Creating a tune
Now we want to write a short melody to get started. Press the „quarter note“ on the „Note tools“ window, which looks like this:
On the „Edition tools“ window
select the „Add“ option to place notes on the first stave, which is marked „Piano“. Now enter the following notes with the mouse. If you've done something wrong, you can erase the last note with the Backspace key or you can hold down the „Ctrl“-key and click on the „wrong“ note.
If you press the space bar after entering the melody, you should hear your first self-made piece of music, played on a piano. You can see how easy it is to enter notes in Melody Assistant. You can enter the notes with the keyboard like playing it on a piano: The keys „asdfghjk“ are equal to a C major scale „CDEFGAHC“. That means that you can enter the small melody above with the following keystrokes: adgghgdassasd, after you've selected the right note and the add command. (You have to press the „Page-Up“-key first to select the right octave.) Listen a few times to the melody. We will add some more „flesh“ to it in a moment. But before we go to the accompaniments, we want to delete the Chord Display on the Piano stave. This will also introduce the stave menu. On the left side of every stave are the following icons:
To open the stave menu, press the small right-arrow on the piano stave. Select the option „Chords display“. A window opens and there you have to click on the „Text“ button to remove the mark. Press „Ok“ and the chord names are gone. The other icons are shortcuts to some items in the stave menu. The last thing we do to the piano melody is changing the „ghost rests“ to real rests. Open the stave menu once more and select the menu entry „Change ghost rests into rests“. The arrow in the fourth bar is no longer there. Now we have a dotted rest symbol there. That's all for the melody. Let's see what we can do for our song. |