Guide

Studio mode and the mixer

Studio mode turns instruments into a piece: tracks of regions on a timeline, editors for notes and rhythms, automation, and a mixer with effects.

Tracks

• Instrument tracks play a patch. Add one with + Track and choose an instrument; ✎ opens its patch in Modular mode.
• Audio tracks hold recordings and imported audio files.
• Track buttons: M mute, S solo, R arm for recording, A automation lanes, ⋯ rename, reorder, recolour, duplicate, change instrument or delete. Double-click the name to rename it.
• Selecting a track lets you play its instrument on the keyboard. While the song is stopped only the selected track sounds, so drones and rain do not keep going in the background.

Regions and loops

• Double-click (double-tap) an empty part of a track to make a one-bar region; double-click a region to edit it.
• Drag a region to move it, also onto another track of the same kind; hold Alt while dragging to copy it. Drag its right edge to change its length.
• An instrument region has a pattern length: when the region is longer, the pattern repeats (thin lines show where). Make a one-bar beat and drag it out to 16 bars.
• Split (Shift + S) cuts the selected region at the playhead; Duplicate (⌘/Ctrl + D) places a copy right after it.
• Snap sets the grid that regions, notes and automation points lock to. ⌘/Ctrl + scroll or the − + buttons zoom.

Tempo, loop and metronome

Set the tempo (20–300 beats per minute) and time signature in the top bar. Click the ruler to move the playhead. Drag in the thin strip at the top of the ruler to set the cycle (loop) region, or drag its ends; the loop button switches it on and off. The metronome clicks on every beat, louder on the first beat of a bar; it is not included in exports. Stop stops everything at once, including echoes and reverb tails; the sound comes back with the next play or note. While stopped, a track only sounds once you play it on the keyboard, and when SynthLab opens nothing is heard until you press play or play a note (also in Modular mode, where drones and sequencers then run freely). When the loop jumps back, echoes from the end of the loop are not repeated into its start (reverbs still ring out smoothly). Starting in the middle of a held note plays that note from there, so pads and drones sound at once. Once the mix has been rendered in the background (see the chip in the toolbar), play uses the rendered audio until you change something; more about the rendered mix. Notes are scheduled a fraction of a second ahead (look-ahead), so the timing stays tight even when the page is busy.

Piano roll

• Click to add a note (it gets the length of the last note you drew), drag to make it longer. Drag a note to move it, drag its right edge to resize. Double-click (or Alt-click) to delete.
• Shift-drag to select several notes; arrow keys move the selection (Shift + up/down by an octave); Delete removes it; ⌘/Ctrl + A selects all.
• Drag in the velocity lane at the bottom to set how hard notes are played. Click the keys on the left to hear a pitch.

Step grid and Euclidean rhythms

The Step grid is a drum grid when the track's instrument has drum modules (one row per drum, named after it), and a one-octave step sequencer otherwise. Click or drag across cells to add or remove notes; right-click or long-press to cycle soft, normal and loud. The Grid menu changes the step size, including triplets.

The Euclidean tab spreads a number of hits as evenly as possible over a number of steps, per row: 3 in 8 is the Cuban tresillo, 5 in 8 the cinquillo, 7 in 16 a samba-like pattern. A row that is switched on is written into the region (and replaces that row's notes).

Automation

Press A on a track for automation lanes. Each lane controls one parameter: volume, pan, the two sends, any knob of an insert effect, or any knob in the track's instrument. The two effect buses and the master have rows and lanes too, below the tracks: automate the master volume to fade the whole piece in and out, a bus's level or effect (for example a shimmer that grows towards the end), or an effect on the master such as a Filter (effect) for a sweep over the whole mix. Click to add a point, drag to move it, double-click to remove it. Between points the value changes in a straight line; before the first and after the last point it holds. While a lane has points, it overrides the knob during playback.

The mixer

• Every track has a channel strip: inserts (a chain of effects, top to bottom, each with a bypass switch), sends to the two buses, pan, the fader with a stereo peak meter, and mute and solo.
• Bus A and Bus B are shared effects, a reverb and a ping-pong delay to start with. A track's send knob copies some of its sound (after its fader) into the bus; the bus runs it through its own effects, set fully wet, and its fader sets how much of the effect returns to the master. So one reverb serves every track, and the dry sound stays on the track. Sending several tracks to one reverb puts them in the same space. Click a bus's effect to change its settings or rename the bus; add other effects with + effect.
• The master has its own inserts and ends with a look-ahead limiter: the output never goes over the ceiling (−1 dBFS by default), even when the mix is too loud. The strip shows how much it is turning the level down. Effects added to the master work on the whole mix.
• The buses and the master also appear at the bottom of the arrangement, with the chain each one runs, so they can be automated along the timeline.

Recording

Arm a track with R and press the record button in the top bar. Audio tracks record from the microphone (your browser asks for permission at that moment, not before); instrument tracks record the notes you play into a new region. The recording starts at the playhead, in time with the song. In Modular mode the record button captures the output itself, which you can download, put on an audio track or load into a sampler. See the recording tutorial.