Core Features

🎵 Contract-Based Composing

Define a musical contract and generate within those constraints:

• Set key, chords, BPM, and bars to establish the musical framework
• Gemini generates MIDI that respects the contract
• Lyria generates audio for texture and atmosphere
• All tracks in a scene share the same contract for coherent compositions

🎼 Arrange Mode

Lay your scenes out as a full song, by hand, without leaving the app:

• Compose on top, arrange at the bottom: drop scenes onto a horizontal timeline, repeat them, and reorder them
• Copies and linked copies: edit one chorus and every linked chorus follows
• Paint layers bar by bar, including layers borrowed from other scenes, which keep their own scene's bus
• Your real mix: faders, pan and panel bus effects stay live while the song plays; only sound changes re-render

Arrange Mode guide →

🧩 Extensible Plugin SDK

All built-in panels run on the Plugin SDK. These are on by default:

• Drums - Drum-pattern MIDI with a built-in sample-based drum sampler
• Instruments - Pitched, polyphonic sample-based instruments
• Synths - MIDI generation played through Surge XT or any VST3/AU instrument
• Bass - One monophonic bassline from your description
• Ensemble - Two to six voices written together, for Strings, Horns or Winds
• Arpeggiator - A repeating arp pattern designed from your description
• Pads - The scene's chords voiced as sustained pads that rotate across Surge XT patches
• Loops - Audio loop and sample browser with time-stretching and effects

Turn these on in the plugins panel when you want them:

• Stems - Audio from text prompts, with optional stem splitting
• Chat - An assistant that builds and edits your scene from plain-language requests
• Recorder - Loop-aware microphone recording
• Animate - Movement over time: pumper, autopan, tremolo, trance gate, filter sweeps, risers, ducking and more
• Mix Assets - A palette of hits, risers and shots
• Text2Voice - Paste some text and hear it sung over your scene
• Freesound - Sounds from freesound.org that match the scene's key and BPM
• Synth V - Vocal lines sung through Synthesizer V Studio 2 Pro (needs Synth V and an installed voice); lyrics with several verses become one take per verse (see Lyrics per verse)

Upcoming plugin integrations: Splice, ElevenLabs, live coding, and agentic prompting.

🎤 Singing with Synth V

The Synth V panel sings your words through Synthesizer V Studio 2 Pro: type or paste the lyrics, pick a style and press Sing. The melody and harmonies are composed to fit your scene, the take opens in Synth V, and once it is bounced each voice lands on its own lane in Signals & Sorcery.

Lyrics per verse

Write the lyrics as verses: leave a blank line between them, or start each with a line such as [Verse 2] (header lines are never sung). Press Sing and you get one take per verse, all on the same melody, in one Synth V project and one bounce: each verse's words on its own lanes, named V1 Lead, V2 Lead and so on (harmonies included), with a Verse 1, Verse 2 header above each take's rows in the panel.

The takes form a set of alternatives, so in Arrange mode each section sings its own verse by its position: the first verse section sings verse 1, the second sings verse 2, with nothing to set. Right-click a section and open Take ▸ to pin a different verse.

• The verses times the voices, plus the scene's other Synth V lanes, must fit in 16 lanes. If they don't, Sing refuses before anything is created and gives the numbers: "3 verses × 6 voices = 18 lanes, but this scene has room for 16: use fewer verses or voices."
• One verse behaves exactly as before: a single take, with the lanes named as they were.
• After ✍ New words, the next Sing sings the new words.

🎧 Audio Output

• One stereo output for everything: built-in audio, headphones or any interface
• Follows your system output device, or stays on the one you choose
• Pick the channel pair on multi-output interfaces, and set the buffer size
• Master FX for your monitoring (room correction, headphone virtualization), never printed to exports

Audio Output guide →

🎹 Instrument Support

• Surge XT ships as the default synth with bundled presets
• Any VST3/AU instrument can be loaded per track via the instrument selector
• The synth generator picks appropriate Surge XT patches based on sound descriptions
• Custom instruments preserve their state across scenes and project save/load

How to load your own VST3/AU instruments →

❄ Freeze

Free up CPU by turning a track's instrument and effects into audio:

• The track ❄ on a track row renders that track to a stem and plays it instead of the live instrument. Your mixer (volume, pan, mute, solo) stays live. Click it again to unfreeze.
• The scene ❄ in the scene list freezes every track in that scene, and Freeze ALL (the ❄ in the Scenes title bar) freezes the whole project. While a batch runs, their counts tick up one track at a time (0/7, 1/7 … 7/7).
• Tracks with an instrument (MIDI tracks) can freeze; audio tracks such as loops and stems can't.
• Change a frozen track's sound and it unfreezes itself so you hear the edit; a note tells you why. Unfreezing brings back the instrument and effects exactly as they were, including each plugin's Dry/Wet setting.
• Changed an instrument inside its own plugin window? The app can't see that, so use ↻ Force re-render stem in the track's drawer.
• Playback stops while a stem renders.

🗂️ Bring Your Own Sounds

• Import your own sample libraries: drop your WAV drum kits and instrument samples into the drum and instrument generators; they sit alongside (or replace) the factory packs and feed generation and shuffle automatically
• Load your own instrument plugins: put any VST3/AU synth or sampler on a synth track
• Imports are kept separate from shipped packs, copied safely, and easy to back up

Custom Sounds guide →

🔄 Scene-Based Composition

Organize your music into scenes:

• Group tracks into logical units that share a contract
• Duplicate scenes to try variations
• Arrange scenes into a full song in Arrange mode