Preparing a pad

A pad is one song, one sound effect, one cue. Everything it does when you tap it is decided here, on one page of cards, at home, with time.

This page takes the cards in the order the app lays them out, so you can read it with the phone in your hand and follow along.

Opening the settings

On a set, the button at the top says “Edit mode off”. Tap it, it reads “Edit mode on” in red, and the pads change job: they stop playing and start editing.

Now tap a pad. If it already has a song, its settings page opens. If the slot is empty, that page holds one card, “File”, with the buttons that put a file there. Fill it, and the other cards appear.

Beside the song’s name at the top of that page there is a play button. It plays this pad without leaving the settings, so you can set a level, hear it, and change your mind without three taps in between.

It is an audition, not an entrance: no count-in, no fades, and no document thrown on the screen. You hear the tape as it is. It stops the song rather than chaining to the next one, for the same reason. To hear the count-in and the fades doing their work, play the pad from the set.

Edit mode stays on while you go from one pad to the next, so preparing a set is one switch and then twelve pads, not twelve switches. Tap “Edit mode on” to leave it. Opening a different set starts in play mode, as it always has. On stage, live mode hides the button altogether, so there is no way to open a pad’s settings by accident during a set.

Nothing to save

Every change is saved the moment you make it. There is no OK button and no Save button on this page, because there is nothing waiting to be confirmed. Move a slider, and the pad has already changed.

So you leave by going back: the arrow at the top left of the page, or Android’s own back button. A setting’s window closes on its cross, or on a tap outside it. Nothing is lost by leaving, and nothing is applied by leaving either. It was applied when you did it.

The full-screen editors are the one exception. The boundaries editor, the lyrics editor and the score editors each have their own “Save”, because in those you are making one deliberate edit rather than turning switches.

What the pad itself tells you

Before you open anything, the pad is already talking to you.

Its colour says where the recording lives. Orange is a pad with its own file. Blue is a pad playing a shared library title. Purple with a broken link is a pad whose title has been removed from the library: it keeps its name so you know which one went missing, and it has nothing left to play.

Red means playing. The same red for every pad, whatever it holds, so what is sounding right now is never in doubt.

The slot number sits top left. That is the number you use when you chain one song to another. The clock sits top right: total length when the pad is idle, time remaining while it plays.

Small badges fill the middle of the pad. They describe how the pad is set up:

Only one document badge ever appears, because the stage only ever opens one. A pad can hold lyrics, a score and a chart all at once; the letter tells you which of them comes up when you press it. What the pad merely carries is in its settings, not here.

They are drawn in that order of importance, and on the tightest grid, the one with fifteen slots, only the first two fit. There is no room for seven badges on a pad that is eighty pixels tall, and a texture of tiny symbols is not information.

All the badges disappear in live mode. How a song is configured is a question for the rehearsal room. On stage the pad has one job: say what it is, and whether it is playing.

The file, and the pad’s name

On the “File” card, the button beside the filename reads “Choose File” on an empty slot and “Change File” once there is something to change.

The picker is filtered to audio, so it will not offer you photos and videos for a slot that can only take sound. MP3, M4A and AAC, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, OGG and Opus, WMA and CAF all go in.

The file is copied onto the phone. Nothing streams, ever, so once the import is done the app has no further use for the internet. The pad takes the file’s name, which you can then change to whatever you actually call the song.

Some studio bounces cannot be played by Android as they are: 24-bit, 32-bit and floating-point WAV, and AIFF. Those are rewritten as 16-bit WAV on import, at the same sample rate and with the same channels, and the app tells you it has done it. It happens once, at your kitchen table, rather than failing on stage.

The card’s first line is the name that shows on the pad, and it is yours to set. Under it, in orange, the original filename and the track’s length, neither of them editable. They are there so you can tell two similarly named exports apart.

From the library

On an empty slot, and only if your library already holds at least one title, a second button appears: “From the library”. It points this pad at a recording the library owns, which any number of sets can play at once.

