There are four ways to get a melody onto the roll, and all of them land on the session's grid: sing it, play it, press play in your DAW and let a clip go past, or import a recording you already have. Whichever way you use, what arrives is a take: notes, the pitch curve behind each one, a tempo, a metre, and a position in the song. This chapter covers all four, plus what the count-in is actually doing and when the grid is a promise rather than a ruler.
What you'll learn
- Singing a take: the count-in, the click, and what happens when the DAW is already rolling
- Playing a take in from a MIDI controller
- How a clip already on the track becomes a take with nothing to press
- Importing a voice memo from a file, from your phone, or from your Song Cage inbox
- Why the first note keeps its place in the bar, pickups included
- When bar lines are drawn dashed, and what that means
4.1 Sing
Press Sing (or R). What happens next depends on your DAW's transport.
When the DAW is stopped
The plugin counts you in at the host tempo and owns the clock. The count-in control beside Sing sets how long: 1 bar in, 2 bars in, or no count. click plays a metronome through the count-in and the take.
The countdown is drawn large on the stage while it runs, so the number you need is the biggest thing on screen rather than a glyph on a button.
When the DAW is rolling
Recording arms and begins on the next bar line. You sing over your own track, to your DAW's own metronome, and the take lands in the DAW's bars. The plugin plays no click of its own here, and the count-in and click controls go inert and say why: a second metronome out of a different device with a different buffer is worse than none.
Stopping
Press Sing again (now reading Stop), or R, or Space. The detector runs, and the take appears on the roll.
What the count-in is actually for
It is not politeness. The capture path takes a context time and drops every sample before it, so sample zero of the recording is the downbeat, and the click you heard and the sample the recording starts on are the same number rather than two estimates of the same instant. That is what makes the bar lines under your take mean something.
Recording over a take
Pressing Sing with a take already on the roll records a new one. The old take is not lost: the plugin keeps the last five, and Cmd+Z also brings it back. See Chapter 5.
4.2 Keys
Press Keys (or K) and play the melody in from the MIDI controller already routed to the track. Same count-in, same grid, same everything downstream. The elapsed readout counts the notes as they arrive.
Keys is not gated on the microphone, which is the point: a DAW that will not give the plugin a mic still routes MIDI, and a player who would rather not sing still has hands.
One difference worth knowing: a played note states a pitch rather than reporting one. There is no ambiguity for In Key to resolve, so a played take carries no pitch curve and Expression has nothing to write.
4.3 Just press play
A clip already on the track reaches the rack with no press at all. Every note your DAW routes through the plugin arrives stamped with the host's position, the page keeps what goes by while the transport is rolling, and when it stops, the pass is on the roll.
- An empty rack takes it outright. Nothing to confirm.
- A rack that already has a take is offered it in a notice: "The DAW just played 14 notes through Melody Rack", with Use them as the take and Keep this one. That is deliberate: the take underneath may be a recording nobody can sing twice, and your DAW replays the same region every time you press play. The offer is made once per distinct pass.
- A loop hands out a completed cycle at each wrap.
4.4 Import
Import opens a panel under the button with three doors. Dropping an audio file anywhere on the window is the same as the first one.
A file
A picker, or a drop. Voice memos from a phone, a bounce, anything with a melody on it. The plugin decodes it several ways so the common cases all work: WebKit's own decoder for what an iPhone records, a dedicated path for the Opus-in-MP4 files Android recorders write, and your host's system decoder as the last resort.
Three minutes is the ceiling. Detection runs on the main thread inside the plugin, and a take is a phrase.
Your phone
The panel shows a QR code. Point your phone's camera at it and a transfer page opens; pick a recording and it comes across. The audio is encrypted on the phone with a key that only exists in the plugin window, so the relay stores ciphertext it cannot read, and each recording is deleted as it is collected. The session lasts as long as the panel is open. This needs a signed-in account, which you already have if the trial is running.
Your Song Cage inbox
Ideas and recordings from your Song Cage account, newest first, titled by the idea. Picking a row fetches the recording and transcribes it.
One rule applies here that comes from Song Cage rather than from this plugin: captures made in the Song Cage mobile Capture app are held behind a Song Cage Pro subscription, and the panel says how many are being withheld. Everything else in the inbox is visible to any signed-in account, imports included. A Melody Rack licence buys the rack; the cloud inbox that carries phone captures between devices is what the Song Cage subscription sells.
What an imported take is missing
Nothing counted it in, so an imported take is never on a grid: the first note is the downbeat, the bar lines draw dashed, and the anchor is where you put it. Everything else works exactly as a sung take does, including the pitch curve, In Key's verdicts and Expression.
4.5 What the take keeps
Your phase
A pickup is a pickup. The take is not rebased so the first note lands on beat zero; it is rebased to the earliest note in the take, and the roll draws the bar before the downbeat when there is genuinely something in it. A late entry stays late.
Your dynamics
Velocity is read off the recording, so the loud notes are loud. The microphone stream is held warm between takes for this reason: opening it cold costs about 18 dB for the first few seconds, which would write the opening of every phrase quiet as well as making it sound quiet.
Your timing
Nothing quantizes a take on arrival. Feel is the only quantizer, it is off until you switch it on, and it is a dial rather than a button. See Chapter 8.
4.6 When the grid is only a ruler
Bar lines drawn dashed and dim mean the take is not sitting on a measured grid. Two things cause it:
- An imported take, which nothing counted in.
- A take recorded through the fallback audio path, which cannot honour a start time. This is rare and host-specific; the status line says when the accurate path was not available.
A dashed grid is not a broken take. It means the plugin is declining to claim a precision it does not have, and everything else, including Feel, works from where the notes actually are.
Chapter 5 covers what happens when you sing it again.