What and where?

14 panels, boxed

Point at one in the picture to read what it does, or pick it from the list below. The two groups are the window's two halves: the things you press, and the places your project lives. Nothing in the picture is staged, and nothing has been tidied up for the photograph.

The menus

Phonon and View. Saving, settings, quitting and the About box are under the first; the sidebars, track headers and the extra windows are under the second. Almost nothing else in the application is reachable only from a menu, which is why there are two rather than eight - the command search in the top bar covers the rest, by name.

The transport readout

Five fields and a meter, left to right: the bar and beat the playhead is on, the tempo, the time signature, the chord the harmonic engine is currently holding, and the elapsed time. The meter on the end is the master output alongside the DSP load, which are the two numbers that tell you the mix is about to clip or the engine is about to run out of headroom. Neither used to be visible without opening another window.

The action pad

Documentation, Battuto, musical typing, the metronome, the pattern bank, command search, bounce, and the drum pattern library. Musical typing plays the selected track from the computer keyboard. The bank and the pattern library are both drag sources: you drag out of them and onto a track. Command search is the one worth learning first, because every result it gives you also shows its keyboard shortcut, and the point is that you stop needing it.

DO

Split, duplicate, combine, mute. It opens a strip below the bar rather than a menu, so the commands sit above the regions they are about to act on rather than covering them. It is a panel toggle rather than a tool, which is why it is shaped differently from everything beside it.

Crayon

A drawing mode rather than an editing mode. You pick a nib and draw on the timeline, and what you drew becomes notes. When it is on, the tool pad beside it swaps out for the crayon's own controls and the bar keeps its width so nothing moves under your pointer.

The region tools

Six modes, one active at a time: normal moves and trims, stretch drags an edge to compress or extend the audio, loop extends a region by repeating it, fade drags a fade in or out, slice cuts a region in two, and automation select drags a box around automation nodes instead of touching regions at all. Exactly one is lit, because which one is lit is the only state there is to read.

The hierarchy

Tracks, buses, folders and the modules inside them, all in the same list. A new project already has some: a Structure folder holding the song structure, the harmonic engine and the melodic engine, plus a control rack and a master. Buses are in the same tree as tracks rather than in a separate mixer view, because in Phonon they are the same kind of thing with different wiring.

On Deck, Tutorial, Help Me, Strategies

Tutorial is how does any of this work, and it walks you through making a first track. Help Me is I know what I want to make: you say it in your own words and it comes back with the conventions of that style and which modules to reach for. Strategies is I am stuck in the middle of something, and it deals you a card. On Deck is the pile of things you have queued up to try.

The ruler

The bar numbers along the top, with the current chord printed beneath each bar - so the progression is legible from the timeline itself rather than only from the harmonic engine. Clicking moves the playhead. The narrow lanes just below it are loop, punch in, song sections and markers.

The track headers

The name, and the small controls that belong to that track alone: mute, gain, record arming, and the module glyph. The column stays put while the timeline scrolls sideways underneath it, and it can be widened or hidden entirely from the View menu when you want the bars back.

The arrangement

Every region in the project, laid out against the ruler above it. Audio and MIDI regions live on the same timeline and are moved the same way. It is empty on a new project, which is the honest state to learn it in: the lanes you can see are the tracks that a new project starts with, not material somebody left there.

The song overview

A compressed map of the entire project in one strip. It is pinned above the drawer rather than inside it, so tucking the drawer away leaves the map in place - when you are zoomed into four bars, this is the only thing on screen that still shows you the shape of the whole piece.

The drawer

A strip you drag up from the bottom by its top edge. The icons down the middle switch what it shows: module info, the mixer, audio analysis, the master chain, colour, video. On the left is the video preview, black until there is video to show, and that is not an afterthought - Phonon is an audio-visual application and the picture gets a permanent seat. The info pane is the one on screen here, and it explains whichever module window is focused, or whichever control you are hovering.

The Tonnetz

A lattice of note names where neighbours are consonant intervals rather than adjacent pitches, lit up to show the chord currently sounding. Open by default down the right-hand edge. It is a read-out rather than a control: the chords come from the harmonic engine, and this is how you see what it chose and where it is likely to go next.