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1 Thank you for trying Tunafish!
Tunafish aims to be the simplest music sequencer you’ll ever find. It allows you to use samples and VST instrument and effect plugins to make music using nothing more than your own PC or laptop. Its strength is not in the features, but in its simplicity. Instead of going after the “big sequencers” and “all-in-one-studio-sims” on the market, adding as many music-gizmos into the package as possible, Tunafish is kept simple, clever and light-weight. That doesn’t mean Tunafish isn’t as powerful though! It still offers everything you need to make professional sounding tracks with all the combined power of hundreds of VST instruments and effects available today. 2 Some Tunafish basics
Before jumping straight into the action it’s probably good to understand some of the basics of the Tunafish concept… Songs and segments
Tunafish songs consist of one or more “segments”. A segment is actually just a part or section of a song. Examples of segments are: intros, themes, breaks, etc. Segments make it easier to manage a composition or to experiment with variations. A segment can be a minute of music, or maybe 15 minutes – the duration is as long as you need it to be. Each segment has 10 channels that can play simultaneously. You can fill a channel either with samples or a VST instrument. To make a song, you simply string a number of segments together. You can reuse segments multiple times in each track. On the other hand there may also be segments you decide not to use in your final song. A song could be structured like this:
In this example there are three segments that make up the entire track. First the “intro” segment is played. When “intro” is finished playback continues with segment “theme” and finally “variation”.
Ofcourse it’s perfectly possible to make a song consisting of just one segment. If 10 channels is enough to fit all the samples and VSTi’s you need then using
a single segment for your song makes it all the easier! Channels
You can have 10 different channels playing simultaneously at any time. In Tunafish there are three types of channels: VSTi, Drum and Sampler. VSTi – This is a channel to which you assign a VST instrument plugin. These plugins are synthesizers, drumcomputers and sampleplayers or anything which generates sounds for you. Instruments need Tunafish (a “vst-host”) to tell them what to do – hence the name “plugin”. There are hundreds of great plugin instruments out there.
You can find dozens of free, shareware and commercial plugins on the internet. Visit http://www.kvraudio.com or run a search on Google for “free vsti”. Some of my favorites are listed on http://www.brambos.com
Drum – Using drumchannels you can trigger samples you have imported in your track. You see a list of all these samples in the sequencer-view. This way you can easily create beats with just a few clicks. Every “dot” in the grid is a moment where a sample is played back.
Using a Drum-channel you can trigger hundreds of samples simultaneously using only a single channel!
Sampler – this is a channel that lets you trigger a single WAV-sample as melodic notes. It’s not as advanced as many other samplers, but it works for simple tricks. If you need more control over your samples, there are lots of VST-instrument plugins (so-called “soundfont players”) that can be used with Tunafish. That’s the beauty of this plugin-mechanism!
Plugins
VST plugins are a worldwide standard, invented and owned by Steinberg – the makers of Cubase and numerous other music products. There are two basic flavours of VST plugins: effects and instruments. Instruments are plugins that generate sound. These can be virtual synthesizers, drumcomputers or many other things you can use as instruments in your songs. Tunafish is the so-called host for these plugins. This means Tunafish tells them which notes to play, which effects to use and it remembers and stores all the necessary settings in its song-files. VST effects are plugins that apply effects to an audio signal. For example you could use VST effects to add echoes or reverb to a beat, turn a voice-sample into a robotic voice or equalize and compress your song to give it a professional and punchy sound. You can send sounds from VST instruments through VST effects, but you can also do that with your own samples! Every channel has three consecutive effect-slots, and then there are three more global “master” effect-slots which apply to all 10 channels mixed together.
This image shows Tunafish with a VST instrument assigned to a VSTi channel. The window on top is the “edit window” of the plugin. (In this case it’s the reFX Vanguard synthesizer: http://www.reFX.net)
Effects and instruments perform a lot of calculations to manipulate sound. This means hard work for the processor of your computer. Your sound may start to stutter if the song uses too many plugins at the same time!
