from the keys.

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.

Singing a note in

Under the keyboard is a Hold to sing button. Hold it, sing the note you want, and let go: the pitch you sang lands on the selected segment. It's the fastest way in when you can hear the note but would have to hunt for it on the keys.

Holding the M key does exactly the same thing, which is usually quicker when you're already typing notes in and don't want to reach for the mouse. Hold M, sing, let go.

While you hold, the button shows the note it's hearing, and it keeps showing that note if you stop humming before you let go. What the button is showing is what a release will write, so it can't name a note and then refuse to place it. Let go and it writes that pitch and plays it back.

Nothing heard means exactly that: nothing was heard at any point in the hold. An empty room, a muted input, or a press with no voice behind it. If the button read a note to you, that note lands.

A few things that help:

• Hold a beat longer than feels necessary. A short jab is less reliable than a sustained note; give it a clear half-second of tone.
• Sing a vowel, not a word. "Ah" or "oo" reads more cleanly than a consonant.
• A close microphone helps a lot, especially low in your range. A laptop's built-in mic thins out the bottom of a bass register, so low notes are where an external mic makes the most difference.

Next to the button is an oct control. It shifts every sung note by whole octaves, which is the fix when your comfortable range sits below the line you're writing: set it once and everything you sing lands where you meant it, with the intervals you sang left intact. It stays at 0 unless you change it, and lights up when it's doing something.

This is one note at a time, on the segment you have selected. To capture a whole phrase in one pass, record a take and detect the notes from it instead: that's §10.7.

Singing in needs a microphone, so in the plugin it depends on your host. Where the DAW allows microphone access the button is there; where it doesn't, it's hidden, and the keyboard, Musical Typing, or the tab lane get you the same note.

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:

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:

1. Song Cage finds the chord at the current playhead position (or the selected block's beat).
2. It builds a pool of 9 ascending chord tones starting from the chord root.
3. 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, show the Melody Tab lane: click the TAB chip in the track bar at the top of the timeline, in the Melody group next to its Mute and Solo buttons (the chip appears when your instrument is guitar). A six-string staff (high e on top, low E on bottom) appears directly under the lyric lane on every line in the song, at the same width as the lyric lane so each beat lines up vertically. Hide it again with the same chip, or with the chevron next to the MELODY TAB label in the lane header.

Existing melody notes show up as fret-number chips on whichever string the pitch sits most comfortably on. Fret positions follow the song's tuning, and the lane header shows the tuning name (when it isn't standard) and the capo offset (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 sits inside a worded lyric block, where the fret lands depends on where the cursor is. On the start of a syllable it changes that syllable's note, which is what a cursor parked on an existing note should do. Part-way through one, it opens a new note there instead: the cursor on this lane moves by grid rather than by syllable, so it can already stand between notes, and landing there used to quietly overwrite the syllable's pitch. The word keeps its spelling and both notes survive. See §10.6.

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.

Hold Shift and the same keys move the note a whole octave. That is the fix when the line is right but sits in the wrong part of your range.

Select several blocks (shift-click, or drag a marquee across them) and both moves apply to every note in the selection at once. A plain nudge still steps each note against the chord under its own beat, so lifting a whole line keeps every note in the harmony it was written over. If any note would run off the end of the piano, nothing moves at all, so a phrase never comes back with some notes shifted and the rest left behind.

Each nudge plays the new pitch through the synth so you hear the change immediately. A move across several blocks stays silent: a dozen pitches at once tells you nothing.

Navigating between notes

Arrow Left and Arrow Right move the cursor through every note slot on the timeline: syllable segments within a block, then grid cells at the current snap across empty space. Each note plays as the cursor lands on it, so you can arrow through a phrase and hear the melody in sequence. Empty cells are silent; the silence is the rest.

When the cursor lands on an empty cell it shows as a dashed outline, and the piano follows it. Nothing is written to the song while you pass through: arrow away and the cell is exactly as empty as before. To place a note there, press Arrow Up or Arrow Down (the note starts one scale step from your previous melody note, in the direction you pressed), type it on the home row, or click the piano. The note appears on the grid and stays selected, so further presses nudge it into place. Press Enter on an empty cell to type a lyric there instead, and Escape to dismiss the cursor.

Deleting hands the cell straight back to the cursor. Place a note, decide it's wrong, press Backspace, and the dashed outline reappears on the cell the note just left, so the next arrow press carries on from there instead of sending you back to the mouse.

Tab and Shift+Tab hop block-to-block, skipping over rests, when you want the coarse jump rather than the cell-by-cell walk.

Giving one syllable more than one note

Sometimes a syllable is sung across two or three pitches. A held vowel at the end of a line, a little turn on the way into the next word: one word, several notes.

Press N with a syllable selected and it makes room. The syllable's time halves onto the next grid line and the cursor lands on the new, empty slot, so the very next thing you play fills it: a piano key, a home-row letter, a note on your MIDI keyboard, or M and your voice. Press N again for a third note.

The word is never re-spelled. The new slot carries a pitch and no letters, so "running" stays "run-ning" rather than becoming "run / ni / ng", and the syllable's letters stretch across the whole run so it still reads as one word. On the timeline the extra notes sit inside the word with a faint dashed seam between them and their own pitch badges underneath.

There are two other ways to the same thing. The pitch popup has a Note button beside Hold to sing, and right-clicking a syllable offers Add note to this syllable. Both go quiet when the syllable is already as short as the grid allows, since there's no line left to divide it on. Drop to a finer snap division first if you need one more.

The new note takes its time from the syllable rather than lengthening the word, so nothing after it moves. If the split lands wrong, drag the dashed seam to shift where one note ends and the next begins.

