Tutorial

Before proceeding, please update StarForge to its latest version.

This tutorial will the cover basics of transcribing a song in StarForge. Most features will be useful if you're just modifying existing songs, so keep reading even if you're not interested in making text-files from scratch.

Overview

1. Load and save txt-files. Press Ctrl+S to quicksave.
2. Load a music track. Supports mp3, ogg and wav.
3. Play verse: switches between playing the whole song and a single verse.
Looping: loop the selected verse or whole song.
Metronome: keeps tempo by tapping on every beat.
4. Play and pause song. Using hotkeys space and return work too, respectively.
5. Volume sliders. Control volume.
6. Enter tempo as digits.
7. Scroll automatically when the position marker leaves the screen.
8. Adjust gap. Faster way for adjusting it later on.
9. Save note and verse positions when adjusting gap and tempo.
10. Perform operations on selected notes. Clicking it does nothing when no notes are selected.
11. Change header data. Note that scale and key are used only by StarForge, and as such are not required for your song to work in UltraStar.

Using StarForge

Load the music file you want to transcribe by clicking "Load track" and locating the music file on your hard drive. Doing so will bring up the sequencer.

You can scroll the view with the mouse wheel, and left and right arrow keys. Press space bar to make sure that StarForge is playing the file correctly and adjust the volume to comfortable level.

Try creating new notes by clicking on the sequencer. Play the song to make sure that you're hearing the MIDI preview and adjust MIDI accordingly. If volume is up and you're still not hearing anything, check the number next to the note's pitch for its octave. If it's less than 4, you can pitch the note up by clicking and dragging it; you won't be able to hear notes pitched lower than that.

You can adjust a note's length by moving the cursor near the right edge of the note and dragging. You can erase notes by right-clicking on them. You can select a note by holding ctrl and left-clicking on it. This makes performing operations like writing lyrics for an entire verse possible. The text beneath the notes are their lyrics. You can change a single note's lyrics by double-clicking on it.

Next create a new verse by right-clicking above the grid in the sequencer and selecting "New verse" from the pop-up menu. You can also delete a verse from the same pop-up menu you used to create one.

In UltraStar the lyrics in view change according to your position in the song. In StarForge the interval between these changes, though closer to a line in general music terms, is called a verse.

You'll notice that the sequencer changes color according to verses.

You can select a verse by left-clicking on it. A selected verse will be slightly lighter than others. Pressing up and down arrows will scroll between verses. This is the fastest way of navigation in StarForge 0.7. When you have "Play verse" enabled, StarForge will start playing back from the currently selected verse instead of the beginning of the song. Clicking on a selected verse, or pressing A on the keyboard, will select all the notes inside it. This is useful when, for example writing lyrics.

You can resize a verse by taking the mouse near its left edge and dragging. Doing this on the first verse will adjust the gap of a song. If you enable timekeeping by clicking "Keep time", notes and verses will keep their positions in relation to the actual timing of the song. Otherwise they'll move when you adjust it.

You can use an online tempo tapper like this to calculate your song's tempo. Tap away until the average BPM stops swaying. Press "Set tempo" to enter the accurate number to StarForge. Now disable autoscrolling and enable metronome and change midi volume to 0. Start playing the song and adjust the gap until you can hear it tapping accurately on every beat. You can fine tune this value by using the buttons in the upper edge of the window.

When you're done, disable the metronome. By now you should be well on your way to transcribing your first song in StarForge.

More functionality

You can ctrl+right-click on a note to set its values individually. Click on a selected note to do the same on all notes selected.

When transcribing, you might want to preview a note's pitch without playing the song. Alt+left-clicking on the sequencer will do this.

You can set the scale and key of a song by clicking "Scale" in the top-right edge of the window. This will highlight the pitches according to it in the sequencer. You can change also change a song's key by alt+right-clicking on the sequencer.

Click "Header" in the upper right edge of the window to modify header tags. Some tags like tempo and creator are included by default and can't be removed here.

Click "Note" to perform operations on a batch of selected notes. You can also copy the selected notes to clipboard with Ctrl+C and paste them to the currently selected verse with Ctrl+V.

Press Ctrl+F to search from lyrics in the current project. Press Ctrl+F again to browse matches.

At this point it might be a good idea to check the known bugs to avoid possible problems.

Links

That's all for this tutorial. If you're interested in writing an alternative tutorial, or have already written one, I'd be happy to link to it from here. If so, please contact me via email.