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Your first song

Look at a small song, build it and listen to it.

Here is a small song to look at. It has a chord part, drums and a bass, joined by a mixer and a master. You can open the same song in your own AMPLE to follow along.

The song before its first build: every block says "not built".

Follow the cables from left to right:

chords makes the notes of four chords: Am, F, C and G.
beat plays drums.
bass reads the chords and plays a bass line that follows them. The green cable from the chords into the bass carries notes.
mix adds the drums and the bass together.
master is the end of the line: what comes out of it is the song.

What is in the text#

The same song, as text, looks like this:

project "my first song" { tempo 100  master-seed 7 }

midi-clip chords stable@1.0 {
  chords Am F C G
  bars 8
}
drums beat stable@1.2 at 1 for 8 {
}
bass bass stable@1.1 at 1 for 8 {
  from chords.notes -> notes
}
mixer mix stable@1.1 {
  from beat.audio -> in1
  from bass.audio -> in2
}
master master live@1.3 {
  from mix.mix -> mix
}

Each paragraph is a block: first the kind of block (bass), then its name (bass), then a version tag. The lines inside the curly braces are its settings. A line that starts with from is a cable; it says where the sound or the notes come from.

Build it#

Press Build in the header. AMPLE makes the sound of every block, from the start of the line to the end. When it is done, every block shows a small waveform, and the word "built".

After the build: every block has a take with its own waveform.

What you see is the take of each block: the audio that block made. It is stored in your project. Press Build again without changing anything, and AMPLE does not make anything again; it finds the takes it already has. That is called a cache hit, and it is why building is fast once a song is built.

Listen#

Press Play. The master block plays from the start. You can also press the small ▶ on any block to hear that block alone, which is a great way to find out what each part contributes.

Next: how the song is counted, in Bars and time.