CREATE AND EDIT SONGS
Important: you can only edit a playlist’s songs under the ‘My Playlists’ section. You can play the song in Edit Mode also, do not have to quit editing to listen to your changes. Once you create a new song, or edit and existing song Songistic will automatically turn into Edit Mode.
Playlist Contents (songlist) Editing, New Songs:
Important:remember, you can only edit a playlist’s songs under the ‘My Playlists’ section.
Create New Song: In your playlist’s song list header, click the button (right of the Search Bar). The ‘Song Editor’ panel will come up: Set the key, genre and fill out at least the title. Click OK and your new song will be created in the selected playlist. There is no special playlist where new songs go into, any playlist under ‘My Playlists’ will accept new songs. After creating the new song you will be put into the Edit mode (more on that later).
Delete a Song: In your playlist’s song list header, click the button. This will put the songlist in edit mode. You select as many songs as you want and do two things: either delete them using the delete button, or make a new list of the selections using the “make playlist from Selection” button
Copy a Song: once you see the song you want to copy, tap-hold for 1 second. It will become draggable, drag/drop onto the playlist you want to copy it into. The playlists in the m’My Playlists’ section will open up in helping you finding the target. This list will also scroll as necessary.
Duplicate a Song (in the same playlist): same as copying except drop the song on its own playlist. Songistic will ask you if you want to duplicate the song. Click OK and you’ll have an identical song in the same playlist. It is an ideal way to have many versions of the same song.
Editing and Creating Songs in Songistic
Important: you can only edit a playlist’s songs under the ‘My Playlists’ section. You can
play the song in Edit Mode, do not have to quit editing to listen to your changes.
Once you create a new song, or edit and existing song (View/Edit Song menu) you’ll be
put in Edit Mode.
Entering new bars: There are many ways to enter new bars. The easiest one is to use the Quick Insert Bar buttons on the bottom bar:
For instance if you want a bar with a single A9 chord in it, it is very easy: click the button labeled ‘A’, and in the menu that slides up select the ‘A’ button right of the 9.
That will give you a new bar at the end of the song with the desired chord in it. If you
want it in the middle of the song, that is easy: select the bar you want to insert after, then use the Quick Insert Bar menus. REMEMBER: the Quick Insert Bar is only an optimization, it only contains the most used chord types. A single click on any bar will bring up the “Bar Editor” which will have all the chord choices.
The other way to enter a new bar is a single tap anywhere in the window where there is
no bar, including possible breaks between existing bars, due to new lines, Section beginnings, etc. You will get a popup menu allowing you to create a new empty bar. It will put you into the Bar Editor Panel. As you can see this panel mimicks a bar, signature, barlines front and rear, boxes representing the beats (Ab in the 1st beat, Bb in the 3rd). The boxes will move right/left they may be all be visible at any time. The number of boxes depend on the time signature’s beat count. On this panel you can do absolutely everything that can be done in a single bar. Single tap on any bar in Edit Mode and you will get Bar Editor:
Top row:
1. Front Symbol/Rear Symbol: DS, Coda, Segno, etc.. In Songistic you can have a
symbol only in the front or the rear of the bar, not in the middle. Depending on the rear
barline (repeat or not) you will get different symbol options for Rear Symbol. In order to
establish consistency in the charts, there are rules that govern the placement of these
symbols. More on those later.
2. Section Labels (A, B etc…): The labels A and B have very important role and
meaning in Songistic, we will elaborate on this in a later section in the manual.
3. Section Type (Intro, Outro, etc…): these have informative purpose, they are wholly
optional.
4. Endings: Here in a menu you can select which ending this bar belongs to. All rules
regarding endings must be obeyed, otherwise you will get a warning message, and the
song will not play correctly in midi.
5. Annotations: enter simple (and short) text to appear above the bar.
6. Signature button: Shows the signature this bar is in. Each bar can have its own
signature, Songistic will display them where it is necessary. Tapping this button will bring
up the Signature Panel where you can change the signature for this bar. Once the
signature is changed, the middle section of the bar editor will rearrange as necessary, to
make sure one chord rectangle is allocated for each beat in the signature. Note: you can
use 4 or 8 based signatures, like 4/4, 3/4, 6/8. You get one chord entry per quarter note (or beat), even if the signature is 6/8 (like 3 in this case). Please note the midi engine will not play /8 signatures.
7. Here is the Chord Entry:
Base Note (C … B)
Chord Base Type (-, 7, -7 etc…)
Alterations
Each chord is made up of 5 parts:
1. Base note
( C )
2. Chord base type
(7 )
3. Alterations 1
( #5 )
4. Alterations 2
( #9 )
5. Bass note
( F )
So this chord would be C7#5#9/F. Tapping on any of the three parts of the Chord Entry Box
will let you set the particular chord part. NOTE: While picking a chord, you must do it in the following order: first, pick the base note and the base chord. You will see that in most instances you will not even have to go past this. If your chord is a more rare, altered chord or has a different (per) bass note, click the bottom section of the Chord Entry Box to set alterations and a PerBass note. Please note, the alterations menus are context sensitive, alterations1 items depend on what the base chord type is (meaning that a min7 base chord will have different alterations than a maj6 chord for instance). Alterations2 items depend on both the base chord type and the alterations1 setting. A special case the “add x” form is made up of both alterations, alterations1 is “add”, alterations2 is whatever note you want to add. Once you select “add” in alterations1, the proper choices will be set up for you in alterations2.