To take a note back off, hover the dashed seam and click the × above it. The note goes and its time returns to the syllable it came from.

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. Backspace is the key people reach for to undo a note they just placed, so the first press takes the note and leaves the word: press it again if you did mean the word too.

A note with no word under it has nothing left to keep, so it goes on the first press, and the dashed cursor takes its cell, ready for the pitch you actually wanted.

10.7 Recording and pitch detection

When you have a melody in your head but not on a keyboard, sing it.

Arming and recording

The track bar at the top of the timeline has three tracks: Chords, Melody, and Audio. Each 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: only one can be armed at a time, so arming one disarms the other. Press the global R key (or click Play) to start recording. The playhead advances and the mic captures your voice.

The take lands where the playhead is. Click the grid where you want to start before you record, and the right-hand end of the track bar will name the section it is going into. Recording while the song is already playing punches in at the playhead instead.

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.

Expand the take and a bar appears under its waveform, holding everything you do to that take. Before detection it holds two things: a play button, and Detect melody at the far end. Click Detect. A status line beside it reports what is happening, and when the run finishes a lane of note chips opens below the bar, one row per timeline line, its grid lined up with the chords and lyrics underneath so you can read each chip's beat directly against the song.

Detection reads the trimmed part of the take, not the whole recording. If you have moved the trim handles, the bar names how many seconds it is about to analyze, so a take cropped down to a second doesn't look like a broken detector when it comes back with one note.

The first detection on a device downloads the pitch model, around 51 MB, and the bar warns you before you spend it. It is stored in your browser, so it happens once: every detection after that runs offline, and your voice never leaves the device. If the model can't be reached, detection still runs on a simpler built-in one and the bar marks the result Basic detection, so a thinner set of notes is never a mystery. Detect again once you're back online.

If a run finds nothing, the bar says so and offers a hint rather than sitting silent. A hum that is quiet, breathy, or very short is the usual cause.

The take bar

Once notes exist, the bar carries four controls, left to right in the order you use them.

• Play, with a Hum / Melody switch attached to it. The switch says what the button plays: the recording as you sang it, or the notes the detector read out of it. Flipping it while something is playing switches straight over, which is how you compare the two. While Hum plays the waveform above fills; while Melody plays a cursor sweeps the note lane, so you can see exactly which chip is sounding.
• A Snap picker: No snap plus the top three keys the detector ranked for your take (for example A maj, F♯ min, D maj). Click a key to snap every pitch to that scale, click another to compare, or No snap to go back to the raw detection. Snapping is not destructive, so you can cycle freely without losing the original.
• Place on lyric line, the commit, covered below.
• Edit, holding the things you reach for less often: split a note in two, merge a run of notes into one, shift the whole melody an octave up or down, detect again, or clear the melody and start over. Right-clicking any note chip opens the same menu at the chip.

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.

Collapsing the take hides the waveform, the bar and the chips together, and the take's header keeps showing the note count, so a detected melody is never off screen without a trace.

Editing detected notes

Detected notes are not yet on the timeline; they're in the staging lane, 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 lane background draws a marquee.
• Drag a chip horizontally to retime it. The drag snaps to a 1/32-beat grid, finer than the timeline's own snap so a chip can sit between two lyric slots. 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 just below the selected chip, flipping above it when there isn't room: 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 clears the active Snap key, since the notes no longer all sit in that scale.
• Arrow Up / Down nudge the selected chip's pitch by one semitone; hold Shift to move it a whole octave, which is the Edit menu's octave shift scoped to the chips you picked rather than the whole take. With several chips selected they move together, and if any of them would run off the end of the piano, none of them move.
• 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.
• C splits the selected note in two and M merges a run of them into one. A wordless hum has genuinely ambiguous note boundaries, since two syllables on one pitch look the same as one held note, and each note becomes one lyric block: getting the count right here is what gives you the right number of syllable slots to write into.
• Delete or Backspace removes the selected chips. Escape clears the selection.

Committing to the timeline

Place on lyric line works two ways. Click it and the melody lands in this section, starting from the top. Drag it onto any lyric lane instead, in this section or another one, and the first note lands on the beat you drop it at, which is what you want when the phrase belongs partway through a line or in a different section entirely.

Either way the rest of the notes keep their relative timing at the take's tempo, and 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. If the melody runs longer than the section it's going into, the section grows to fit in the same step, so no note ends up past the end where no line would draw it.

The notes become real lyric blocks (melody-only, no text) in the target section, and the take you sang collapses behind them. You can type the lyric in afterward, drag the blocks around the grid, or open the inline piano on any of them to nudge a pitch.

A voice memo captured on your phone works the same way, with one step in front of it. Expand the idea in the Ideas Inbox and drag its audio piece onto a section: that copies the take onto the section's Audio track and opens its waveform. Hit Detect melody there and everything above applies unchanged.

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.
• Too long for the section? If the trimmed take runs at least half a section past the end, a Double section to fit button appears in the take bar. It extends the section and duplicates its existing content in one click.

10.8 Melody voices

Melody playback uses sampled instruments: four Mellotron tape voices and two guitars. Right-click any lyric block and choose from the Melody Voice options:

• Female: chamber vocal sample
• Male: chamber vocal sample
• Flute: the tape-based flute sound from classic recordings
• Violins: string ensemble sample
• Acoustic Guitar: sampled steel-string acoustic
• Electric Guitar: sampled clean electric
• 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.

Rhythm counts as well as pitch. A long note on a downbeat carries more weight than a short one between beats, and a note that is approached and left by step on a weak beat is read as a passing tone the harmony is not expected to contain. Move the same note from an offbeat onto the downbeat and the rankings shift even though the pitch never changed.

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

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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.