A pad is either its own file or a library title, and that is decided once. There is no switch between the two later. If you want a library pad to become an independent copy, that is what “Deep copy to a set”, on the “Inter-Sets” card at the foot of the page, is for.

On a blue pad the name belongs to the title, not to the pad, so change it from the library and every set follows.

Type: Music or Sound Fx

“Type:” has two settings, and it changes how the pad behaves more than anything else on the page. The card shows the icon in force; tap it to choose.

“Music” is a backing track. Only one music track plays at a time: tapping a music pad while another one is playing stops that one and switches to this one. That is what you want for a setlist, where the next song replacing the last one is the whole point.

“Sound Fx” plays on top. Tap it while a track is running and it sits over the track. Tap three of them and all three sound together. That is what you want for a door slam, a phone ringing, thunder.

Two consequences worth knowing before you choose:

• A Sound Fx pad has no count-in. The “Pre count:” card is not drawn at all. A thunderclap does not need counting in.
• A Sound Fx pad carries no document at all. The “Lyrics:”, “PDF” and “Chord chart:” cards disappear, and nothing opens on stage when the effect fires. An effect sounds over the song you are playing, and several can sound at once: its sheet would land on top of the score you are reading. Nothing is deleted by the switch. Turn the pad back to “Music” and the three cards come back as they were, words, score and chart included.

Split audio source

“Split audio source:” turns one pad into two independent sources, one per ear, with a level each. It is how you send a click to the drummer’s in-ears and the track to the room, from a single phone.

It has a page of its own: Two sources in one pad. Everything below on this page assumes a pad with a single source, and where a setting behaves differently with two, it is called out.

Volume

“Volume: {n}%” runs from 0 to 200%. Above 100% is a boost, which is useful for a track that was bounced quietly, and which will not help a track that was already loud.

The slider works while the song plays. Move it during a rehearsal, hear the change immediately, and the pad keeps the new level for next time. This is the one setting worth adjusting with the band in the room rather than in the quiet.

Under the slider sits a small waveform of the track. Tap it anywhere to jump to that point, use the play button beside it to audition, and watch the level meter next to that. The waveform’s height follows the slider, so you can see the boost as well as hear it.

On a pad playing a library title the slider inside reads “Level (this set only)” instead. The level is the one recording setting each set keeps for itself, because the same song can need more push in a loud room than in a quiet one.

The card is not drawn at all on a two-source pad. Each source has its own level there, and a master on top of them would be a third volume control for the same sound.

On stop: Reset or Pause

“On stop:” decides what a second tap does to a track that is already playing.

“Reset” rewinds. Stop the song, and the next tap starts it from the beginning. This is what you want for a set, where a song you abandoned is a song you will start again from the top.

“Pause” keeps the position. Stop the song, and the next tap picks up exactly where you left off. This is what you want for a long atmosphere or a rehearsal track you keep interrupting.

Two things about resuming from “Pause”:

• The count-in does not run again. You are already in the song. Four clicks in the middle of a piece would be four clicks the audience can hear.
• The fade-in does apply again. Coming back in from silence at full level is abrupt, so if you set a fade-in, you get it on the way back too.

A paused pad also grows a reset area on its right-hand side. Tap that instead of the pad itself and the song goes back to zero without playing, which is how you abandon a half-played track without hearing the top of it again.

Audio Boundaries

Most tracks have dead air at the front. “Audio Boundaries:” is where you cut it off, so the tap and the downbeat are the same moment.

Tap the card and the editor opens straight away. The switch beside the title is the trim itself, and once you have moved something the card reports where the bounds sit: “In 4.2s / Out 26.8s”.

That readout is deliberate. A trim cutting thirty seconds off a song must never be able to hide behind a switch you turned off months ago and forgot, so the card says what it is doing without being opened. “Reset”, beside the editor’s own title, puts the bounds back to the whole file.