Event though VST is a standard, plugin developers may interpret the standard differently. Therefore some plugins may not work correctly with Tunafish or require currently unsupported features to function.
3 The Tunafish main window
When making music with Tunafish most of the action takes place in the main window:
1. Playback controls: play/stop/rewind, position-display and toggles for loopmode
and vst-controller recording. Use these buttons to playback your song. 2. Work area. Depending on the viewmode this contains the sequencer for the
current channel, an overview of all 10 channels in the current segment (shown here), or the segment-sequence of the current song.
3. Buttons to switch the viewmode. These determine what is displayed in the work area. For example: if you want to enter notes in a channel, you need to go into channel-mode. If you want to export your entire track, you go to song-mode.
4. Channel mixer. Every segment has 10 channels which can play samples and VST instruments at the same time. Each segment may have 10 completely different channels. You can also access the built-in effects, VST-effect slots and the mutebuttons for each channel here. The light-green coloured channel is the currently active channel.
5. The samples-button opens up the sample-manager. You can use this to import and manage your own soundfiles in the current track.
6. The segment list is your collection of segment. Each track can be made up of several segments. For example: “Intro”, “Main theme”, “Variation”. You can name them whatever you like to organise your song.
7. The tempo and shuffle controls allow you to change the playback tempo and the amount of “swing” in the current track.
8. Master volume lets you change the main output volume of your track. If you want to amplify or attenuate everything you should use these sliders.
9. The main vst slots let you select vst effect plugins that apply to all channels at the same time. For example: you could use this to apply mastering compression and EQ effects to the entire song.
4 Making beats with Tunafish
The easiest way to create beats and rhythmic patterns in Tunafish is using a Drum-channel. Step 1 – select a channel to use for your beat You can use any of the 10 channels to create your beats in. Pick one you haven’t used yet. Activate the channel by clicking on the strip next to the volume-slider. Once the channel is activated, its colour should be a brighter green than the other channels. Step 2 – define it as a Drum-channel Go to the Channel-viewmode. If the current channel isn’t a Drum-channel yet, make it one by clicking on the “Drum” mode button in the top of the screen. Step 3 – import some samples When you start up Tunafish, some samples are already loaded for you. If you want to use your own samples, you can import some WAV files. Simply click on the “Samples” button on the righthand side of the Tunafish screen and then click the “Import” button to start importing. When you’re done, click “Done”. Step 4 – make some beats Click on the play-button to start playback. This way you can immediately hear what you’re doing. The playpointer (the white vertical line) will loop between the start and the end of your segment. When you haven’t used any other channels yet it will loop in the first measure only. Measures are blocks that hold 4 beats together. Count to four in a rhythmic way (1, 2, 3, 4)… that’s one measure. In the sequencer measures are numbered (see the image below).
Making beats is actually simply a matter of adding triggers in the sequencer. By clicking in the work area you add a trigger.
The most basic beats have a bassdrum (or kickdrum) on the first and third count and a snaredrum on the second and fourth count. The pattern above is slightly more complex but uses the same idea: it has snaredrums on the second and fourth count and bassdrums in between. We’ve used a hihat to make the beat flow easier.
You can move misplaced drums by picking up the note with your mouse and dragging them around. You can easily remove drumnotes by clicking on them or dragging over them with your right mousebutton.
Sometimes you don’t want every note to sound equally loud. For example, to make accents you need to vary with the loudness of every note. This loudness is called “velocity”. To adjust the velocity of a note, simply click on it with your left mousebutton. Then click on the green bar to adjust the velocity.
5 Using the Segment overview
Ofcourse you’ll want a little overview when using multiple channels. That’s what the “overview” viewmode is for. It shows you what’s in the channels of the current segment. Click the “Overview” button to switch to overview-mode. In overview-mode you can copy, cut, paste, delete and insert measures between channels. This way you can quickly reuse beats and melodies you’ve made in channel-mode. Every square in the grid represents one measure. Drumchannels are green, VSTi channels are yellow, Sampler channels are blue.
