Music Editor
From Sleep is Death
The music editor is an interface for composing background music for Sleep is Death games. You can reach it by clicking the note icon on the right side of the screen while you are in the main Controller interface. It's advisable to create your game's music in advance, as you will not have time to modify it during gameplay.
In SiD v14, the music editor got a complete overhaul to be much more powerful. However, it's also much more difficult for new controllers to learn. This page is intended to teach the basics of how it works, and the fundamental principles of music that it employs.
This is the main music editor screen in v14:
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Editing Songs
Songs are analogous to rooms in Sleep is Death. You can design new rooms by arranging tiles on the screen, and a single tile can be used as many times as needed in any number of different rooms. Similarly, songs are arrangements of "phrases," which can be repeated within a single song or shared across multiple songs as desired. The phrases box, explained in the next section, is highlighted in green in the screenshot above.
Phrases
You can edit phrases directly by opening the phrase editor (click the small arrow above the current phrase selection). You should see the following tone matrix:
The different-colored rows in the tone matrix indicate the octaves their notes belong to. For example, the bottommost note in one color is the same tone as the bottom-most note in the color above it, but one octave lower in pitch. The number of notes in each octave varies depending on the scale you're currently using (see explanation of the scale editor below).
Click in a slot to add a note, and click again to remove it. A single "phrase" is intended to correspond to one measure of music, assuming you're using a standard 4/4 time signature (count the beats as "1,2,3,4" and they will fit nicely into one phrase). Other time signatures can be manually shoehorned into the system, but there's no way to tell SiD that's what you're trying to do. In other words, you will always have exactly 16 note slots in every phrase. As a result, the shortest note you can play is a sixteenth note. Furthermore, every note is a sixteenth note, since there's no way to sustain one tone over multiple slots. You can play the same note repeatedly to simulate a quarter, half, or whole note, but the effect seldom works, since the looping sound is very apparent.
Songs
Close the phrase editor to return to the music editor screen (the first image, above). Notice there are eight rows here; each represents an instrument in your virtual band. Every row contains nine phrase slots, which is the maximum length of a given song in SiD (sorry, no hour-long symphonies here). You can control the volume and stereo pan of each instrument via the sliders to the right of its row. (Cyan in the screenshot above)
As you edit a song, SiD will play it back to you in realtime, looping indefinitely. There are no controls to pause the music or jump to a certain time marker, which can be annoying if you need to hear a particular section of your song again. You must wait for the entire song to finish playing, loop, and reach that point again. It's worth noting that every instrument row loops independently of every other one. This is beneficial if you have only one repeating phrase for, say, a "drum" instrument, but several more elaborate melody phrases playing sequentially in another row. Be advised that if the number of phrases in a long row is not a multiple of the number of phrases in a short row, your instruments will loop out of sync. This could create unintended dissonance, or it could be exploited to arrange dynamically looping songs that evolve over time and appear to be longer than the nine-phrase limit. A song will always loop back into sync eventually.
To start building your song, select a phrase from the phrases box and click anywhere in the row of the instrument you want to use. As you can see, it snaps to the leftmost position in that row. This is because you can't have empty slots between phrases. You can, of course, fill slots with the "default" phrase, which contains no notes, if you wish to pad a row with silence. The eraser button works like it does in other editors, except if you erase a phrase from the middle of a row, the phrases to the right of it will get pulled leftward to fill the space. To prevent this from happening, you may wish to replace the unwanted phrase with "default" instead of erasing it, as a matter of habit.
Timbre
To open the timbre editor, click the small arrow at the far left of a row (highlighted in yellow in the screenshot above).
Currently, the timbre editor is a big unknown. The best advice right now is to just mess around in the timbre editor until you get your sound right.
However, Jason explained everything in an email based on a whole bunch of music theory nonsense. If you can explain it in simpler words, go ahead.
Under the grid are three sliders for adjusting how the music editor will interpret the current timbre: Attack, hold, and release. These correspond to the three major attributes of every note — a fade in (attack) at the beginning, the note itself (hold) in the middle, and a fade out (release) at the end. A low attack rate makes the note begin softly; a high attack rate begins it sharply, immediately. A short hold makes the note into a very brief beep; a long hold plays it longer before stopping. A short release ends the note abruptly; a long one makes it fade out slowly, simulating reverb. As you adjust one slider the others may move themselves, because SiD won't allow a single note to play longer than a predetermined length of time.
Another feature of the timbre editor that's worth noting is the octave setting. Each instrument's range is centered around one octave (though a few notes above or below it may be available, depending on your current scale, see the following section for more info). If you plan to cover several octaves with one instrument, you will actually need multiple copies of the instrument in your song, each set to a different octave. Click on one of the five circles at the right side of the grid to set one for this timbre. Some timbres become distorted or inaudible when assigned octaves that are very high or very low.
Scale
Note: The scale you select affects the song as a whole; it cannot be assigned to individual instruments. If you change a song's scale after the song has been composed, all your notes will be reassigned to fit the new scale. This will most likely destroy your music, so you are strongly encouraged to decide on a scale before assembling your phrases!
To access the scale editor, click the button between the phrases box and the songs box (highlighted orange in the screenshot). You will see a grid similar to the the one on the right — a diagonal line extending from bottom left to top right. Click an empty square to add that note to the current scale, or click an existing note to remove it. The preinstalled scales bundled with SiD are probably more than sufficient for your music; it's unlikely that you'll even need to customize one.
Be warned that a scale must have at least one note in it. If you attempt to remove every note, SiD will crash.
Here are the default scales and equivalent notes. Heptatonic Scales:
| Natural Minor | Melodic Minor | Harmonic Minor | Arabic | Locrian | Major Locrian | Major |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C# | D | C# | C# | C# | C# | D |
| C | C | C | C | B | B | C |
| A# | A# | A# | A# | A# | A# | A# |
| G# | G# | G# | A | G# | A | A |
| G | G | B | F# | F# | G | G |
| F | F | F | E | F | F | F |
Pentatonic Scales:
| Pentatonic Major | Pentatonic Minor |
|---|---|
| D | D# |
| C | C |
| A | A# |
| G | G# |
| F | F |
Tempo
The tempo is the speed of the song. Adjusting it will change both the rate at which notes are played, and the duration of each note. SiD currently offers only three tempo choices — slow, medium, and fast — which are controlled by the three arrow buttons at the left of the screen (highlighted in blue in the screenshot above). The "slow" option is likely too slow for most interesting compositions. And the "fast" option may also be too slow if you're looking to create anything very intricate (simulating 1/32 notes, for instance). Perhaps a future version of SiD will remedy this.
