Welcome to Master Tracks Pro 5. The demo disk in this package contains a version of Pro 5 that's identical to the actual program, with one exception: it won't save any music you create. If you have a Mac, connected to a MIDI interface and at least one MIDI instrument, you can use this demo version of Master Tracks Pro 5 to record, play back and edit up to 64 tracks of music.
Here's a brief guide to using some of Pro 5's most essential features. When you're familiar with these, feel free to explore. Pro 5 is very intuitive and easy to learn, and there's a lot of sequencing features you can discover, even before you read the manual that comes with the real program.
Also included on the demo disk are sample music files called QuikTunes. QuikTunes are pre-recorded songs that are voiced to the General MIDI standard. Use "Open" from the File Menu to load these songs.
MASTER TRACKS PRO 5 OVERVIEW
Master Tracks Pro 5 integrates recording, track editing, automated mixing and control over MIDI instruments in a single window, containing up to 64 independent tracks of music. View and edit your music in several ways, accessing any parameter of a musical sequence for precise editing control. The Step Editor displays notes on a graphic “piano roll” grid, giving you intuitive, click-and-drag editing power over all characteristics of individual notes, or sections of music. The Event List displays notes alphanumerically, letting you edit all note qualities. This window is also a SMPTE hit list for scoring to film or video.
Pro 5’s new features include recordable track and master faders, easy drum mapping with a transpose map, click-and-drag velocity editing, mouse-drawn velocity curves, SMPTE insert, multi-channel tracks, greater control over MIDI devices and much more!
THE MAIN WINDOWS
The Master Tracks Pro windows let you view and edit music in a variety of ways. With the controls in Master Tracks Pro you can easily change many aspects of the music - the key, the tempo, even the sound of each track.
• The Song Editor
The Song Editor window can contain up to 64 tracks of data and has controls for naming tracks, recording, soloing, assigning MIDI channels and program numbers and looping tracks. The Track Sheet window is where you organize and name the individual tracks, build your song and determine what instruments will be played by each track. The Song Editor also displays a bar chart of your song, showing you each track as measures in time. Solid black measures contain data and hollow measures contain only musical rests. Notice how the display follows the music as it plays back. The Song Editor can be used to build and edit songs. You can perform editing operations like cut, copy and paste on measures by first selecting an area to be edited, and then performing the edit operation. You can also mix two tracks together. You can select a section of the song, or an entire track using the mouse. The Song Editor is a very powerful tool for building songs, repeating sections and using the power of the computer to help you compose.
• The Transport Window
The window at the bottom of the screen is called the Transport - it controls playback of the song and tells you which song is in memory. The Transport has controls for fast forward, rewind, pause and record, just like a tape deck. You can even fast forward while playing back to locate part of a song. On the left of the window you see some counters that show us the location in the song in measures, beats and clocks. Below it you can see the elapsed time in hours, minutes, seconds and frames. These counters let you locate different parts of the song.
• The Step Editor
In the Step Editor the notes are displayed as lines that show the pitch and length of the notes. You can use a mouse to enter notes by clicking on the note icons and then clicking on the grid to place them.
• The Event List Editor
The Event List Editor displays a track's worth of information as numerical data. This allows you to edit individual notes and other data and view the track as measure or SMPTE time.
• The Data Windows
Passport pioneered the use of graphic data windows and continues the tradition with Pro5. Any controller, pitch bend or other MIDI data can be viewed and edited in these windows.
Master tracks Pro5 Guided tour
Start-up
• Drag Pro 5 from the "Master Tracks Pro" folder to your hard disk. The "Master Tracks Pro" folder is located in the "More Information" folder on the CD.
• Open the "Master Tracks Pro" folder and double click on the Pro 5 icon to start the program.
• When the Demo Screen appears, click the mouse to start the program
• You should see 3 windows:
Track Editor
Transport (labeled "Untitled")
Tempo
Set-up
• Pull down the Goodies menu and choose MIDI Setup.
• Select MIDI Manager if you've installed it in your system, or, if you don't use MIDI Manager, click the serial ports you use for MIDI.