In the example above you can see that this segment starts with four measures of bassline. Then in the fifth measure the drums and synthesizer kick in. By clicking and dragging in the grid you can select multiple measures (even across multiple channels) so you can easily copy and paste parts. The dark-red bar below the sequencer is the scrollbar which lets you scroll the sequencer view.
Clicking on the name of the segment, above the sequencer, with your right mousebutton lets you change its name. Names of individual channels can be changed in the green name-bar above the channel’s mixer-strip.
You can switch between your segments by clicking in the segment-list on the lefthand side of the interface. If Tunafish is playing then segments will change when the currently playing measure is finished. This keeps the flow of the song going. As if you’re doing live-mixing! By right-clicking on a segment you get additional options, such as renaming or duplicating.
6 Using VST instruments and the sampler
VST instrument channels and Sampler channels work in a similar way to the Drum channel. Step 1 – select the appropriate channel mode Go to Channel-viewmode and then select the channel you want to use by clicking on its mixer-strip. Next select the channel-mode you want to use. Step 2a – VSTi: load a VST instrument If you wish to use a VST instrument you’ll have to load it from your computer. Click the VSTi name button to select one of the VSTi’s you have in your collection. The filename of a VSTi always ends with “.dll” so these are the files listed in the file-select box. Tunafish assumes you know where you’ve installed your VST instruments so it doesn’t help you finding them. It’s recommended to make a folder on your PC where you keep all your instruments together for easy loading.
.dll means Dynamic Link Library and is actually a standard windows filetype. There may be hundreds of .dll files on your PC that are not VST plugins! Keep track of your plugins to make your life easier and avoid confusion.
If the file you’ve selected is a valid VST instrument then it’s loaded for you and its editor-window is opened. Each instrument has a different editor-window. Tunafish can’t influence how a plugin looks or works so you’ll have to refer to the plugin’s documentation to find out how it works. Step 2b – Sampler: select a sample from your collection If you want to use a sampler-channel instead of a VSTi channel you’ll have to select a previously imported sample from the list that pops up when you click the sample-name box. Step 3 – enter notes Entering notes works very similar to how it works in a Drumchannel. The major difference is that every vertical row in the grid means another note. The higher a gridline is, the higher the pitch of the that will be played. For easy reference a piano-view is placed on the left side of the sequencer.
You can change the duration of a note by grabbing its white end and stretch it by dragging your mouse. Grabbing a note on its body let’s you move it around.
Simply clicking on a note will let you change its velocity – similar to how it works in a Drumchannel. By right-clicking or dragging over it with right mousebutton pressed you can delete notes.
If you click on the piano-bar image on the left it will change into a bar displaying the note-names. Clicking it again will toggle back to piano-view.
7 Using the mixer’s features
Many of Tunafish’s most powerful features are hidden in the mixer. That’s why the mixer is always visible and available (except, ofcourse, in Songmode). The currently active channel has a light-green colour. All other channels are a darker green. To activate a channel, simply click on it or use one of its controls. Obviously, the volumesliders control the output volume of the individual channels. Clicking on the tiny box in the bottom mutes that channel from the mix. The “Effects” button opens up the channel’s built-in effect panel (as shown in the image on the right). These are effects that are built into Tunafish for easy access. They’re very basic but you won’t need to use VST effects if the effect is sufficient for your needs. Clicking somewhere between the controls brings you back to the normal volume-panel view. The “VST” button lets you use VST effects in this channel. Three effects can be chained after eachother to allow lots of freedom for modifying the sound of a channel. The top-effect is processed first. You could – for example – use a distortion effect, an equalizer and a compressor chained in a row to completely transform sounds to your own taste. The Playback and Export leds let you specify if the effect should be applied when doing normal playback or only when exporting your song. This way you can use your CPU power when you need it most.
The Master output controls work in a similar way. You can specify three VST effects in a row that will apply to the entire mix. This means that first all the channels are mixed together and then the audio signal is fed through the VST effects you’ve chosen. The red led behind the label “Master Output” lights up when the signal distorts during playback. It may happen when one or more of your channels are too loud. This is called clipping and it makes your signal sound bad. You can fix it by lowering the master output level or the level of the individual channels.
