A take leaves Melody Rack three ways: as live MIDI to the instrument already on your track, as a clip you drag onto a track, or as an idea filed in your Song Cage inbox. All three carry the same take at the same beats. This chapter covers the routing, what the four export choices mean, when to use MPE, and how the take survives a closed window.
What you'll learn
- How live output works, and the two switches that control it
- The host's Output parameter, and why it moves when you click the counts
- The plugin's own play button, loop and cursor
- Dragging a clip out: the four parts, and plain MIDI versus MPE
- Send to Song Cage, and what lands there
- What saves into your DAW project
10.1 Live MIDI
The rack streams to the instrument on your track continuously. There is nothing to render and nothing to commit: move a dial and the next note is different.
Two switches decide what goes out, and they are the counts in the take bar: 12 sung and 31 made. Each is lit in its own hue while that channel goes to the track and goes dim when it does not. They are a legend, a count and a mute in one place, because a legend, a count and a mute for one thing should be one thing.
- sung is the line you sang, which the plugin sends on MIDI channel 2.
- made is everything the rack generated, folded onto channel 1.
Two channels rather than one per part, because that is what the scheduler this plugin shares with the Song Cage plugin can filter on. Per-part delivery happens in the drag, not in the live stream: see §10.4.
Each take carries its own pair of switches, so take 2 can be the arpeggio while take 1 is the bare line.
The host's Output parameter
Those two switches are the page's face for one host parameter, Output, with four values: Off, Parts, Lead, All. Your DAW owns it, which means:
- Automation in the host moves the switches in the window.
- Clicking a switch in the window registers as a parameter edit your DAW can undo.
- The setting saves with your project, because the host saves its own parameters.
It is a master mute with the host's scope, and it is deliberately separate from the per-take switches: two mutes, two scopes.
10.2 Hearing it without the DAW
The plugin has its own play button and loop, because a plugin cannot move the host's playhead in any desktop format, and rewinding your DAW to bar 1 every time you move a dial is the round trip this exists to cut.
It plays the same MIDI through the same instrument on the track, so what you audition is the sound you are going to get. Space starts and stops it.
Click the roll's ruler to park a cursor, and playback starts from there instead of the top.
Both are disabled while your DAW is rolling, because the host owns the transport then.
10.3 The octave
The octave buttons in the take bar move the whole output up or down, and they run after the chain, on whatever came out. That placement is the point: the roll, the live MIDI and the dragged clip all read the same array, so they cannot disagree about where the part sits.
The pitch curve moves with the note; the chords in the rack are untouched, because moving a melody an octave does not make it a different progression. The buttons go dim at the point where another octave would push a note out of MIDI range, rather than accepting the click and dropping what fell off the end.
10.4 Dragging a clip out
The drag handle in the take bar drags a standard MIDI file straight onto a track in your DAW. Beside it, two choices.
What leaves
| Choice | What is in the clip |
|---|---|
| everything | The whole output of the rack, exactly as it sounds. |
| just what I sang | The lead line only. |
| just the parts | Everything the rack made. |
| just the chords | The progression as a voiced chord part. |
"Sung" and "parts" partition the rack exactly, so dragging both onto two tracks loses nothing and doubles nothing. That pair is the main use of the control: the melody on one instrument, the arrangement on another.
"Just the chords" works even when the chord bed is silent, which is how the rack opens. The voicing comes from the same code the audible bed would use, so the chord you drop on a piano is the chord you would have heard.
The clip's name follows the choice, because the track-name event is what your DAW puts on the region, so two drags arrive with different names instead of two regions called the same thing.
The file is Type 0, one track, no tempo map. Splitting by channel or shipping a Type 1 file was the obvious idea and it is wrong: a multi-track file dropped on a track spreads itself across new tracks in Ableton and makes an instrument track per track in Logic. A clip should be one clip. So you drag twice.
Plain or MPE
| Mode | What it carries |
|---|---|
| plain | Notes only. Plays on anything. |
| MPE | Your sung pitch curve rides on each note as per-note bend. Needs an MPE-capable synth. |
The file declares its own bend range, which is what stops the difference between expression and seasickness: 48 semitones for MPE, 2 for plain.
The trial
Drag-out is the one thing the trial withholds. The handle reads Buy to drag out until the licence lands, and no clip is written to disk before then. Everything else, including the live stream and Send to Song Cage, works throughout the trial.
10.5 Send to Song Cage
One press files the take in your Song Cage inbox as one idea with several takes:
- The melody through the rack.
- Each part the rack made (harmony, echo, arp, anything an effect was pointed at), each as its own take.
- The take as sung, untouched.
The progression goes as the idea's chord sketch, with the key, tempo and metre on the idea, and the card is titled for the effects that were on, so a month later it reads what made it. Behind each take, the line as you sang it is kept, so nothing is lost.
That shape is the point of the button. Getting a hum into Song Cage was already possible; the rack exists to turn one hum into several candidate melodies, and you should pick between them where the words are.
It sends notes, not audio. A Song Cage card with no recording shows no waveform and no play button, which is the truthful card for a take that exists as notes.
The chord bed is the one voice left out, because the chord sketch already carries it. A rack with nothing switched on sends the line once.
If you are signed out, the press opens the same sign-in the licence uses and the status line says so. It needs a Song Cage account, free or paid.
10.6 What saves into your project
Everything: the recording as notes, the pitch curves, all five takes, each take's rack, key, anchor, length and output switches, the chain order, and the plugin's own settings. Closing the window or reopening the session next week brings it all back.
That matters more here than in most plugins, because the take is the one part you cannot reproduce by clicking. The audio itself is not kept: what is stored is the take, which is what the rack runs on.
Chapter 11 covers what to do when something is not behaving.