Songistic will always stay consistent, i.e you cannot enter chord combinations that do not exist or do not make sense. The barlines default to a single line put in by default. The beginning and end of the song will get a thin-heavy line automatically, you do not need to set them. Set your barlines if they are anything other the default. A special trick: you can have no barline in front if you want more than one bars to look like a single bar in the chart. For instance if you need more fermatas to appear in a single bar you can use this feature. To set the barline type, you can swipe or tap the barline control as any other flat button in Songistic.
The Bar-Purpose button:
1. Chords (general chords)
2. Repeat bar (it will have no properties on its own, except the multiplier, as to how
many bars are being repeated). Please note: if you use a repeat bar with multiplier (eg. 2) the repeat will apply to the 2 regular bars before it, NOT the last regular bar twice.
3. Rest bar. Set how many bars or rest you want.
Undoing changes:
There are three levels of undo in Songistic:
1. Undo while making changes in the Bar Editor (not yet left the editor).
2. Undoing any (one) of the changed bars back to their permanently saved versions.
3. Undoing all changes to the song, reverting back to the last saved version.
Once you make changes in the Bar Editor, you can undo them while you in the editor.
NOTE: your changes will be discarded if you leave the editor without tapping ‘OK’ in the
bottom right corner. Once you OK it, the changed bar will appear in the edited song, its bar
number will turn bright green showing you that it has changes in it (or yellow if it is a new
bar). You can undo the changes in an individual bar by tapping on it once, as if you are
editing further, then tapping the undo button in the bottom row. Remember, it will affect this
single bar only. You can save or undo changes for the entire song by using the buttons in the
top right corner. Be sure to save your work often!
Copy/Paste/Delete/Replace Bars:
The most exciting feature of the Songistic Editor is how easily bars can be managed in a
song. When you select some bars they are automatically copied to the clipboard.
1. Copy bar(s) to the end of the song: this is something that is done frequently as you
enter a new song. You are entering a bar to the end that already exists in the song. No
need to eve copy this bar.. just double tap on it, and gets copied onto the end of the song.
You can select multiple bars, tap-tap, and they are copied to the end. This speeds up
entering new music a great deal.
2. Delete bars: Select the bars, then tap-hold in the selection to get the menu, than
select “Delete Bars”.
3. Copy bar(s) and insert them anywhere: Once you copy some bars by selecting
them, tap-hold the target bar (or even the same ones after deselecting) until you get the
menu, you can paste before or after the target bar.
4. Replace bars: select the source of the replace. Then, select the target bars that will be replaced by the source. Tap-Hold into the target selection, get the menu, tap ‘Replace Bars’. Note that source and target do not have to be same number of bars, i.e. you can
replace a single bar by three bars for instance. As you can see, with all the copy/paste options and the Quick Insert Menu there are many ways to quickly enter new music or edit your songs.
Chart Design Tips/Restrictions/Guidelines
One of the things that set Songistic apart from other apps of its kind, is that it tries to
cut some order into the chaos that is Real-book style blockcharting today. Although this
format and some digital tool is used by almost all of today’s jazz/pop/latin musicians, there
are no standards, and reading some of these charts can be quite difficult because of the many different ways the same idea is presented. Songistic keeps the charts consistent by evaluating them when you save, and presenting warning panels if some of the rules are violated.
NOTE: YOU CAN SAVE ANYTHING. At the end it is the user that prevails, you can
enter your charts in any form, but the midi play may not be there for you if it violates
Songistic’s rules which are as follows:
Repeat Rules:
1. Repeats cannot be nested.
2. You can have only one ending before and one after the Repeat-End. The one before
can be multiple, like you can have a 1,2 and 3rd ending after the Repeat-End, like so:
You can have a 3rd. ending after a DS as part of the DS/Segno navigation, but in no
other way, meaning that you cannot have a separate 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ending, because they are unreadable and confusing to the user.
Navigation Rules:
1. There is only one DS or DC in the song.
2. There is only one ‘fine’ in the song, it requires a DS/DC.
3. There can be none or two codas in the song. The first coda (jump from) must be at
the end of the bar, the second one (jump to) must be at the beginning. The first coda must
be before, the second one must be after the DS.
4. DalSegno and Fine are mutually exclusive.
TIPS:
1. For AABA songs the use of navigation should be avoided. It is okay for the last A
being a repeat of the first two, because for larger devices they fit fine, on smaller devices
the user can turn on auto-navigation that will insert the necessary navigation marks to
save space.