Instruments

The icons at the right side of the on-screen piano represent output instruments. The downward arrow can be clicked to see more instrument choices. The icons are in a loop, so if you keep clicking the arrow you'll come around again to the beginning of the list.

For information on sound input, see input methods.

Synth and MIDI output

The default choice is "QT" (QuickTime Music Instruments) on the Macintosh, or "SYN" (internal synthesizer) on a Windows computer. The next is MIDI, in case you want to play sounds through an external MIDI device, and all the others are "sampled" instruments, which means they use recorded sounds stored in the program.

The QT or SYN instrument is generally the best choice, since no extra equipment is required and these output instruments work quickly without requiring much of the computer's memory.

MIDI is valuable mostly if you happen to own a high-quality MIDI device that can produce sounds more realistic than those created by the computer.

"Sampled" sound output

A "sampled" instrument is one made by recording sounds of an actual acoustic instrument. The sampled instruments include guitar, piano, organ, voice, viol, violin, and brass, and have special uses:
- The sampled instruments can be tuned to different "temperaments," or divisions of the octave.
- Some Windows computers have software synthesizers that respond too slowly to be easily used in rhythm tapping - for example, if you want to record a melody in "real time" by playing the letter keys of the computer. If your computer is one of these you'll find that the sampled instruments, particularly the guitar, will generally respond more quickly than the synthesized sounds.
- In the rare occasion that you have more simultaneous voices than could be played by the synthesizer (synthesizers may not be able to handle past 8 or at most 16 voices) the sampled instruments can play any reasonable number of simultaneous voices. But they take some time to calculate the sounds, and may require quite a bit of memory, too.

When one of the sampled output instruments is chosen on the screen piano you'll find that the staff instrument choices in the edit window will also change to sampled instruments. You can click on the instrument image at the left of the staff to change the staff's assigned sound, just as you do with the synthesized instruments.

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