Touch and tablet

The studio is laid out for fingers as well as pointers. Every instrument panel fits a 1024 × 768 tablet with the transport still visible, menus and submenus open from real taps, and anything you would reach with a right-click on a desktop opens from a hold. Pinch gestures zoom the timeline and the piano roll, and drum pads, keys and value bars are sized for touch.

When to use it

Use a tablet for sketching, playing drum pads and auditioning sounds, or as a second surface for the mixer. The interface scale helps when a screen is smaller than a tablet; the Rack layout keeps everything in one column, and the Split layout gives the lower panel its own height.

Controls

Hold a clip, a track header, the timeline ruler, a chord block, a piano-roll note or empty note grid for about half a second to open its editing menu, the same one a right-click opens on a desktop. Moving the finger, a second finger or scrolling cancels the hold, and lifting the finger cannot activate an item under it. Clips use the Select/move tool for this; Cut and Draw keep their immediate behaviour. In the piano roll, choose Draw or Select before holding for a menu. A mouse attached to the tablet behaves as a mouse.

Notes with a finger

The piano roll starts in Pan: drag with one finger to move through time and pitch. Choose Draw to tap a new note or drag out its length, move notes, or resize their edges. Choose Select to drag a selection box from empty grid space. In Draw or Select, hold a note for its menu: transpose, duplicate, delete, quantize. A second finger discards a pending edit and starts a pinch; after pinching, the remaining finger pans until you lift it.

Pinch

Pinch over the lanes to zoom time; pinch over the sequencer’s track headers to change the row height. In the piano roll a pinch keeps the music that was under your fingers where it is.

Phone controls

On narrow phones, the hamburger opens File, Edit, View, Settings and Help. The project name stays editable; Save and Export use icons. The transport keeps playback in one row. Choose workspace view opens the workspace list, and Song settings holds tempo, key, time signature and metronome. An effects rack keeps its title and Add effect in one row; its ⋯ menu holds Chain presets, Minimize all and Include tail. Wider landscape screens show the text menus and musical settings again.

Menus

Taps open menubar menus and their submenus, and submenu triggers inside hold menus, such as a filter band’s Shape, expand on a tap too. The sound libraries open without raising the software keyboard; tap Search when you want to type.

Tips

A clip or note that is already selected stays selected when you hold it, so you can act on a group you built with a box.
On a phone, swipe sideways across an instrument or effect panel to reach its other controls. Drag on a heading or an empty part of the panel to scroll without adjusting a knob or fader.