Notes and rests
Tap the pencil button in the toolbar to enter compose mode. The note input strip appears along the bottom: durations from 16th to whole note, the dot, flat, natural and sharp, a rest, the tie, and a gear that reveals more (32nds, 64ths, extra voices).
Writing a note
Choose a duration on the strip, then touch the staff:
- With the Pencil, the ghost note appears the moment the tip touches.
- With a finger, rest it briefly — about a fifth of a second — and the ghost appears just above your fingertip, so your finger never hides what you are aiming at. A quick swipe still scrolls; the pause is what says “I mean a note”.
The ghost note is the blue preview: it rides the staff as you drag, naming the pitch it will become. Lift, and the note is written where the ghost was.
A few rules the page follows:
- A bar is always full. Writing a note replaces the rests around it; deleting a note puts rests back. There is no such thing as an empty bar — silence is written as rests.
- Placing a note where one already sounds in the same voice builds a chord.
- If a note cannot fit, nothing happens and the app says so — “No room for a note there” — rather than writing something you did not ask for.
- Long notes split across barlines become tied notes, as engraving demands.
Editing a note you already wrote
Back in selection mode (the arrow button), tap a note and the same strip reappears — now editing that note. The buttons light up to show what the note is: tap the dot and the note becomes dotted; tap a duration and it changes length (and the dot clears); Delete, Pitch up and Pitch down sit at the strip’s left end. Mistakes are cheap: Undo in the toolbar takes back any of it.
One honest caveat: editing a bar re-beams it to the meter’s standard grouping, so beaming that arrived with an imported file — vocal music beamed by syllable, say — is redrawn. Syllable-aware beaming is on the list, honestly labelled as not built yet.