The boundaries editor

The card opens a full-screen editor titled “Edit Audio Boundaries”.

Below the waveform are “In (s)” and “Out (s)”, typed in seconds to two decimals, with a play button between them that auditions the region you have marked. Only that button plays: touching the waveform never starts the sound.

Below them, four buttons: “Track start”, “In marker”, “Out marker” and “Track end”. The two marker buttons also choose which boundary you are setting, and the chosen one stays lit, on its button and on the waveform. With the In marker lit, a tap on the waveform puts the start where you tapped; with the Out marker lit, it puts the end there. A tap that would cross the other boundary is ignored. You can still drag either handle, and grabbing one lights it.

The “Zoom” slider starts at the whole song. Push it and the waveform stretches out, gently at first, then fine enough to land a marker on a particular beat.

“Save” applies the trim and closes the editor. This editor is the exception to everything-saves-as-you-go: nothing is applied until you save.

Opening this editor stops whatever the app was playing. It has to. The editor previews audio through the browser engine while the pads play through the phone’s native one, and the two do not negotiate the speaker between them, so both playing at once would just double up.

The boundaries card is not drawn at all on a two-source pad. There, each source is trimmed separately, and a third set of bounds over the assembled mix would only muddy the picture.

Chained play

“Chained play:” is how a set runs itself. One song ends, the next one starts, without anybody reaching for the phone.

Tap the card and you get three things. The switch beside the title only arms the chain; the settings are there either way.

“Next Song:” is a grid of slot numbers. Tap the number of the pad that should follow this one. Your own slot is marked in the grid so you can see where you are counting from.

“From set:” names the set that number belongs to. It defaults to the set you are in, which is what you want almost always. Choose a different set and the app will follow the music into it: when the chain fires, the screen switches to that set with the next song already playing. That is how a show in three parts becomes three sets that run into each other.

“silence before moving on: {n}s” holds up to 20 seconds of nothing between the two songs. Zero runs them together. Three or four gives you room to say something between numbers without the next track arriving over the top of it.

When the chain fires, and when it does not

The chain fires when the track reaches its end. That is the only thing that triggers it.

It does not fire when you tap the pad to stop it. Pressing stop is the musician ending the song, which is a different act from the song finishing, and starting the next one on top of that decision would be exactly wrong. “Stop all” does not chain either, for the same reason: it is the panic button.

A fade-out counts as reaching the end. When the fade completes the song stops, and if it is chained, the next one starts.

Your stop is taken the moment you press it, even when a ten-second fade follows. The pad changes at once to say the stop is being carried out, and the lyrics or the score come off the screen straight away rather than lingering over a song on its way out. What continues is only the sound, going down.

Pre count

“Pre count:” clicks the band in. It is offered on “Music” pads only.

“Clicks” is how many, from 1 to 12. Four is a bar.

“Tempo: {n}” is how fast, from 60 to 240 BPM. Set it to the tempo of the track, not to something comfortable to count, or the clicks and the music will not agree.

“Audio click:” puts the clicks in your ears. “Visual click:” puts a big number on the screen for each one, which is what you want when the click cannot be in the monitors. It is drawn over everything, a score or a chart included, so the count is never hidden behind the page you are about to read. Turn the visual click on and a third switch appears: “Reverse countdown:”, which counts 4-3-2-1 down to the start instead of 1-2-3-4 up to it.

The music comes in one beat after the last click. A four-click count-in goes 1-2-3-4, and the band plays on the next beat. That is how a drummer counts a band in, and it is why you do not need a fifth silent click to make room for the downbeat.

The count-in runs when you start a song from a stop. It does not run when you resume a paused pad, and it does not run when you jump to a position: in both of those you are already inside the song.

On a pad that plays a library title, the tempo is shared with every other pad playing that title. Change it here and you have changed it in every set. The number of clicks, the audio click, the visual click and the reverse countdown all stay on this pad, where you would expect. The tempo does not, so check the other sets before you nudge it.