8 Sequencing a track in Songmode
As was mentioned before, a Tunafish track consists of a number of segments sequenced after each other. You can do this in the Songmode. Go there by clicking on the “Song mode” button under Viewmode.
You can drag segments from the segment-list on the lefthand side of the interface and drop them into the strip in the work-area. You can remove segments from the sequence by dragging them out of the strip. They will automatically disappear. You can also shuffle and reorder segments by dragging them and dropping them in other places in the sequence. If you hit the play-button in Songmode, the entire song will play. The “Export WAV” button exports the current sequence to a stereo 44.1KHz 16bit Wav-file. This is a standard CD-quality audiofile which can be burned directly to an audio-CD (to be played in a CD player) or edited further with another application. The “Export MIDI” exports the notes from your song to a standard MIDI file (.MID). This way you can use the composition you’ve made into other music composition environments.
When you export a MIDI file, only the notes will be exported. Plugin settings and controller information will not be saved. Always keep a Tunafish file as a an original file if you wish to continue working on it later!
9 MIDI Recording (configuring Tunafish for MIDI)
With Tunafish you can use external midi hardware to do live recording of notes and controller movements. Setting up MIDI input If you have a midi-controller, master keyboard or another midi device which can send midi messages to your PC, you can select it on the Settings screen: “Midi input device”. Some keyboards are “velocity sensitive” which means they’ll also tell Tunafish how much pressure was used when hitting a key. If you wish to ignore this and use maximum velocity all the time, check the checkbox “Ignore midi velocity”. Setting up your soundcard (ASIO) When you hit a key, it takes a fraction of a second before you actually hear the sound come out of your PC. This time is used to calculate and generate the sound and is called the “Latency” of your soundcard. The lower your latency is, the better. In order to get a good usable latency for MIDI recording, it is recommended to use ASIO drivers with your soundcard. If your soundcard doesn’t come with ASIO drivers (you can tell it doesn’t if the “Use ASIO” option is disabled) you can try out the free ASIO4ALL drivers which you can download from www.asio4all.com By default Tunafish uses MME for playing back sounds. This is the slow – but very safe – system provided by Windows. When using MME, the latency is far too high for recording MIDI so you’ll want to select “Use ASIO” from the settings window. Setting up ASIO and configuring buffersizes is advanced stuff. Please refer to the documentation of your soundcard and/or ASIO driver for more details.
The buffersize you choose for ASIO affects the performance of Tunafish. If the buffer is too small, you may start to hear pops, crackles and distorted sound! In that case: increase the buffersize to a safer (bigger) size!
MIDI Learn MIDI learn is the a very important MIDI feature of Tunafish. If you have a midi controller device, chances are that it has a bunch of knobs or faders which you can use to control musical parameters. Using MIDI learn, you can very easily assign a controller to any tweakable parameter of a VST plugin. Here’s how it works: 1. Open your plugin instrument’s editor window (click ctrl-E) 2. Click the “MIDI-learn” button in the window’s menubar 3. Tweak the parameter on the screen you wish to link to your controller. The
parameter’s number and title show up in the popup window
4. Fiddle with the knob or slider on your hardware controller. Again, the MIDI-controller number shows up in the popup window.
5. Finally, click the “Store” button. If the button isn’t active, then you had already saved this same setting previously.
6. Repeat this for every parameter you wish to control with your keyboard or controller.
You only need to do this once for every instrument, because Tunafish saves the link-settings for future use (the settings are stored in a little file called “cclookup.dat”). 10 Recording MIDI and quantizing
Once you’ve configured Tunafish for MIDI, recording MIDI is fairly straightforward. If your MIDI keyboard is connected and configured properly it should work as soon as you start up Tunafish. To test this, simply load up a VSTi and hit some keys.. you should hear the VSTi play them back.
