Widgets

Widgets are floating panels you can open on top of the main window. Each one is a self-contained tool: a tuner, a chord detector, a piano visualizer, and so on. They're always available on top of the arrangement and the piano roll, and you can have several open at once.

Opening the widget picker

Click the ··· button in the transport, or press F8 from anywhere in the app. The picker organizes every widget into three categories:

• Performance - playing and visualizing what you play
• Composition - reading and analyzing what's already written
• Tools - measurement and tuning

Click a widget's tile to open it. Press F8 or Esc, or click outside the picker, to close it.

Working with a widget

Each widget is a floating window:

• Drag the title bar to move it around
• Click the X to close it
• Click the gear, where available, to open that widget's own settings
• Click the expand icon, where available, to fill the screen with that widget

Melony remembers which widgets were open and where you put them.

Performance widgets

Wheels

Don't have a MIDI keyboard? No problem! Melony provides two built-in vertical wheels that match the pitch bend and modulation wheels on a MIDI keyboard. Drag the pitch wheel up or down to bend playing notes up to two semitones; it springs back to center when you let go. The mod wheel stays where you put it and adds a subtle vibrato to playing notes.

Pads

A sixteen-pad grid for playing drum kits. Each pad triggers one piece of the kit. When the currently selected track has a drum instrument loaded, the pads light up as you play them.

The Pad widget has its own controls:

• Layout - Match the Launchkey's two-row arrangement, or switch to a 4×4 grid
• Lighting - Choose from a variety of fun lighting effects
• Colors - Tint the pads by drum group (kick, snare, hats, toms, cymbals, percussion) or use a single neutral color

If a Launchkey is connected, the physical pads mirror what's on screen. Pressing a pad on the hardware lights up the matching tile, and clicking a tile sends the note to the selected track.

Visualizer

A piano-roll view of your whole project. Notes from every track fall from the top of the panel toward a keyboard at the bottom. When a note lands, the key lights up. Playing live reverses the direction, and the notes rise from the keyboard as you play them.

Every aspect of the visualizer can be adjusted in its settings:

• Note effect - Choose from a variety of fun effects for the notes
• Impact effects - Fire, Ripple, and Pulse
• Background - Ambient Glow, Inferno, Aurora, Plasma, or none. You can even upload your own image to use as a background!
• Falling speed - Slow (4s), Normal (2.5s), Fast (1.5s), or Turbo (1s)
• Range - Auto-fit to the notes, or always show all 88 keys
• Grid - Octaves + measures + beats, beats only, measures only, or off

The header has two buttons worth knowing about. The expand button fills the whole window with the visualizer. The video button opens the render modal, which produces a full .mp4 or .webm video of the visualizer playing your melody, up to 4K at 60 fps, with an optional title card, and artist name. The render runs offline as fast as your machine allows.

Composition widgets

Sheet Music

Shows MIDI notes as standard notation. Notes, rests, chords, clefs, key signature, and time signature are all handled automatically from the project's current settings.

By default the widget shows only the selected track. Enable Grand staff in settings to show every track at once, split into treble and bass hands at a pitch you choose. Enable Color notes by track to tint each note with its track's color.

Other settings include zoom (40% to 300%), duration quantization, whether rests are drawn, whether drum tracks are included, and whether the score auto-scrolls to keep the current line in view during playback.

During playback, notes light up in their track color as the playhead reaches them. The header's image button exports the current score as a PNG.

Chord Finder

Identifies the chord that's being played, whether from live input or from the timeline. It shows:

• The chord name, spelled with sharps or flats depending on your project key
• A roman numeral relative to the project key (for example V7 or ii°)
• Each note's name as a pill, with the root and bass note highlighted
• A small piano showing which keys are currently active
• A confidence bar - high when the notes exactly match a known chord, lower when the interpretation is a guess
• Alternatives - up to three other chords that also fit the same notes. Click any of them to hear it played on the selected track.

The Chord History strip keeps the last twenty chords you've played. Click any chip to hear that chord again, right-click to remove it, or use Play progression to step through the whole history as a sequence.

The Analyze button reads the currently selected MIDI clip and fills the history with its entire chord progression. This is the fastest way to learn what an imported MIDI file is actually doing.

Hold time in the settings controls how long the widget waits before committing a new chord name. Raise it if you play chords as slow arpeggios and don't want the name to flicker.

Tools

Tuner

A chromatic instrument tuner that listens to the input on the currently selected audio track. It shows the detected note, its octave, the exact frequency in hertz, and how far sharp or flat you are in cents. A needle on an arc display swings to the side you should tune toward, and the readout turns green when you're within five cents of the target.

Two modes are available:

• Chromatic - Detects any note
• Selective - Pick a tuning and target one string at a time. Presets include guitar (standard, drop D, drop C, half and full step down, DADGAD, open G, open D, open E), bass (4- and 5-string), and ukulele

AutoPitch

A real-time pitch correction widget. It listens to the selected audio track and bends incoming pitch toward the nearest note in the key and scale you specify. The piano keyboard at the bottom lights up the note being detected, snapped to the scale.

The big knob controls strength, which doubles as a style preset:

• Off - Bypass
• Light - Gentle correction for a natural feel
• Moderate - The classic "pop vocal" setting
• Strong - Firm tuning, audible but musical
• Robotic - Full hard-tune effect

AutoPitch adds a hidden effect to the audio track it's working on, so it's part of the track's effect chain and will be applied when you export.