Fade in/out

“Fade in/out:” gives you “Fade In Time: {n}s” and “Fade Out Time: {n}s”, both from 0 to 20 seconds.

The fade-in applies every time the track starts. That includes resuming a paused pad and jumping to a new position, so there is no version of starting this song that arrives at full level.

The fade-out starts by itself. The app watches the time remaining, and when there is less of it left than the fade-out is long, the fade begins. You do nothing. When it reaches silence the song stops, and if the pad is chained, the next one starts on schedule.

That last part is what makes a fade-out useful for a set rather than just tidy: a long track can be brought down and handed over without anyone counting bars.

Lyrics and scores

“Lyrics:” holds words, typed or imported, which scroll themselves as the track plays. “PDF (chords, sheet):” holds a chord chart or a score, which turns its own pages.

The two are mutually exclusive. Turning one on turns the other off. A pad shows one document on stage, because a phone has one screen and a set has no time for a choice.

Both have more depth than fits here: timestamps, page-turn markers, cropping, font size, auto-sync. They live on their own page: Lyrics and scores.

If you need to build a chord chart in the first place, Chord Analyser does it for free and exports the PDF: /apps/chord-analyser.

Inter-Sets

“Inter-Sets:” is the full-width card at the foot of the page, where a pad moves house.

“Duplicate” and “Move” both open the same picker: every set, every slot, with the occupied ones greyed out. Pick an empty slot and confirm. Duplicate leaves the original in place; Move empties it.

The audio file is shared, not copied. The app stores a recording by its contents, so a duplicate points at the same file rather than making a second one. Two copies of a forty-minute track cost you forty minutes of storage, not eighty, and a set you back up does not upload bytes the cloud already has.

“Transfer to library” moves this pad’s recording into the shared library and leaves the pad playing it from there. The recording, its bounds, its mix, its lyrics and its score all go; the pad keeps its type, its level, its count-in and its chaining, and goes on playing exactly as it did. The button only appears when your plan has room for another title, because a button that explains it cannot work is worse than no button. See The shared library for what that plan allows.

“Deep copy to a set” appears only on a pad that already plays a library title. It makes an independent copy in another slot: same audio, but its own settings, following nothing. This is the escape hatch for when one set wants a title trimmed differently from all the others.

Deleting a pad

In Edit mode, the right-hand part of every filled pad is a red delete area. Tap it and the app asks first, with the song’s name in the question.

Deleting empties the slot and deletes the audio file, unless another pad still uses it. Your cloud backups are untouched, so a set you have saved can be restored. A song you imported and never backed up is gone.

MIDI at start

If a keyboard or a module is in your rig, the pad can put it on the right sound before the first beat. Tap the “Simple MIDI” card and its editor opens straight away; the switch on the card arms it with a first program change.

There are two MIDI cards side by side, “Simple MIDI” and “Advanced MIDI”, and only one of them is on at a time: switching one on switches the other off. Nothing is erased when you swap, so you can go back to the other one and find it as you left it.

You need a USB MIDI interface plugged into the phone. Bluetooth is not supported, and nothing here needs an account: MIDI is free, like everything you use on stage.

Each line is one message on one channel.

• ”+ Program” sends a program change, with an optional bank. Leave “Bank MSB” and “Bank LSB” empty unless your manual gives you numbers, because on most instruments bank 0 is a real bank: writing a zero would throw away the bank you had selected on the machine itself.
• ”+ Controller” sends any CC. Controller 7 is the volume, and the field says so.
• “Delay ms” holds one message back for a machine that is not ready at once, such as a module loading a sound from its card.
• The arrows on a card move it up or down, and the red bin deletes it after asking.

The order is fixed and it matters: banks arm first, then the programs load, then the controllers are set. A program change resets the controllers on many instruments, so a volume sent before it would be wiped by it.