To record what you’re playing, enable the “Record MIDI” led right underneath the play/transport buttons. Once you hit play (or the spacebar), Tunafish starts recording whatever you play or do with your keyboard (keys and controllers). This same way you can also record the notes you play from the PC keyboard.
Once you hit stop or the spacebar to stop playback/recording the recording mode is automatically disabled for you.
Tunafish doesn’t have a metronome function to help you play in the beat. However, it’s extremely easy to make one using an unused drumchannel. Use a sample of a closed hihat to provide the ticks you need.
Quantizing When you’re done recording your MIDI stuff, some notes may not be timed correctly, or the length/duration of some notes may be off. In some cases you may not like this, and prefer it all to be a little bit more “straightened out”. If this is the case you may want to apply “quantization” to the recorded part. The Quantizer (ctrl-Q, in the Edit menu) looks at all the notes in the measures you’ve selected. It rounds the start of each note and its duration to the nearest gridline. For example: if you’ve set the “Start of notes” option to “16 th”, it will move each note to the nearest 16th gridline in the pianoroll. It works the same way with the durations.
11 Recording VST controllers on the screen
Many VST instruments offer lots of knobs and buttons in its editorwindow that let you change the sound and effects that you hear. Sometimes it’s nice to record the movement of the knobs when you’re editing the sound. This lets you dynamically change the sound while your song is playing.
An all-time favourite controller to modify is the filter-cutoff. Many analogue-styled synthesizers let you modify these filter settings to create great soundefftects. Look for “cutoff” and “resonance” and check them out!
Click the “Record MIDI” led to tell Tunafish that you want to record all button movements. Next open the editor-window of the VST instrument in the channel you wish to record. You can quickly open this editor with the CTRL-E key combination or by clicking the little editor-button behind the name of the VST instrument you’ve loaded.
Then start playback of the song and tweak all the knobs and sliders and buttons you like. You can see the recorded controllers in the sequencer overview. A white bar in the bottom of the measure indicates that controllers have been recorded in that particular measure.
Just like recording controllers you can also record movement of the volume-sliders of the Tunafish mixer. This works with the volume sliders of individual channels and with the master volume sliders.
If you aren’t happy about what you’ve recorded you can remove the controllers. Go into Overview mode, select the section you wish to remove and then select “Remove tweaking” from the Edit-menu. It works the same way for recorded volume-slider movements. Sometimes you don’t want to record knob movements, but simply want to store a snapshot of the current knob-settings into Tunafish. You can do this by selecting “Make VSTi snapshot” from the Channel-menu or pressing F12. The settings of the current VSTi are then recorded and will be used in the entire channel (from beginning to end – not just from the current position).
Some plugins won’t let a host remember all their settings. Very often the main-volume controller of a plugin can not recorded so it is recommended that you use Tunafish’s volume sliders to control the output levels.
12 Freezing Channels
What is “Freezing”? You may have heard of the term “freezing” when using sequencers. People use it to conserve CPU power when using heavy plugins. Basically, what it does is calculating an entire channel before playing back and remembering all the audio in memory. This way, when you hit playback, the CPU doesn’t need to do anything for this channel and simply plays back the audio that is already waiting somewhere in memory. The drawback of freezing is that you can’t change anything about the channel (except its volume) while it is frozen. You can unfreeze a channel at any time, change stuff, and then re-freeze it. But this takes a bit of time ofcourse… Tunafish one-touch-freezing Tunafish offers you an extremey easy to use freeze function: Every channel has its own dedicated freeze-button. Freezing is as easy as hitting the freeze-button. Unfreezing is… you guessed it.. just a matter of hitting it again. Clever use of freezing easily saves you up to 90% of your available CPU power and lets you use even the heaviest, most CPU intensive instruments and effects without a problem.
When a channel is frozen, you can’t add notes to it, paste to it, or change its effects settings. That’s why the effects and VST buttons in the mixer are hidden behind the snowflake symbol. Ofcourse you can still adjust the mixer volume and use the mute-button of a frozen channel. Changing Tempo and Shuffle When you change global variables, like tempo and shuffle settings, all frozen channels need to be unfrozen. Tunafish will ask you if you want to unfreeze the channels and will do it for you if you agree.
