Playing

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PianoStudio always runs in landscape mode with the Home button to the right. PianoStudio requires two thumbs or two (or more) fingers to play. While there is no wrong way to hold your iPhone (or iPod touch) with PianoStudio, it does work great just holding it in your hands and playing it with your thumbs. Another option is to place the iPhone on a table, and play PianoStudio with your fingers. This makes it easy to use more than two fingers to play, but makes it hard to use the optional tilt-sensing features of PianoStudio (like hold/sustain and volume controls ... see the Hold & Sustain and Settings chapters for more on these).

The rest of this chapter describes:

• Cancel and Done buttons
• the Main Menu
• the Record Menu
• the Bank Buttons
• playing Note and Phrase Buttons

Cancel and Done

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Many of PianoStudio's screens have "Cancel" and "Done" buttons. These appear in the top left and right corners of screens used for editing, chord selection, settings selection. Tapping Cancel will try to exit whatever you are doing without saving any of the changes you have made. Sometimes it will bring up any Alert asking you to confirm that you want to lose all your changes. Tapping the Done button will exit whatever you are doing, saving any changes in the process.

Main Menu

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If you hold a finger or thumb on the top left "Main Menu" button, the Main Menu slides into view from the right. The Main Menu options are:

• Songs - selecting and managing your songs
• Editor - tools for constructing your song
• Settings - tap this to change Song and Global Settings
• Help - brings up the built-in Help documentation

Songs, Editor, and Settings are described in their own Help chapters. The same Help documentation for PianoStudio is available both from any "Help" button or menu item in the app, and on the web at http://frontierdesign.com/PianoStudio. (Look for "Online Documentation.") The built-in Help screen includes "Back," "Forward," "Contents," and "Done" buttons across the top bar. The page title is shown in the middle of the top bar.

Record Menu

PianoStudio includes a recorder so you can capture your songs, add to them, and play back the saved recordings.

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You access the Recorder by holding a finger on the Record Menu icon in the upper right of the screen ... the one that looks like a cassette tape. As you do, the Record Menu slides into view from the left edge of the screen. This menu includes the current song position in bars and beats, location controls, play and record buttons, and more. You can learn all the details in the Recording help chapter.

Note and Phrase Buttons

This is the core of making music with PianoStudio ... the Note and Phrase Buttons. Note Buttons have rounded corners (see icon at right). When you press a Note Button, any notes assigned to it are immediately played. This might be a single note, a complex chord, or nothing. While you press it, the Note Button is highlighted in orange.

Phrase Buttons have angled corners (see icon at left). When you press a Phrase Button, the phrase assigned to that button begins playing. A phrase is a pre-programmed sequence of notes, up to 4 bars long. It can be a single note, a simple melody, or a complex combination of chords and runs. As it plays it is highlighted in orange, and a small glowing dot travels from left to right on its top edge to show the progression of the phrase.

You can play up to five buttons simultaneously (although using more than two fingers at a time can be a challenge).

Sliding your finger from one Note Button to another is different than just pressing one then the next. When you slide between Note Buttons, any notes that the two buttons have in common will continue to sound (they are not "re-triggered"). Other notes are turned on and off as the slide occurs. It's as if you have some fingers playing a chord on a real piano and move just some of those fingers to new notes.

Releasing a button normally stops the note from sounding, but it will continue to play if Hold or Sustain is engaged. All the details are in the Hold and Sustain help chapter. The short version is this: Hold is great for making seamless, legato transitions between notes or chords. With Hold on, when you press a button, all buttons that do not have a finger down on them are turned off. Sustain keeps the most recently pressed buttons sounding, simulating the sustain pedal of a real piano. This can give you a very big, ambient sound.

Every song can use Hold or Sustain mode (or both can be disabled). Hold and Sustain can be controlled dynamically with the iPhone's tilt sensors. All of this is controlled by the "Volume & Sustain" tab of the Settings screen.

The volume (loudness) of each note in a phrase is programmed in the Phrase Editor, but the volume of notes in a Note Button can be either a fixed level, or controlled by tilting your iPhone. This is detemined by a setting in the "Volume & Sustain" tab of the Settings screen.

The state of Hold or Sustain (on or off) and the current Volume level are both shown on the right side of the status bar. If Hold or Sustain is on, it is shown in bright orange. Otherwise it is a muted gray. Similarly, the louder the volume, the more it is shown in orange, like a volume meter from left to right.

You also have some control over a button's appearance ... its "style." You can assign it a color (or make it "invisible"), add a text label, and can give it pointers to other buttons. The Button Styles help chapter gives you all the details.

Bank Buttons

Every song has five banks of buttons, only one of which will be active at a time. The selected bank has its button highlighted in orange. When you tap a bank button at the top of the screen, the Note and Phrase Buttons for that bank will be displayed and the bank button is highlighted.

Bank buttons multiply the number of Note and Phrase Buttons you can use in a song, and they offer a way to organize your buttons into song sections, like "Intro," "Verse," "Chorus," or "Bridge." You don't have to use more than one bank for your song, but banks are indispensable for longer and more complex songs.

Each bank has a set of properties that can be edited. The bank can have a customized name (which defaults to a simple number), a layout (how buttons are arranged on the screen), and a default button color (for Note and Phrase Buttons whose color has not been explicitly assigned). Banks can also be copied, pasted, and reordered. All this is covered in detail in the Bank Editing help chapter.