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The Piano Roll

Piano roll is a feature that can be found in most music production software. It is the ability to visually place where you want the sound in the art of drum programming. The piano roll window itself is a massive matrix of squares made by intersecting lines of X and Y axis on a graph. Each horizontal strip is interlocked with a note of a key on a virtual keyboard which stands at the very left standing up vertically. These keys on the horizontal strip can also be replaced with different sounds by using soundfonts. The procedure is to load up a sound or sample you like, go to piano roll and fill the empty squares with colored boxes in the places that sound best to you until you are satisfied with your newly created pattern. Depending on your bar settings, your newly created pattern should loop or may continue. Most bar forms are in 4/4 form, which means 4 beats for every bar. The average rapper spits 16 bars per verse, to you as a beat maker this means that there are 64 beats for verse verse in hip hop. Piano roll also has functions that allow you to change the velocity, pitch and pan to every note you make be using vertical bars in the bottom of the window which you can adjust negative or positive and can also act as left or right.