Most music is composed by using several layers, called Tracks.
A track is a horizontal lane on which you can place musical parts arranged in time.
For example, you can have a track with drums, a track with a bass line, a track with keyboard, one with guitar and a track with a singing voice.
Arranging these tracks and parts into Compositions is done in the Composer, cfr the above picture.
There are 2 types of parts: Audio Parts and Sequence Parts.
An Audio Part plays an Audio File from your harddisk.
For each audio part, you can set the start location within that audio file.
This can be done in the Audio Lab.
You can open the Audio Lab by double-clicking the audio part, by pressing [Tab] or via the part's context menu.
A sequence part plays a Sequence, which is a sequence of events (e.g. Notes, PitchBend, ...) that make up a melody, rhythm-groove, filter-sweep etc...
Sequences can be edited in the Sequence Editor and List Editor, by double-clicking or right-clicking the sequence part, or by pressing [Tab] when that sequence part is selected.
Each part can be routed to a Target Module, which can be a synthesizer module, an effect module, or a Rack module with a synth and effects modules, which transforms the received events into a rich sound.
Many musicians prefer to set a single target module per track. This can be done using the track's context menu. All parts on that track will send their audio/events to that track target module.
MU.LAB also allows you to set the target module per part. Therefore tell the track that you want to use a target per part, then you can set the target module for a part via its context menu or via the Part Property Panel at the top right of MU.LAB's main window.
All of these objects (i.e. Compositions, Parts, Sequences, Racks, Synth and Effect Modules etc...) are part of a Session. Note that you can have more than 1 composition in a session.
To finish this brief overview: At the top of the screen you'll find 3 panels: The Main Menu, the Transport Panel and the Part Property Panel.
The Main Menu contains 3 menus to access application-wide functions like "Open Session" and "MIDI Setup" etc...
The Transport Panel lets you start and stop the sequencer, start recording, set the tempo and so on.
The Part Property Panel shows/edits which target module is used for a certain part, which audio file or sequence it plays, etc...
Last but not least: Note that a lot of MU.LAB's functionality is located in the context menus which popup when you right-click an object! You can never do something wrong by right-clicking somewhere. At the contrary: Try right-clicking every possible object on the screen and you may discover extra functionalities!
| 