Overview
PICO DAW is a digital audio workstation for creating PICO-8 tunes. If you've ever been frustrated by the piano style layout keyboard layout of the music editor or just wished you could draw your music, PICO DAW is for you. It's a mouse-based alternative for tune creation.
THIS CART IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND MINIMALLY TESTED. Consider it alpha. Save early and often! Please report any bugs you find.
Quick Start
- Open the PICO-8 console and enter
load #daw. - Save the cart under a new name.
- Optional: Add any desired custom instruments in SFX slots 0 through 7.
- Edit music patterns for length, looping, channels, and SFX assignments.
- Edit SFX for length, speed, and filters.
- Run the cart.
- Hold down the left mouse button to draw your tune.
- Select active track by scrolling the mouse wheel.
- Left and right arrows pan the music patterns.
- Edit notes by right clicking on them.
- There are many more keyboard shortcuts and tools, keep reading to get the most out of PICO DAW.
Preliminaries
Quite simply, PICO DAW is an alternative note editor and nothing more. Therefore, you must assign SFX to the music patterns and set the SFX speed and other top level SFX settings after PICO DAW is loaded, but before you run the cart. If you plan to use custom instruments, you should load them into SFX slots 0-7.
Navigation and Layout
Editing is done one music pattern at a time. The current pattern number is displayed in the upper right of the screen and the pattern itself occupies the major portion of the screen, with a few notes of the previous and next music patterns displaying at the left and right margins.
Change the active music pattern with the left and right arrows or by left clicking in the left and right margins. Press Home or End to jump to the beginning or end of the tune.
The horizontal staff lines represent pitch values. The highest pitch is at the top and the lowest pitch at the bottom. Each note is 3 pixels in width.
The crosshair cursor indicates you are in draw mode. The dot pattern cursor indicates you are in stamp mode.
Toggle the main menu on and off by right clicking in the left margin.
Some tools require selecting a grouping of notes. Hold down the shift key while dragging with the left mouse button to select a range of notes . A selection rectangle will appear over the notes. Release the mouse button to finalize the selection. Right click anywhere in the music pattern to cancel a selection.
Saving
PICO DAW automatically saves your work every 5 minutes. You can force a save anytime by pressing Ctrl-S. Be sure to press Ctrl-S before exiting PICO DAW.
If you forget to press Ctrl-S before exiting, salvage things by entering resume, pressing Ctrl-S, and finally exiting the program.
Editing
Draw Tool
To place notes, click with the left mouse button anywhere in the music pattern.
By default note are placed according to the current scale. To place a non-scale note, hold down the CTRL key while clicking to color in between the lines.
Drag with the left mouse button held down to create a grouping of notes with attack settings applied to the first note, release settings applied to the last note, and sustain setting to any notes in the middle. (See track indicator tool for setting note defaults.)
Scroll the mouse wheel to change which channel is being edited. (See also channel indicator tool.)
Hold down the delete key while clicking on individual notes to erase them. (See also the delete tool below.)
Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y undo and redo editing actions. The size of the undo buffer is only limited by the size of the PICO-8 memory. please be aware that cut and insert actions are especially memory intensive operations and they tend to decrease the number of actions that can be held in the buffer.
Note Options Menu
To view or change settings for an individual note, right click on a note. Your cursor color must match the note color. Scroll the mouse wheel to change the current channel if needed.
To batch edit a range of notes, select them and then right click on a note in the range. Edits only apply to notes that are in the same channel as the cursor. Notes from other channels will be ignored.
Hover over the waveform icon and use the mouse wheel to change the note's instrument. The standard instruments are represented with the same waveform icons found from the SFX editor. Custom instruments are represented by the numbers 0 through 7.
The next icon is the effect icon. Use the mouse wheel to change the effect.
The third icon is the volume icon. Use the mouse wheel to set the volume. You cannot set a note's volume to zero; delete the note instead.
Click on the speaker icon to audition the note or range of notes.