• To the right of "Record on Port," click on the Mac serial port to which you've connected your main MIDI keyboard. Click OK.
• Click on the Track Editor window to make sure it's active.
The left side of this window displays the numbers of 64 tracks and boxes in which you click to make a track play (P), record (R), play solo (S) and loop (L).
• In the Track 1 line, click in the box below the R. This record-enables track 1, and sends any notes you play through Pro 5 to the MIDI instrument on the channel you'll set for track 1 in the next step.
Set Channels
• Look a little to the right and find the box labeled "Chnl." Click in the box directly below this.
• Type a "1" on your Mac, hold down the Option key and press Enter.
This sets the MIDI channel over which track 1 will play, and brings up the channel dialog box for track 2. Repeat this for every track you want to record on.
• You can have more than one instrument play the music on a single track, to get rich, layered textures. In the channel dialog box, click the Multi-Channel Track switch, then select up to eight channels.
Set Your MIDI Instrument
• Set your main keyboard (or the instrument you want to play on Pro 5's track 1) to MIDI channel 1.
• When you play your MIDI keyboard, you should hear the instrument you've set to MIDI channel 1.
Program Change
You can change the programs on your MIDI instruments easily with Master Tracks Pro's Program Change feature.
• Just left of the horizontal center of the Track Editor, click on the box below Program Name.
• Click on the pop-up menu to the right of the word "Device." if you have one of the instruments listed, drag to it and release the mouse button. If not, the Pro 5 manual tells you how to enter your instruments in this list.
• Double-click on any program number (or name, if your instrument was in the list) on the program grid. Master Tracks Pro sends a MIDI message to your instrument, telling it to change to the program number you clicked.
RECORD
• Make sure track 1 is still record-enabled (read the Set-up section, above).
• In the Transport (the one with the shuttle buttons like a tape deck) click on Auto-return, Count and Click so they're highlighted (white letters on a black background).
• Press Enter, and after four beats, play your MIDI instrument.
• Press the spacebar when you're done.
• To play back the music you recorded, press the spacebar again.
Special Record Modes
In the Transport, double-click on the Punch-in button to bring up the Special Record Modes dialog box. You can set the start and end points of the section you want to record in, as well as the record mode.
• Punch-in. Like punching in on a tape deck, Punch-in automatically turns record on, and then off, at the points you designate. (Live punch-in. You can also punch in on the fly by pressing the Mac's Enter key while the sequence is playing. Any record-enabled track will record until you press the spacebar.)
• Overdub. Record on an existing track without erasing any music already there.
Step Record
• Looped Record. Repeats the section you designate in this dialog box and replaces the last pass with the current pass.
• Looped Overdub. Like Drum machine recording, loops a section and keeps what you record on each pass.
Step Record
• In the Step Editor, click on the pencil icon to the upper left of the note grid.
• Click on one of the note duration icons above the pencil icon.
• Click anywhere on the note grid, and a note of the selected duration will appear.
EDITING
Editing in Master Tracks Pro is done by clicking and dragging, or by selecting one or more events and editing them with menu commands.
Edit Notes
In the Step Editor, you can edit individual notes in different ways by clicking on the pencil or arrow icon, then clicking and dragging the note.
• Click on the arrow icon, then double-click on a note. You can type in values to change the note's parameters in the box that appears.
• Notes in the Step editor have vertical "tails" to indicate velocity. The longer the tail, the greater the note's velocity. Click on a note head with the arrow cursor and drag up or down to raise or lower the note's velocity.
• Click on the pencil icon.
• Click on the left end of the note and you can drag it up, down, left or right.
• Click on the right end of the note and you can drag left and right to change the length of the note.
• Click on one of the note duration icons above the pencil icon.
• Click on a blank spot and you record a note of the selected duration.
Selecting for Editing In the Step Editor
• Select any note or group of notes by clicking on a blank spot with the arrow cursor and dragging a rectangle around a group of notes.
• Select a measure by clicking in the measure number bar above the note grid.
• Select a range of measures by Shift-clicking on any number of measure numbers.
Selecting for Editing In the Track Editor
• Select a range of measures and tracks by clicking and dragging across them in the grid.
