maxWerk - Copyright 2000-2007 Amanda Pehlke
Published by RedMoon Music - www.RedMoon-Music.com
the number of bars it contains. The length of a Basic or Drum Loop with no change of play direction can be from one to four bars. In order to be able to tell what is going in a multi-track Werk and to be able to edit loops easily, it is a good idea not to overdo the total number of steps; that is, the steps per bar menu number multiplied by the number of bars. Instead, think of maxWerk as an analog- style step sequencer. Step-entering notes to match a previously stored midifile motif may sometimes call for a higher step resolution so that the results can reflect as well as possible the timing of the original. (There are window buttons and key commands that make doing that easy. We'll talk about them later under "Keyboard Entry".)
Each Meter offers several levels of step resolution, and as we have previously mentioned, step number choices for 6 and 8 count Meters are interchangeable. If you pick a number of steps that is not an even multiple of Meter count, a dialog appears reminding you of the appropriate choices, and the rejected menu selection will not "stick". (If the total steps were out of sync with bar starts on play- through, the resulting repetition of beginning steps or skipping of end steps would cause confusing track behavior. Read on to discover maxWerk's much better ways of creatively shifting loops.)
If you are unfamiliar with music theory, the first of the four sections of bar graph data in the Note Editor, the nine-value notes display, offers a fundamental maxWerk concept. Here is where you can begin making musical patterns, using as your components the seven pitches found in most western musical scales, represented by values 1 through 7. As you might expect, a value of 0 represents a rest or silence. When you enter a number 0 through 7 on the computer's QWERTY keyboard or play back numbers that you store for each bar, maxWerk transposes all the patterns made in the note displays to play over any of the seven different triadic chords or positions in the current Scale. This means that you should view the patterns you enter here as patterns of relationship between pitches, not as representations of fixed ones.
Value 8 in note patterns is a more elusive symbol for a pitch that is variable. In order to allow musically sophisticated leading tones that are not part of the current chord triad, 8’s trigger notes (again,