Close the note menu by right clicking anywhere in the pattern.
Additional Editing tools
Right click in the left margin to display the main menu.
Scroll the mouse wheel in the current pattern area to change the cursor's channel. The channel indicator shows which channel is under edit.
To switch from stamp mode back to draw mode, click the channel indicator.
The channel indicator also sets the default attack, sustain, and release used for note drawing. Select a range of notes and then click the channel indicator to assign attack, sustain, and release to a channel based on the selected notes. The first note in the selection is used for the attack, the last for the release, and the second note for the sustain.
Select a range of notes and click the copy icon to copy a pattern of notes for stamping. You may also press Ctrl-C to copy. The cursor will change to the repetition/transposition cursor.
Click one of the stamp icons to stamp the previously copied notes. The stamps are: repetition/transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion.
The cursor changes to a pattern of dots representing the notes. Click to place the notes in the music pattern. If you click near the left or right margin any notes that do not fit the current music pattern will spill into the previous or next pattern
Note intervals automatically adjust to the scale you are currently using. Hold down the Ctrl key while stamping to ignore the current scale and stamp chromatically.
Select a range of notes and click the insert icon to insert blank space at the start of the insertion point. The existing notes of the tuen will be pushed right.
Generally, the range selected should go all the way from the top of the screen to the bottom, but if a narrower band is select, only the notes within the horizontal band will be pushed right. This can be useful if you want to isolate the notes pushed to specific channels and exclude others.
The insert key may also be used for inserting.
Select a range of notes and click the cut icon to copy a range of notes, delete those notes from the screen, and shift notes left to close up the gap.
Generally, the range selected should go all the way from the top of the screen to the bottom, but if a narrower band is select, only the notes within the horizontal band will be pulled left. This can be useful if you want to isolate the notes pulled to specific channels and exclude others.
You may also use Ctrl-X to cut instead of clicking the icon.
Select a range of notes and click the delete icon to delete a range of notes. You may also press delete on the keyboard.
View Settings
By default PICO DAW shows staff lines for the C Major scale. Clicking on the scale dial icon to select another scale. The scale selector tool displays. Ur the up and down arrows or the mouse wheel to set the scale family. Drag the outer ringer with the left mouse button to set the tonic pitch class. Drag the inner ring to set the mode. Click save to return to the editor.
Hover over the chord icon and scroll the mouse wheel to change the chord number. The staff lines for the root of the chord is highlighted in a lighter color. (When the chord number is set to 1, the root of the chord and the tonic are the same, so the chord icon may also be used to highlight the tonic.)
Press the 3, 5, and/or 7 keys to toggle on display of the e 3rd, 5th, and/or 7th of the chord. Press again to toggle them off.
Click the measure icon (metronome) to toggle measure markers on and off. By default there are 4 measures of eight notes per music pattern.
To change the measure width, select a range of notes the width of the new measure and click the metronome icon.
It's usually best to do this on the first music pattern of the tune and select the first note of the pattern through the desired width.
Click the subdivision icon (note) to display the subdivisions of the measure. By default the subdivisions are two notes wide.
To change the subdivision width, select a range of notes the width of the new subdivision and click the subdivision icon.
It's usually best to do this on the first music pattern of the tune and select the first note through the desired width.
Toggle view.
Click the view icon to toggle between channel view and spectrum view. The channel view displays the color of each note according to which channel it is in. The spectrum view displays notes according to how closely they are related harmonically as defined by the circle of 5ths. The closer that two notes are in color, the more consonant they are. The more the colors clash, the more dissonant the notes are.
Playing and Recording
To listen to your composition, press the play icon or press the spacebar. To stop playback, click the stop icon or press the spacebar.
To record to your composition, press the record icon. To stop recording, click on the stop icon or press the spacebar.
The recording saves to your desktop. If your music pattern loops, the recorder will record two loops before stopping if not stopped earlier by you.
Congrats, @bikibird! Something like this is requested so often, I'm sure this will help a lot of people!
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