Saving tracks: what about those “.frozen” files? When saving a track with frozen channels, these channels will be saved in a separate file, named “songname.frozen”. These files contain all the rendered audio so they can be quite big. It is safe to delete the “.frozen” files and keep only the “.tuna” files. However, you then need to re-freeze those channels the next time you open your track, ofcourse!
When you render your song to WAV or MP3, it is recommended to unfreeze all channels first. Things like trailing delays, reverbs, LFOs and evolving instruments may sound more natural when rendered in real-time.
13 Using presets with your plugins
FXB and FXP When looking for interesting plugins to use with Tunafish, you may come across so-called patches and banks. These files (also known as FXBs and FXPs) are basically sets of presets (FXB) or single instrument presets (FXP) which you can load into certain plugins to replace the standard presets that are already there. Using the “Banks” menu in the plugin window you can load and save banks of presets. Presets are always meant for a single plugin, and you can’t use them with other plugins! Tunafish will warn you when you try to open a bank with the wrong plugin. When you save a bank, all current presets (every item you see in the “Presets” menu) are saved into a single bank which you can then share with others.
Please keep in mind that some preset banks are sold commercially and you should not simply copy these and distribute them to others. You can always share your own presets, ofcourse!
You can also import one or more single presets (FXP) using the option “Load Preset(s)”. If you import a single preset, it will be imported into the currently active preset slot (in the example above it will be in the slot called “Velosync”). If you select multiple presets (as in the example on the right), they will be imported starting with the first preset slot. This way you can easily create your own bank with favorite presets from several other banks.
“Extract all Presets”, the last option in the menu, will save ALL presets currently loaded into the plugin to separate files. You have to specify the base-filename and Tunafish will save all presets with to that folder using numbers.
14 Tunafish as a Portable Application
Studio on a Stick Ever wondered how nice it would be to simply have all you need to make music on a single memory stick or DVD? Tunafish can do that for you if you run it as a so-called “Portable Application”. A Portable Application is a program which doesn’t leave any tracks on the PC it’s running on. It doesn’t write things to the registry or leaves .ini files in the Windows folder – and best of all: it doesn’t require you to enter you serial number any time you run the application on another PC.
Simply click the checkbox “Run as Portable Application” in the settings window. You should always do this on the PC on which you’ve registered Tunafish! Tunafish will now create an .ini-file in the Tunafish folder which contains all your settings and your registration information.
You can now copy the Tunafish folder to a DVD or memory stick and use it on any PC.
If you have selected ASIO in your settings, Tunafish will expect ASIO drivers on every PC you’re running it on. It may be better to use MME because this will work with every PC. The alternative is to modify your settings every time!
Even though Tunafish will not require you to enter your serial number on each new PC, a lot of plugins will require you to register the first time. Keep in mind that it may not be legal to run some plugins on more than one PC!
By unchecking the same checkbox in the settings menu you remove the ini-file with your settings from the Tunafish folder. From then on, Tunafish will use the settings stored in the Windows registry again. Please note that if you uncheck this box on a guest PC (one you didn’t use to register Tunafish on) you may not be able to run Tunafish from the stick anymore without entering your serial number again! 15 Automatic Backup
If you select “Automatically backup every 4 minutes” in the settings window, Tunafish will save a rescue copy of your current work to the harddisk. If you encounter a crash while you were working on a project, Tunafish may be able to salvage your work the next time you start it up. Please note that it is not recommended to use automatic backup when you’re running Tunafish from a memory stick because saving to the stick may be so slow that you’ll get an interruption of the audio playback. Small interruptions may also occur when Tunafish saves your project in the background while you’re listening to a really large project. You can temporarily disable auto-backup when playback performance is critical.
