Quick Start Tutorial.

I thought I’d add a little guide to help new users of Gingerbread get to grips with the basic features quickly. This is by no means extensive — it has many more options that it will probably take you weeks to explore but this will hopefully introduce you to the most important aspects and make its learning curve a lot less steep to begin with.

Gingerbread Browser.

Run the program. You’ll see the Gingerbread Browser screen. This is where you will do most of your composing with the system.

The screen is made up of sixteen Mandelbrot fractals. Each are mapped to their own instrument. At the beginning each instrument is an Acoustic Grand Piano with the exception of the tenth browser (counting from the top left), which is mapped to the Standard drum machine sound set.

Finding a melody.

Click with the left mouse button anywhere on the top right fractal. You will hear a melody played by piano. Keep clicking on it and you’ll realise each point on the fractal produces a different melody. If you like the graphic is similar to a map, and each location on the map produces a different melody. Points close to each other produce similar melodies, points further apart differ more. In general the most interesting melodies are produced to the right, the more minimal, rhythmic patterns to the left. And the longest phrases are found on the borderline areas of the fractal, i.e. the parts that look like lightning/tentacles.

You can also zoom in on any fractal by double-clicking at any point. This is useful if you have found a melody that is almost what you want, but not quite. Zoom in and move around the zoomed in version slightly, you might find exactly the music you are looking for.

When you have found a melody you like click on the fractal graphic with the right mouse button and choose Store Coordinate from its pop-up menu. This will "lock" your choice and prevent you losing your choice by clicking on the fractal by accident.

Once your coordinate is stored you will notice that the little red bar on the top left of its fractal turns from red to green. Red means a browser hasn’t been used in your composition. Green means it has a stored coordinate. And clicking on the green bar will mute that browser, clicking once more re-enables it.

Adding a bass line.

Now that we’ve found a basic piano melody let’s add a bass instrument to accompany it.

Right click on the first fractal’s graphic again and choose Copy Acoustic Grand Piano to » 2 Acoustic Grand Piano. A pop-up window will ask you to select which aspects of your first fractal you wish to copy to the second. Leave everything ticked and hit OK.

Now you’ll see that your first fractal has been copied into the second fractal on the browser screen. Currently this means that if you play your melody the your initial piano melody will be played twice in parallel. But we’re going to alter that second copy to become the piece’s bass line.

Right click on the second fractal browser and choose Edit Fractal Instrument Style from the pop-up menu.

The Fractal Instrument Style screen will now appear. It features 8 tabs of different options you can use to tweak your fractal’s instrument and melody.

Firstly we’re going to use the Base Notes tab to make the bass line play an octave lower than the piano.

As default your melody will be made up of notes between Base Note 60 (Middle C), over a Range of 12 notes (i.e. an octave) above it. So every note in the melody will be between note 60 and note (Base 60 + Range 12) = 72.

To lower the bass line by an octave, subtract 12 notes from the Base Note, i.e. 60 - 12 = 48. Change the value from 60 to 48.

Now let’s make the bass line slower than the piano melody. Choose the Durations tab and change the Variance drop-down selection box from Busy Melodic to Slower Melodic.

Now let’s tell Gingerbread that this is a bass instrument, not a piano. Choose the Patch / EFX tab and use the Patch drop-down selection box to change the instrument from Acoustic Grand Piano to Acoustic Bass.

At any stage you can preview your changes by selecting Music » Play Instrument on the Fractal Instrument Style screen’s Music menu.

Now that we’ve created our bass line, choose File » OK from the Fractal Instrument Style screen’s Music menu. (Note: you can also use the Save Style As option here to save your settings as a stand-alone Style file (.STL) to import into other compositions.)

Hearing the piano and bass together.

To hear both instruments play in unison, either right click on any fractal and choose the Play All Stored Instruments option on the pop-up menu —

— or click on the Play Composition button (the blue triangular arrow at the bottom left of the screen).

Choosing to use the pop-up menu Play All Stored Instruments option will produce a short burst of music, at default 4 bars of music, but this can be altered by changing the Audition Bars value at the top right of the screen.

Clicking on the Play Composition arrow will produce a much longer composition, 128 bars of music, which is the maximum length of a piece Gingerbread can generate.

You can speed up or slow down the entire composition with the Tempo setting at the top right of the screen.

You can also alter the Scale/Key of the piece by changing the option at the top left of the screen from Pentatonic to another value. Don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with these names, just try them out and see how they change your composition, you can always change it back to Pentatonic if you prefer it.

Saving & Exporting your composition.

Now let’s save our composition. Choose File » Save Project As.

This saves your piece as a .GIN file, which is Gingerbread’s default project type. Save pieces in this format as you work on them. Once you have saved a piece using Save As you can save an updated version of it without specifying the filename again by choosing File » Save Project or using CTRL+F3. Lots of other Gingerrbead features have short cut keys, you’ll notice them listed to the right of each of the system’s menus as you explore them.

Once your composition is finished, you can export it as a standard MIDI file (.MID) for rearrangement and production using any standard sequencing program.

Choose File » Export Midi As — you will be allowed to specify the number of bars of music to export (maximum of 128). Once you have successfully exported a composition in midi file format (.MID) you will find it in your c:\program files\gingerbread\midi\ folder, ready for import into any standard sequencing program for re-arrangement and production.

This is obviously a very basic tutorial but it teaches you the most important things to know — how to explore the fractals and find melodies, how to use each browser’s Edit Fractal Instrument Style options to alter its instrument and characteristics, and how to hear and save your finished piece.

The rest is up to you, play with it, explore different options as you go along to learn what they do, it won’t take long before you realise that even though you might not understand precisely how everything works underneath according to the mathematics, it doesn’t really matter. You can still have a lot of fun playing with it and create a lot of very interesting and unusual original works of music that are all your own. And you don’t even have to understand music theory or play an instrument either. All you need is time and patience!

Happy composing,

Phil Thompson
March 2008

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