Hold & Sustain

The real short description of Hold/Sustain is this:

• If you want your buttons to stop playing immediately, for a short, staccato sound, then Hold/Sustain should be off.
• For smooth, seamless transitions between notes, chords, and phrases, Hold should be on.
• For a full, lush (and possibly dissonant) sound, Sustain mode should be on.
• If you need to turn Hold or Sustain on and off while you're playing, you can use tilt sensing to control it.
• Operation modes are selected in the "Volume & Sustain" tab of the Settings screen. There you can lock Hold/Sustain on or off, or control it dynamically by tilting. The Hold/Sustain state is shown on the Status Bar.

For a more complete description, please read on!

As described in the How to Play help chapter, Note and Phrase Buttons start playing when you touch them with your finger, and have an orange glow around them whenever they are playing. But when do they stop playing? That depends on the state of Hold or Sustain.

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Every song can have either Hold or Sustain enabled. This mode is controlled by a setting on the "Volume & Sustain" tab of the Settings screen. If Hold/Sustain is "OFF," then all buttons immediately stop playing when you release them.

If Hold/Sustain is "ON," then when you lift your finger from the button, it continues to play. It is as if a virtual finger is held on the button for you. If Hold/Sustain is then turned off using the tilt control, any button that is playing, but does not have a finger on it, is turned off.

So how are Hold and Sustain modes any different? They are different in how buttons that are playing, but don't have a finger on them, are treated. When you touch a new button while Hold mode is on, any button that does not have a finger on it is immediately turned off. When Sustain mode is on, the five most recently touched buttons keep playing.

In some songs you may want Hold/Sustain to be on at some times and off at others. If so, you can dynamically control it by tilting your iPhone or iPod touch. Next to the Hold/Sustain selection on the Settings screen, you can set Hold/Sustain to be:

• Off: Locked off for the entire song
• H-Tilt: Controlled by tilting side-to-side
• V-Tilt: Controlled by tilting front-to-back
• On: Locked on for the entire song

The tilt settings make use the of the tilt sensor in the iPhone and iPod touch. If H-Tilt is used, then tilting to the left of the midpoint turns Hold/Sustain off, and to the right turns it on. This is the default setting. With V-Tilt, tilting it backward past the midpoint turns it off, and tilting it forward (like pressing a Sustain pedal down) turns it on. The midpoint threshold can be set from the Main Menu with the "Set Tilt" menu item. Hold your device where you want the tilt midpoints to be and select this menu item. The screen will briefly flash orange to show that the tilt midpoints have been set.

No matter how it is controlled, the current state of Hold/Sustain is always shown on the right side of the Status Bar, along with the current volume level. It is shown in bright orange when on, and in a muted gray when off.