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It writes a drum part for your form rather than handing you a loop. You give it bars, a time signature and a mark wherever the music changes; it works out which bars the form leans on and puts the fill in the bar before and the crash on the downbeat after. Fifteen styles, five kits, nineteen time signatures, an engraved percussion staff, and MIDI or MusicXML out.

No. Chords are optional and always have been. Bars, a meter, a tempo and a section mark wherever the music changes is enough for a complete part. If you do paste changes, Talea uses them to sharpen the turns — a return to the tonic reads as a bigger arrival than a passing chord.

Each one marks a bar the music turns after: a section arriving, a phrase closing, the ending. The taller and brighter the tick, the bigger the turn. The fill lands in that bar and the crash on the downbeat after it.

They are the whole idea made visible, and they update as you edit — add a section and the tick before it grows.

Tap the bar where the new section begins, then + Section. Sections are what tell Talea the form: the turn before a section boundary is the strongest turn there is.

That is what a feel is — a property of the section, not of a single bar. Set Half-time on bar 9 of a 16-bar form with one section and all sixteen bars go half-time.

The control tells you before it does it: it reads Feel · bars 1–16, naming exactly what it will rewrite. To change fewer bars, tap + Section at the bar you want it to start, and another at the bar after it should stop.

Half-time moves the backbeat to half speed — the standard chorus-drop. Double-time does the opposite. Broken/open thins the pattern out. Build tightens toward the end of the section. Stop-time plays only the accents.

They are modifiers on the style, not separate styles: half-time funk still sounds like funk.

Deliberate. Editing the form makes the current take stale rather than wrong, and Talea will not quietly swap the part you are listening to. Press Generate when you want to hear the change.

Yes, and it is not a special case. Every style is written against the pulse map of the bar — which pulses are strong, how each one divides — rather than against “beat 2 of 4/4”. A 7/8 rock groove exists because the rule does, and so does a 6/8 march.

Nineteen, in three families, because which family a meter is in is what decides how it feels.

Simple — 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 6/4, 7/4, 3/8, 2/2, 3/2. One pulse per notated beat.
Compound — 6/8, 9/8, 12/8, 15/8. Every pulse is three beats, so every style becomes its own compound version.
Irregular — 5/8, 7/8, 8/8, 10/8, 11/8, 13/8. Uneven pulses: 7/8 as 2+2+3, 8/8 as 3+3+2.

2/2 is not 4/4 with a different label. Its pulse is the half note, so the same rock groove puts its hats on quarters instead of eighths.

And the list is a convenience rather than a limit: import a file in a meter that is not on it — 17/8, say — and the meter is added to the picker under From the file, so the control can always show what the app is actually counting.

Yes — the field beside the slider. Type it and press Done; the slider follows. Half-typed numbers are left alone rather than clamped under your cursor, and clearing the field puts back the tempo that is actually in force rather than jumping to a default.

The same fourteen voices, re-voiced. Concert is a band or pit: concert toms, a crisp field snare, tambourine, splash and suspended cymbals. Orchestral is symphonic: timpani in place of the toms, tam-tam, triangle, and a soft-mallet bass drum. Both are parameter sets, exactly as 808 and 909 are — nothing about the app behaves differently, so every style and every feel works on them.

They rename and renumber themselves on the way out, so the file says what you heard: a tambourine leaves as GM 54 Tambourine, not as GM 42 Closed hat. The Export note tells you which voices moved before you press the button.

It should not — picking a concert idiom moves the kit for you and says so under the chip row. If you changed the kit back afterwards it stays where you put it: picking Rock never drags it the other way, because that would fight a choice you made on purpose.

Density is how busy the timekeeping is — how finely the hats or ride subdivide. Motion is how much the part moves against the grid: syncopated kicks, ghost notes on the snare, open hats. A sparse part with high motion is a very different thing from a busy one with none.

On purpose. Each style produces several readings of the same form, ranked, and Next take cycles them. The form, the turns and the fills stay where they are; the playing changes.