“Send now” fires the lot without starting the pad. Makers disagree about which half of a bank select does what, so the numbers in a manual rarely work first try, and this turns an evening of guessing into ten seconds of tapping.

On a pad playing a library title, the MIDI belongs to the title, like its lyrics: every set that plays it sends the same thing, and the cards are blue to say so. A pad that owns its own file keeps its MIDI to itself.

Back on the set, a small DIN plug sits beside the title when the set sends anything. It names the channels, says “not connected” when nothing is plugged in, and flashes red with the message as it leaves.

Choosing which outputs receive

Tap that DIN plug and you get “MIDI outputs”: everything this phone can send to, with a switch each.

Most rigs have one output and nothing to decide here. It matters when something else on the phone also speaks MIDI. Some players run a mixing desk from a companion app, the kind that puts the front panel of a rack unit on the screen: those apps offer a MIDI port of their own and take orders on it. Without this setting, every program change you send a keyboard would land in the mixer too.

Three things worth knowing:

• You switch outputs off, never on. Anything new is served from the moment you plug it in. A list of chosen outputs would silence the interface you buy next year, and you would find out on stage.
• It belongs to this phone, like the number of chart lines on screen. It is not in your sets, not in a cloud backup, and two musicians sharing a set keep their own rig.
• An output you silenced stays in the list even when it is unplugged, marked “not here”, so tonight’s choice survives until tomorrow and nothing is muted behind your back. Switch it back on to forget it for good.

Advanced MIDI

Simple MIDI says what the rig should be at the start. Advanced MIDI says what it should do during the song: the lead sound for the solo at 1:45, the delay pedal off for the bridge, the volume pulled down for the last chorus. Each change is an event, placed on the waveform, and the pad sends it at that moment while it plays.

Switch “Advanced MIDI” on and the editor opens. It fills the screen: the list at the top (on the left in landscape), and what you are editing below it.

The timeline and the list

The dotted line at the top is the whole file. When the boundaries are on, the part that plays is drawn in orange between them.

• S and E are “On Start” and “On Stop”. They sit on the boundaries, or at the ends of the file when the boundaries are off.
• The numbers are the events, in the order of time.
• What you are editing is highlighted, and what is switched off is faded. Tap any of them to edit it.

The list says the same thing in words. “On Start” always comes first and “On Stop” always comes last, because one opens the song and the other closes it. Each event shows its time, what it sends, and its port when it has one. Its switch turns it off without deleting it; its red bin deletes it, after asking.

”+ Event” adds an event at the start of the part that plays, ready to be placed.

Placing an event

Tap the waveform where the event should fall. It opens showing the whole song, so you aim at the right part first; the slider under it zooms in to aim more finely, and back to zero to see everything again.

The four buttons nudge the event by half a second or by five hundredths, which is the precision you need to land on a downbeat. “Listen” plays a few seconds around the point. Listening never sends MIDI: hearing the song to find a spot is not playing it.

An event placed outside the boundaries is kept, and the editor tells you it will never be sent. Move the boundaries and it comes back to life.

Below the waveform come the destination of the event (see the next chapter) and its messages, the same cards as Simple MIDI: program changes and controllers, with their channel and delay. Two events at the same time are both sent.

Nothing is saved until you tap “Save” at the bottom. “Cancel”, or the back button, asks before throwing away what you changed.

When the pad sends what

• “On Start” is sent when the pad starts, before the count-in, so the sound has changed by the first bar. After a chained song, it is sent at the end of the silence between the two.
• Events are sent at their time in the file. Times are positions in the recording, not counted from the start boundary, so moving a boundary never shifts them.
• “On Stop” is sent every time the pad stops: at the end, on a manual stop, on a pause, or when a chained song takes over. It is off until you switch it on.
• Starting in the middle, or resuming after a pause, puts the rig back in the state the song is in at that point: the last program of each channel and the last value of each controller, rather than every event since the beginning.
• The play button of the pad’s settings sends nothing, Simple or Advanced. It is an audition.

