What this manual covers
Everything inside the plugin window, plus the parts of the setup that live outside it: installing the AU and the VST3, granting your DAW a microphone, signing in to start the trial, and where the plugin appears in Logic, Live and REAPER. Inside the window it covers the four ways to get a melody in (sing it, play it, let the DAW's own clip run past, or import a recording you already have), the five takes the plugin keeps, the key picker, the chord progression the rack writes from your melody, correcting notes the detector heard wrong, all thirteen effects and every control on each of them, why the chain order matters, and the three ways a take leaves: live MIDI to the instrument on your track, a MIDI clip you drag onto a track, or an idea filed in your Song Cage inbox.
What it doesn't cover: Song Cage itself. Melody Rack shares Song Cage's audio engine and its music theory, but it is a separate product with its own window, its own installer and its own licence, and you do not need Song Cage to use it. The Song Cage songwriting canvas has a manual of its own.
Who it's for
Melody Rack is for people who write tunes by singing them and then have to get them into a DAW. That covers three situations, and the manual serves all three:
- You hum ideas and lose them. The fastest path from a melody in your head to MIDI on a track, counted in so it lands on the beat, with the chords worked out from what you sang.
- You already convert audio to MIDI and hate the cleanup. The last mile is the whole product: correcting notes against the chord underneath rather than against a scale, telling a blue note from a missed one, and hand fixes for the things the detector genuinely got wrong.
- You want a second idea out of the first one. Bones rewrites a verse into its own chorus, Morph walks one dial between two takes, and Harmony, Arp and Echo write parts that stay inside the changes.
How it's organized
- Start here is what the plugin is, how to install and unlock it, and a tour of the four bands of the window.
- Getting a take covers the ways in, the five takes the plugin keeps, and establishing the key and the progression that everything downstream reads.
- Shaping it is the rack itself: correcting a take, the thirteen effects in full, and what the order of the chain changes.
- Output and reference covers live MIDI, drag-out, Send to Song Cage, and what to do when something is not working.
Chapters
Start here
- 1. Welcome to Melody Rack: what a MIDI effect is, what harmony-aware means in practice, and what the plugin deliberately does not do.
- 2. Installing and Signing In: the macOS and Windows installers, the MIDI FX slot, microphone access, the 14-day trial, and the licence.
- 3. The Window: the header, the take bar, the roll and the chain, plus every keyboard shortcut.
Getting a take
- 4. Getting a Melody In: Sing, Keys, the DAW's own pass, and Import from a file, your phone, or your Song Cage inbox.
- 5. Takes: the five takes the plugin keeps, each with its own rack and its own key, plus copy, flatten, anchor and length.
- 6. The Key and the Chords: the key picker, why the rack starts with no key at all, and the Chords slot that writes a progression from your melody.
Shaping it
- 7. Correcting a Take: In Key and the three questions it asks, the correction marks on the roll, and the hand fixes for what the detector got wrong.
- 8. The Thirteen Effects: every slot and every control, from Chords through Expression.
- 9. Chain Order: why the default order is what it is, how to reorder, and what each move changes.
Output and reference
- 10. Getting It Out: live MIDI and the Output parameter, the local play button, drag-out in plain MIDI or MPE, and Send to Song Cage.
- 11. Troubleshooting: no sound, no microphone, a missing plugin, a dashed grid, and what the trial withholds.