16 The Arpeggiator
Arpeggiating a VST instrument Some VST instruments feature a so-called “arpeggiator”. This is a nifty little tool that turns chords into rhythmic patterns of notes which makes it seem like you’re playing individual notes on a keyboard in rapid succession. For example:
The pattern on the left is what was entered. The pattern on the right is how it might actually sound when it was processed by an arpeggiator. Ofcourse not all plugins have one, so Tunafish has its own arpegiator for use with any of your VSTi plugins. The Tunafish Arpeggiator The arpeggiator in Tunafish is only available for VST instruments. Hence, the button to enable it is only visible when you’re on the channel view of a VST channel.
Clicking the Arpeggio-button will bring up the simple control panel for the Arpeggiator for the current channel. You can use the topmost checkbox to enable and disable the arpeggiator. If it’s enabled, the “led” on the button in the channelview will be lit – so you can see at a glance whether the arpeggiator is currently processing the notes played in the current channel. Try out various combinations of “Rhythm” and “Pattern” to see what sounds best with your instrument. If “Retrigger pattern” is checked, then the arpeggiator will restart its pattern upon the first note of each measure. If it’s unchecked, the pattern will continue indefinitely.
17 Cool things to know
Defining a template for new tracks When you start up Tunafish or select “New track” from the file menu, Tunafish opens up a fresh new empty track for you with a couple of samples in it. Through a trick it is possible to define your own template for this. Simply create a Tunafish song that contains whatever you’d like for a fresh song. For example, if there are WAV-samples you use a lot you could import those instead of the standard samples. Or if you always use a certain VSTi in your tracks you could open that one in your first channel. Next, save your track to disk and rename it to “template.new”. Place this in your Tunafish folder and from then on you’ll always start up with your newly created template! Micro mode You can switch Tunafish temporarily into micro-mode by tapping the “Backspace” button. Hit it again to restore normal view mode. Randomizing VSTi presets This is a special hidden feature only for those who read manuals :-) Go to a VSTi channel and press the F11 key. This will randomize the parameters of your current preset. Sounds don’t always get better this way, but sometimes it makes for interesting new inspiration. Importing MIDI When you import a .MID file Tunafish creates a new segment for it. Next, the first 10 channels of the midi file are imported into this channel. Only note-data is imported, controllers and other data is not interpreted. No sounds are assigned to it yet. You can then copy/paste the parts you want to use into your own segments. Reordering your samples When you’re in a drum-channel, you can change the display order of every drumsound simply by dragging and dropping the box containing the drum-name in the right spot. Using Chordspace with Tunafish Chordspace is an innovative VSTi-plugin which creates chords from single notes and sends them to other channels as midi-messages (so it doesn’t create any sound!). If you want to use it with Tunafish, you simply have to change the output channels in Chordspace to the desired Tunafish-channels (1-10). In the example on the right: all output would be sent to the plugin in the third channel in Tunafish (indicated by the “Ch” column in the image). Chordspace was created by Nuffink and can be found through http://www.kvraudio.com
18 Keyboard shortcuts
In the main window: Ctrl-N New track Ctrl-O Open track Ctrl-S Save track Ctrl-X Cut to clipboard Ctrl-C Copy to clipboard Ctrl-V Paste from clipboard Ctrl-Q Run Quantizer Ctrl-U Transpose selection up Ctrl-D Transpose selection down Ctrl-K Add new segment Ctrl-A Select entire channel Ctrl-L Open controller list Ctrl-E Open VSTi editor
Ctrl-R Add controller range Ins Insert before selection Del Delete selection F1 Help F12 Store VSTi patch snapshot Shift < Previous VST preset Shift > Next VST preset - Zoom out + Zoom in Space Start/Stop playback Backspace Micro mode
In the VST editor window: Ctrl-O Load presetbank Ctrl-S Save presetbank F2 Rename current preset 19 Contact and copyrights
Tunafish was designed and developed by Bram Bos http://www.brambos.com mailto:[email protected] Tunafish, the Tunafish logo, this document: “Using Tunafish”: © 2004, 2007 Bram Bos VST is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH ASIO is a trademark of Steinberg Soft- und Hardware GmbH http://www.steinberg.net