Back on the set, the DIN plug beside the title flashes with each event as it leaves.

Sound Fx pads have no Advanced MIDI. A pad needs its audio file to carry events, since they are placed on its waveform.

Destinations

Most rigs never need this chapter. With one keyboard on one interface, leave every destination on “Follow the general mapping”: the event goes to every output switched on in “MIDI outputs”, exactly like Simple MIDI.

Destinations are for the rig with several machines on several interfaces: a keyboard on one USB interface and a pedalboard on another, where a program change meant for one must not land on the other. Channels separate machines on the same cable; destinations separate the cables.

Ports, not interfaces

An event does not name an interface. It names a port, “Port 1” to “Port 8”, and each phone decides which interface sits behind each port.

The reason is the day you change phones, or a bandmate plays your set on theirs: the same interface does not carry the same name everywhere, and an event pointing at your interface would point at nothing on theirs. A port is a promise that travels: “the keys are on Port 1”. Each phone keeps that promise with its own hardware.

Tap the destination to choose. Each port shows the interface behind it on this phone, or “not mapped here”, faded.

Mapping the ports on this phone

On a set, tap the DIN plug beside the title to open “MIDI outputs”. Under “Advanced mapping”, give each interface you use a port number. Choosing a port that is not mapped also shows a “Set up the ports” button in the editor, which opens the same panel on the spot.

• One interface per port. A port that needs to reach two machines uses one interface and two channels.
• An interface is recognised by its name, so unplugging it and plugging it back in finds it again.
• A port aimed by an event goes to its interface even if that interface is switched off in the list above. Switching an output off keeps out what follows the general mapping; a port is an explicit choice, and it is honoured.
• A port with nothing behind it sends nothing. Not to every output, not to the first one: nothing. An event that went somewhere you did not choose would be worse than an event that stays silent.

Moving to another phone

What is saved with the song, in the library and in its cloud backup, is the port name only. The mapping belongs to the phone, like the outputs you switched off: it is not in your sets and not in a backup.

On a new phone, or after reinstalling the app:

1. Restore the library. Every event comes back, with its port.
2. Plug the interfaces in, open “MIDI outputs”, and map them to the same port numbers as before.
3. That is all. No event needs touching.

Until the ports are mapped, events aimed at them send nothing, and events on “Follow the general mapping” work straight away. Before a gig on a phone you have not set up, open one song and check that its destinations do not say “not mapped here”.

Pitch

Two different problems live on this card, and the app keeps them apart because mixing them is how a song ends up in the wrong key by accident.

The tuning, in cents, from -50 to +50. This is the pitch of the recording, not its key: at this distance a note does not change its name, it changes its frequency. It is what gets you level with a church piano nobody has tuned in ten years. The card shows the reference it lands on, so -12 cents reads as A = 436.9 Hz.

The transposition of the track, in semitones, from -12 to +12. A singer losing their voice drops the song three semitones rather than not singing it at all. The operation does colour the sound, nobody pretends otherwise, and past a fifth the app says so in as many words. It is your call, not the app’s.

Then, on a pad, what the sheets show. A chord chart and lyric chords follow the track by default: playing a song dropped by two and reading the chords from before is the surest way to get lost. Unlink either one if you want to read the original while the track moves, which is what a capo does on a guitar.

A single play button sits on the card’s title row, and it plays the song as it now sounds, with both settings applied. One button rather than one per slider, because what you are listening to is the song, not the tuning.

The tuning and the track transposition belong to the recording: a tape cut a quarter-tone flat is flat for every set that plays it. A pad can override them for one set, and the card says so when it does.

Where to go next

Two sources in one pad if you need a click in the in-ears and the track in the room.

Lyrics and scores for words and charts that follow the music by themselves.

The shared library if the same song turns up in more than one set and you are tired of setting it up twice.

And Good habits, which is not about settings at all. It is about how the people who gig with this app every week actually lay out a show.