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Compose

A staff that takes a tap where a pen would go — a piano's grand staff, a string quartet's four, a choir's. Choose the value, touch the line or the space, and the note is there — engraved, in time, ready to play back, print or hand to Sibelius.

Open compose free · no sign-up · works offline

What it does

Write by tapping. Pick a note value on the rail — whole to sixty-fourth, dots, rests — and tap the staff where the note goes. It lands on that line or space at that beat, spelled for the key, with the rests around it re-grouped the way an engraver would group them. Tap the same beat again for a chord; drag a head up or down to re-pitch it; select a run and make it a triplet, a quintuplet, a tie, a slur. Accidentals, articulations, ornaments, glissandi and rolled chords are one tap on a selection. Up to four voices per staff, with notes that cross to the other staff when a passage asks for it.

Change anything anywhere. Key, time and clef changes go on the bar or the beat you tap, and the music re-flows to fit: a change to 3/4 re-cuts the bars with tied notes where they have to split. Dynamics, hairpins and text sit on beats and half-beats of their own, so they can be selected, dragged in time, lifted or lowered, and deleted like anything else.

Shape the form. A Form rail puts double and final barlines, repeats with first and second endings, segno and coda signs, D.C. and D.S. al Fine or al Coda, To Coda, Fine, rehearsal letters and tempo changes (Adagio ♩ = 60) on the bar you tap.

Mark it for the hands. A Piano rail puts a pedal line (Ped. to the lift, with retakes), an 8va or 8vb line (the notes under it draw an octave lower or higher; the pitch is untouched) and fingering — a digit on each notehead, stamped on a selection or by tapping heads with the digit armed — where you tap.

Score it for an ensemble. A piece starts as a piano, a voice and piano, a string quartet, a choir or a guitar, and the Instruments sheet adds, renames, reorders and removes instruments from a catalogue of twenty — up to twelve on sixteen staves. Families share a bracket, a keyboard keeps its brace, names stand before the first line and abbreviations after; the pedal belongs to the keyboard and a note crosses only within its own instrument. Everything is written at concert pitch and, for now, every instrument plays with the piano's sound.

Ornament it. A second Notes rail turns grace notes on: the value you have armed becomes a small note before the next note you tap towards, slashed or plain, beamed when there are several; tremolo strokes, marcato and staccatissimo go on a selection.

And the rest of the page. Hold a button for its family: ppp and fff behind pp and ff, sudden dynamics (sfz, fp) behind sf ▾, dashed cresc. lines and hairpins from nothing behind the hairpins, 15ma behind 8va, Ped. ✱ and Sost. Ped. behind Ped., beat units behind ♩ =, numbers or a word behind the rehearsal letter. A % repeats the bar before it; u.c. lays an una corda line; r.h. / l.h. mark the hands; the Notes rail adds portato, breath and caesura marks, trills with a wavy line or an accidental, inverted and delayed turns, and a stem flip and beam break (or join) for when the automatic engraving is not what you meant. The Chords rail writes chord symbols over the staff — Am, B7/A, Bm7(♭5), E7alt. — from a root, a quality and an optional bass, or typed. All of it is heard: rit. and accel. shape the tempo, ornaments play as written, a fermata holds, a caesura pauses.

Hear it. Play, pause, stop, skip by the bar, drag the playhead, set a tempo. Playback follows the form — repeats twice, endings in turn, the jumps — and slows or quickens at each tempo mark; the pedal holds the notes under it; grace notes steal their moment before the beat and tremolos re-strike; dynamics and hairpins shape the velocities; slurs play legato; rolled chords roll.

Keep it. Pieces save as you write and, with an account, follow you between devices. Undo reaches back two hundred steps.

Out of Chopinly

PDF. The export sheet shows page one at the staff size you choose, on Letter or A4, with the margins and a title block, then saves the file to the device or shares it. Add to Scores puts the same PDF into your Scores library with the title, composer and tags, so the piece you wrote is the piece you practise, with bookmarks and Pencil ink like any other score; send it again after a change and the library copy is replaced in place.

MusicXML. Export MusicXML writes a MusicXML 4.0 file — pitches, rhythms, chords, ties, tuplets, voices, cross-staff notes, key, time and clef changes, articulations, ornaments, dynamics, hairpins, text, tempo, pedal and octave lines, fingering, grace notes, tremolo, chord symbols, lyrics, every part with its name and bracket — that Sibelius, MuseScore, Finale and Dorico open. The reverse works too: import a .musicxml, .xml or compressed .mxl file from any of those programs (or from a scan you had recognised elsewhere) — a quartet, a choir, a song with piano — and it becomes a composition you can edit, play and print, every part kept. What Compose cannot hold is set aside and named: percussion and tablature, more than three staves to an instrument, a transposing part's transposition.

Made for the glass

Compose was written for an iPad with an Apple Pencil, and works with a finger or a mouse. The pen places; a palm resting on the glass does not. Pinch to zoom, pan with two fingers, or switch to Pan mode and use one. Every button is a real square, big enough to hit while the other hand holds the keyboard's edge. Nothing is recognised or guessed: what you tap is what you get, which is the point.

Your music stays yours

Compositions live in your browser on your device. With an account they are backed up and synced like the rest of your practice; without one, nothing leaves the device. Exports and imports are files you choose — no server sees them.