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Your first track

You will: open Gloopy, play a demo song, add your own instrument track, draw a short looping melody, and hear it play alongside the demo. About 10 minutes. No MIDI keyboard or extra setup needed.

By the end you'll know your way around the four things every Gloopy session is made of: the transport, tracks, clips, and the editor.

Before you start

You need Gloopy installed and the bundled examples/ folder alongside it. Everything here works with a mouse — we'll cover recording from a keyboard in a later guide.

1. Open a song and press Play

Launch Gloopy on the portable demo:

gloopy examples/demo-song

A row of tracks runs down the left; each track's clips sit along the timeline to the right. Press the green Play button (or watch the playhead sweep across as the song plays). Press Stop to return to the start.

That green triangle and the tempo readout next to it are the transport — the one clock the whole song follows.

2. Look inside a clip

Click any clip in the timeline. It loads into the editor at the bottom of the window. Toggle between STEPS and PIANO:

  • STEPS — a 16-step grid, quick for drums and simple patterns.
  • PIANO — a piano roll, better for melodies; scroll and zoom vertically.

Both edit the same notes — a clip owns its content, and these are just two ways to see it. Don't worry about changing the demo; we'll add our own track next.

3. Add an instrument track

In the toolbar, click + Synth. A new instrument track appears at the bottom of the track list, ready to play notes.

Tip

+ Synth, + Sample, + Audio, and + Plugin all add tracks — they differ only in what makes the sound. They're all the same kind of track underneath (see The Gloopy model).

4. Draw a short loop

  1. On your new track, make a clip on the timeline near the start of the song.
  2. Click it to open it in the editor, and make sure STEPS is selected.
  3. Click a few steps to place notes — try four evenly spaced notes for a simple pulse. Each note you place, you'll hear (note auditioning).

Your clip is short, but a clip loops by default: placed across a longer span it just repeats. So a one-bar idea fills the whole section without extra work.

5. Play it together

Press Play. Your loop plays in time with the demo — one shared transport keeps everything locked. Too loud or too quiet? Use the track's volume control in its header, or open the Mixer (toolbar) to balance levels and, later, add effects.

6. Save your work

File → Save Project (or Ctrl+S) — your project is saved as a composition folder, a directory of readable text files that works well with version control (it's a git repository from the first save). This is the working format.

To share the project as one file, use File → Export Project (.gloopy) — that same folder zipped into a single portable archive. Reopen either with File → Open (a folder) or File → Open Archive (a .gloopy/.zip).

What you learned

You met the four core nouns — transport, track, clip, note — and saw that clips loop and share one clock. Each of those is defined precisely, once, in The Gloopy model.

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