Because a drum chart without them is ambiguous — the position of a note on the page implies its rhythm, and implied rhythm is exactly what notation exists to stop being implied. Each voice is written complete: hands with stems up, feet with stems down.

Yes. Squeezing sixteen bars into a phone width turns a bar of sixteenth notes into a black smudge, so the panel shows a four-bar window and scrolls. The arrows page through the form, and the window follows whichever bar you have selected.

That is correct engraving. Swing is a performance, written as straight notes with a swing marking — and it is exactly what lands in the MusicXML, so the preview and the file agree.

MIDI for a DAW — General MIDI drum map on channel 10, format 1, with tempo and time signature in a conductor track. MusicXML for notation software — a real percussion staff with the right noteheads, for NoteFlight, MuseScore, Dorico or Sibelius.

Both have been round-tripped through third-party software and checked note for note.

Check the track is a drum or percussion track. Talea writes the standard GM map — 36 kick, 38 snare, 42 closed hat — on channel 10, which every DAW reads as drums, but a plug-in loaded on a pitched track will play those numbers as notes instead.

On a Concert or Orchestral kit a few voices move to different standard GM numbers — tambourine 54, triangle 81, tam-tam 52 — so they play the right instrument on any GM kit with no program change. Talea deliberately does not use the GM Orchestral map, whose notes 41–53 are timpani pitches that collide with the hats, toms and cymbals of the standard one: if the program change were ever dropped, a hi-hat line would come back as a chromatic timpani run.

Not directly — GarageBand has no MIDI export. Getting a part out takes an Apple Loop and a converter. That is a GarageBand limitation rather than a Talea one; files go in cleanly.

Talea takes the tempo, the meter and the length — and reads the part's character: the style, the density and the swing. Those controls move where you can see them, and pulse gold so you know they moved. Anything it cannot read confidently is left alone and named in the report.

It does not load the pattern itself. Talea is a generator, and a pattern it could not regenerate is one its own controls could not touch.

Files that are not drum parts are recognised as what they are rather than forced through that door: a bass line becomes something to lock to, and a polymeter file from Anacru becomes a rider.

Talea recognises it as a polymeter file and does not read it as a groove. It takes the meter from the file, and one of the layers becomes a rider: a cycle that runs over your bar and goes in and out of phase with it — five quarters against 4/4 realigns every five bars, and the row tells you so in bars rather than in numbers.

You choose which layer rides and what it plays — cross-stick, claves, ride bell or pedal hat — and whether it sounds every pulse or only the accents. Accents only is the default, because in most Anacru scenes every layer clicks on the same pulses and the polymeter is entirely in which of them are accented.

Unchecking the rider mutes it and keeps it; only Remove deletes it. What Talea cannot carry — a metric-modulation tempo map, tuplet subdivisions finer than the staff can write — is named in the import report rather than dropped in silence.

Yes, through MIDI. The rider goes out on its own track with its cycle written into the track name, so re-importing hands it back as a rider rather than mixing it into the groove.

MusicXML does not carry it separately. The staff draws it honestly — those cross-sticks are what plays — but a MusicXML round trip folds it back into the part. MIDI is the lossless path for anything with a rider in it.

It bends the kick toward the bass. Kicks that are nearly on a bass onset move onto it, and kicks answering nothing get dropped — the downbeat always survives. The snare and hats are untouched, so the groove keeps its shape.

Press it once more — iOS only allows audio to start after a tap. Talea plays with the ringer switch either way. If it is still silent, check the volume with the app in the foreground, since iOS tracks media volume separately.

Expected. Talea synthesises its kit on your device — there are no samples in the app — and your DAW plays the exported notes through its own drum instrument. The groove is identical; the timbre is whatever you loaded.

No — iOS stops the audio when the app goes to the background, and Talea stops the transport with it rather than leaving the button claiming to play. Come back and press Audition again.

On the device, automatically, as you edit. There is no account and no cloud copy, because there is no network code in the app at all. Undo steps back over anything you change.

No. The saved session is versioned and read defensively — a record written by an older build opens in a newer one.