Your first melody in five minutes

Tonegrid turns a grid of squares into music. Each column is a step in time, from left to right. Each row is a note, with the highest note at the top and the key note (the root) at the bottom. When you press Play, a playhead moves across the columns and every lit square in the current column sounds. When it reaches the end, it starts again — that is your loop.

Start from a clean grid

1. Open the File menu and choose Templates….
2. Pick Blank canvas and press Open. You get an empty 16 × 16 melody grid and four drum rows below it.

Your previous project is not lost: Tonegrid saves every project in this browser, and you find it again under File → Recent projects….

Light up some squares

Click a square to switch it on; click it again to switch it off. You can also press and drag across several squares to paint a line. On a touch screen, tap a square.

Try this shape — four notes that rise and fall:

• step 1: the bottom row (the root),
• step 5: three rows higher,
• step 9: five rows higher,
• step 13: back to three rows higher.

The labels on the left show which note each row plays, for example C3 at the bottom and C4 five rows above it in the default major pentatonic scale.

With Play a short preview when I turn a square on switched on in the Options panel, you hear each note as you place it. Nothing else ever plays by itself.

Press Play

Press Play in the toolbar (or the P key). The playhead highlights the current column and the status bar says which pattern is playing. Keep editing while it plays — changes are heard on the next pass. Press Stop (or P again) to stop.

Make a chord

Squares in the same column play together. Light up two or three squares in one column and you have a chord. Because the default scale is pentatonic, any combination sounds pleasant — there are no clashing neighbours.

Undo, redo and names

• Undo and Redo are the arrow buttons in the toolbar, or Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z. A whole drag stroke is one undo step.
• Type a name into the field on the right of the toolbar, for example “Morning loop”. The name is used for files and the recent-projects list.

The status bar at the bottom shows the loop length in seconds and says Saved in this browser once your work is stored.

Next steps

• Add drums in Add a beat with the drum grid.
• Change key, scale and sound in Keys, scales, tempo and sounds.