Tracks

All clips for an instrument, spanning the entire arrangement

With Synfire, the narrative Structure of your composition is the primary focus. Flat Tracks for each individual instrument (as in a DAW) are created automatically. They are the sequence of clips that results from the placement of Phrases in containers.

Since containers can be nested and phrases may contain any number of parameters, it is not immediately obvious on the Structure page what's ultimately landing on a track. This final output becomes evident on the Tracks page.

Structure vs. Tracks

In the Structure view, you can focus on building tension and the overall musical experience, while the detailed work on each individual track is automatically handled for you in the background. This view makes it particularly easy to move musically related parts, make changes to the course of the song, add new ideas, and try out alternatives. In the unstructured tracks view, this can be very tedious (which is why we often avoid doing this in a DAW).

The powerful structure perspective takes some getting used to. Of course, you can still place the Tracks in the foreground, as in a DAW, and build your piece from left to right for each instrument individually. However, the resulting structure is flat and unordered and is less suitable for moving parts and adding new ideas.

Even after the fact, you can still add some structure to your flat tracks by using Clip > Collect In Container to group related clips, such as “Verse,” “Chorus,” “Middle Part” etc.

Important Tips

Tip: Keep phrases short! Never use a single phrase as if it were a long track spanning the song. Don't scroll back and forth in a huge Figure. Put multiple short phrases in movable Containers instead.
Tip: Rule of thumb: When you want something to start in the middle of something, insert a container at that position. Don't insert blank space at the beginning of a phrase only to make it start at a later time, unless you really want all loops to include this long pause at every turn.