• Select an entire track by clicking on the track number just to the left of the track grid.
• Select a group of tracks by clicking and dragging across a range of track numbers at the left of the track grid.
• Select an entire measure in all tracks by clicking on the measure number just above the track grid.
• Select a group of measures by clicking and dragging across a range of measure numbers above the track grid.
Editing a Selection
Any selection can be edited by menu commands. The Edit menu contains standard Mac Cut, Copy and Paste commands. Choosing Paste will put the contents of the Mac Clipboard immediately after wher you click the insertion point in the Step or Track Editor.
The Change Menu
The Change menu contains a number of commands that use the same or similar techniques to edit selections. The Change Filter works identically in all of these. Transpose is a good example.
• Record four bars of four quarter notes, on the beat.
• Select bars two and three in the Step Editor (choose from the Windows menu).
• Pull down the Change menu and choose Transpose.
• Click the Change Filter button.
• Notice the box is checked for "Only apply changes to events with pitches from C-2 to G8"
• Near the bottom of the Change Filter dialog box, click in the box next to: "Start Times within 10 clocks of these sub-beats".
• Below that, click in the radio button on the first sixteenth note of beat 1.
Now, whatever you do in the Transpose dialog box will only affect notes in the range from C-2 to G8, that also start within 10 clocks of the first beat of every bar.
• Click OK.
• In the Transpose dialog box, notice the line that reads, "Transpose notes from C3 to C3."
• Type a C4 into the box where you see the righthand C3. This means you will transpose every selected note up one octave.
• Click OK.
Of the notes you selected, all those on the first beat of a measure will be transposed one octave up.
Program changes:
• In the lower left corner of the Step Editor window, notice the small triangle. This is the Program Change well.
• Click on the Program Change well and drag right to any point in the sequence.
• Release the mouse button, and you'll see the program change dialog.
• Double-click on any program change number (or name) and that program change number (or name) will appear where you released the mouse in the Step Editor grid.
You'll never have to hunt through an event list to find the mystery program change again.
Auto Locate
Press the period (".") key on the Mac's numeric keypad or main keyboard, and no matter what window is active, a numeric entry dialog box appears. Type in any measure or SMPTE location (depending on which you set in the Layout menu). All open windows and the transport's location counter immediately go to that location.
Slide Data
To move any group of notes earlier or later, pull down the Change menu and choose Slide Data. Enter the number of ticks (240 per quarter note) and direction, then click OK.
Recordable Faders
Master Tracks Pro lets you record volume changes on individual tracks and the entire mix, with moving, on-screen faders.
Track Faders
• In the Track Editor, click the heading of the Volume box ("Vol"), so the column expands into a set of faders.
• Hold the Shift key and, in the Track Editor, click in any track's record box. A miniature fader icon appears there.
• Click Record (or Press Enter), then click and drag the fader. You will record all fader moves you make. On playback, the fader will move to indicate your moves.
• Record fader moves on any number of tracks by clicking MultiTrack Record in the Layout Menu.
Master Fader
• Pull down the Goodies menu and choose Master Fader. This fader has three Modes which you select by clicking the rectangle at the bottom of the Master Fader.
• Live. This sends volume data to all tracks in real time, but does not record the information.
• Absolute. This is also real time and sends the master Fader's position as the "Master Volume" Sys Ex message. (As yet, very few instruments respond to this MIDI message.)
• Record. Records volume changes on any tracks in Fader Record mode.
These are the only the basics of Master Tracks Pro. It has many more features, but is a remarkably intuitive program. You'll find a lot of ways to record and edit your sequences, just by exploring.
Master Tracks Pro 5 is unequalled for combining professional features with clear, powerful functionality. Take your musical productivity to new levels and make your next song a hit with Pro 5!
Passport also has two programs that will show and print standard sheet music - the entry level Music Time ($249.00) and the professional version, ENCORE ($595.00).
FOR DEALER AND ORDERING INFORMATION ABOUT MASTER TRACKS PRO AND OTHER PASSPORT PRODUCTS, PLEASE CALL OR WRITE:
