Styles work by generating virtual events in autostyle segments to suit the chords or scales of your song.  This allows you to quickly generate a complete musical arrangement from a simple chord sequence.

The style mechanism in Songtrix has been carefully designed for both convenience and flexibility.  There are many features of styles which make them invaluable for music exploration, drafting and production.

Autostyle Segments

Autostyle segments are the canvas on which the generated style events are placed.

Standard segments are filled with real events that you can create and edit.  However, with an autostyle segment you are handing control over to Songtrix to fill it with events generated to suit the song, based on your selected style.

The generated virtual events can be viewed in detail within the autostyle segments, but they appear in gray, and cannot be selected or changed.

Because autostyle segments have the same flexibility as all segments to be split or joined, you have great flexibility to decide which areas of the song are to use styles.

You can base the entire song on a style, or just specific bars in specific tracks.

Style Selection

Songtrix is supplied with a collection of standard styles.  You can select any of these for your song, using either the Tracks page, or the transport bar to open the Change Style window.

Styles can accommodate all time signatures.  Some styles are natively designed to support multiple specific time signatures, but if not, Songtrix is able to synthesize rhythms compatible with all meters. 

Styles may be selected in two ways.  For simplicity and consistency, you can use the same style for all tracks of the song.  On the other hand, a vast range of style combinations is possible if you select a different style for each track.

Each time you select a style, the events in the autostyle segments are immediately updated.  To preserve the original sound of the style, you can also choose to have the track setup and scope synchronized with the selected style.

Chords and Scales

Styles need the Chords (or optionally Scales) track to guide the generation of the autostyle events.  Without a harmony track in the song, only Drums track events can be played.

This is a key element of the styles mechanism.  Each style file contains a sample of a musical style for a known chord or scale.

When Songtrix knows the chords or scales in your song, it is able to generate compatible musical arrangements by transferring and reharmonizing the source events from the style.

Styles used together with the harmony tools are a powerful creative combination.  You are free to explore and can instantly evaluate the musical effect of new and original harmonic progressions, since the accompaniment is automatically updated with each new chord or scale selection.

Substyles

Substyles allow you access a number of style variations within the same overall theme.  Typically you might use one substyle for the verse of a song, and a slightly stronger variation for the chorus.

Substyles are allocated letters and are indicated in work sheets within a red box in the Control track area.  They are not indicated in staff sheets.

Songtrix supports up to four substyles (A, B, C and D) but they may not all be available, depending on the style.  The standard styles only contain definitions for substyles A and B.

Detaching Styles

While you cannot directly select or edit the virtual events generated in autostyle segments, these can be converted to standard segments, rendering their events into real events which can be edited.

In this way you can capture the generated style events, and optionally adjust them to get exactly the effect you want.  Once an autostyle segment has been rendered, it is no longer connected to or updated by the style.

The Package Song process can perform this operation for the whole song, with the Detach Styles option.  All autostyle segments are rendered to standard segments with events, and styles are deselected from all tracks.

This is highly recommended to make sure that your song will play correctly on another computer, which may not have the styles you used available to it.