The Pitches Viewer is a useful tool to assist you in transcribing music and for getting a view of how the various parts combine to make the song. It offers three levels of viewing pitch information:

• raw spectrogram form - this view shows the frequency content present in one or more of the tracks. For melodic instruments, you will see how a note on the instrument is distributed along the harmonic series. Percussive instruments will appear as "smears" along the vertical axis.
• pitches - this view shows the results of Song Master processing the raw spectrogram into a more useful form that highlights the probable notes being played.
• midi notes - the pitches layer is further processed and midi note values are generated. The midi notes can be saved to an external midi file or dragged into a DAW or midi editor for further processing.

These three levels can be computed from a stereo/mono audio track or from Song Master's generated stems and can be viewed in any combination. 

Bottom Pitch Panel

The Pitch Panel is composed of three sub-panels. The first panel contains controls to generate, modify, and save the pitches to midi format. The second panel contains controls to display the three levels of pitch information for each track. The third panel contains available global options. 

Let's look at the middle panel first.

Tracks sub-panel

This panel determines what is displayed in the view area. Each audio track has a group of controls to display the three layers (except Drums which doesn't contain melodic information so it doesn't display Pitch and Midi layers) and controls to Solo and Mute the track.

In the above screenshot, we've enabled the Pitch and Midi layers for the keyboard track only. Note that the Midi layer displays the name of the note as well as showing its start and end times. It is often useful to view both Pitch and Midi layers at the same time since the midi layer may filter out useful information that is available in the Pitch layer.

Scrolling and Zooming

All the options for scrolling and zooming in the Waveform view apply to the Pitches view. However, you also need to be able to zoom and scroll vertically as well as horizontally. There are numerous ways to scroll and zoom the pitch viewer:

• Scroll/Zoom Time (horizontal) with mouse-wheel (+ <shift>)
• Vertical zoom - use the slider at the very left of the Pitches view
• Vertical scroll - <shift> + mouse-drag the piano
• Zoom vertically - Ctrl+shift + mouse-wheel
• Pan - Ctrl + shift + left-mouse-drag
• Zoom into a region - shift + mouse-drag to draw a rectangle over the region to zoom in on.
• Reset vertical zoom - double-click the piano or the zoom slider

 

Side Bar

The area to the left of the Pitch view displays a keyboard showing the notes corresponding to each row of the Pitch view, a colored bar that corresponds to the range of the instrument played on the track, and a slider that controls the vertical zooming. The piano also functions as a vertical scrollbar when <shift> is held as the mouse is dragged up and down. 

Midi Parameters sub-panel

The set of controls in the Midi Parameters sub-panel are used to manipulate the notes in the Midi layer. These controls apply to the active track's midi layer. To change the active track, click the name of the track in the Track sub-panel. 

The Start control is used to adjust the sensitivity used to determine when a note starts. The End control is used to adjust the sensitivity of when a note ends. Finally the Volume knob can be used to filter out quieter notes. 

Exporting Midi Data

The midi data for a track can be saved to an external file or drag-and-dropped into a DAW or midi editor. The three radio buttons at the bottom are used to set the time range of the midi data to export. Selecting All will export all midi, Visible will only export the notes that are visible, and Loop will export only the notes in the active loop. 

Options panel

 The controls in this panel are used to show/hide the "keys" displayed as a background of the viewer, and to show/hide a grid overlay.