The tempo of bar 1 is in the bar at the top of the page, beside the time.
Beats a minute. A recording sets its own speed.
Tempo changes
Bar 1 plays at the Tempo. From the bar you choose the music changes speed: at once, or gradually, arriving at the new tempo by that bar.
Tonal Centre changes
From the bar you choose, the numbers count from the new Tonal Centre, so it reads as 1. The notes and their letters do not move.
Backing
▴
The music
Tonal Centre
Home: the note everything is numbered from, where the 1 sits. Change it and the numbers stay; only the letters move.
Scale
The rows on the grid are the notes of this scale.
How are you playing Numbiano?
Tablet makes the notes and buttons bigger for a finger. Laptop keeps them small for a mouse.
How it looks
The same piece drawn two ways: rows of notes, or the stave.
Reading it
Numbers count from the Tonal Centre. Letters name the note itself.
Stacking notes
On, two rows may share a beat and that is a chord. Off, a beat holds one note.
Bars
Bars8
Four at a time: a line is four bars.
Notes and words
What the strip offers to drag. A greyed word does not fit this time or these note lengths. Kept in the piece, so a piece handed out keeps its notes and words.
Pick-up bar
Where the first note before bar 1 comes in, counting the bar before: 1& is the and after 1. Those notes sound on the last counts of the count-in.
MelodyOctave
HOW COMPOSE WORKS
Drag a note from the strip at the top onto a line of the grid: how long it is comes from the note you pick, and the row is its pitch.
Tap a note to hear it; press Edit on a track to move, copy or delete notes. Play plays the piece with its band; Loop goes round the bars you choose on the loop bar.
Practise it turns the piece into something to play along with. The Menu holds everything else: Project keeps and opens pieces, Edit undoes, View changes how the piece is drawn, and Settings changes the piece itself.
Your piece is kept on this device as you work.
Note names
Colour
Rhythm words
Harmony
Drag a chord onto the lines
Or fill it with
Drums
Tap a square to put a hit there
Or fill it with
Select
Selected noteChordTap a note to pick it. On Several, every tap adds another - and a bar number takes the whole bar.
Paste into bar
Add a track
Save your piece
Keeps it in your own space. Only you can open it; your teacher sees it when you hand it in.
Makes a file you can open, play and share anywhere. Put it in your Drive.
Opens Numbiano Studio with this piece as tracks to arrange and mix. Send it again after changes and the Studio's clips update.
A code you can paste into a message. Import a piece reads it back.
Every track as text, a note to a line: downloaded as a file and copied, ready to send.
Open a piece
the file Save my piece made
the return code the page gave you when you handed in
the pieces you saved to My Numbiano, and everything you have handed in
Hand in
the code on your slip keeps all your work together
Your teacher gets your piece with your first name on it. Nothing else is sent. The class code also brings your teacher's settings to this page - which note lengths, which scale, how many bars.
for a phone to scan, or to paste into a message when there is no internet here
Teacher settings
an audio file the class composes over; the band plays without one
beats per minute
a bar of clicks before the music, every time round
No recording loaded. The 8 bars are played by the built-in band over I (one) vi IV V.
Everything above is a guess made from the music itself, and every box can be corrected. The tempo follows from the recording's own length divided by its bars, so the loop can never drift out of time with the grid.
If the Tonal Centre sounds wrong, the usual mistake is its relative major or minor - three semitones away, and made of exactly the same notes, so nothing in the sound separates them. A minor is C major's relative; try that before anything else.
To put a piece in front of a class, load it, check the numbers, then press Save my piece with no notes on the lines. The music travels inside that file - hand that file out as the starting point.
To change what the children have after that - the note lengths, the scale, the octaves, the Tonal Centre, the bars - choose the class below and press Send this page's settings to the class. Every child who types the class code gets them, and a child who has already typed it gets the change the next time they open the page.
Send these settings to a class
The class's Compose pages pick these up: Tonal Centre, scale, octaves, note lengths, bars and count-in. Hand-ins, children and codes are in the teachers' area.