Quick Start Guide

By MadTracker Staff on 2005-09-01

Print this tutorial  Add/View comments (9)  Send this tutorial to a friend

4. Entering your first notes

Now that you have made one or more instruments, it's time to make actual music!
You can close the instrument editor window if it is still open. Press [F12] in order to switch to the pattern editor (the main window).

Before you can enter notes in a pattern, you first need to enable the edit mode. Do so by clicking on the  red button, or simply press the [Spacebar] key.

Now press a key of your PC keyboard (the [Q] if you have a QWERTY keyboard for instance).
The note will be entered at your current cursor position inside the pattern. After entering a note, the cursor will move one step (line) down.

MadTracker will use the currently selected instrument when you enter notes. The instrument that will be played with a note is shown by the number you can see at the right of the note. Instrument number 1 is used in our example.

You can make the cursor automatically advance more steps (lines) after each entered note by adjusting the Add value in the toolbar.

To enter notes of a different octave, adjust the Octave value in the toolbar.

Below you will find the keyboard layout that you can use within MadTracker for entering notes. You can use the gray "Off" key to insert a so-called "Note-off" () event in the pattern. This Note-off tells the current playing instrument to stop playing. As a result, the same thing happens as when you stop pressing a note of a music keyboard.

The upper row of notes is for the current octave.
The lower row of notes maps to the lower octave.

You can use the arrows keys to navigate in the pattern. You can also use the [Tab] and [Shift]+[Tab] shortcuts to go to the next or previous track.

Sometimes you will have to delete notes. To do so, place your cursor on the note you want to delete and hit the [Delete] key.

Print this tutorial  Add/View comments (9)  Send this tutorial to a friend