Overview
The step sequencer in the studio is limited to C, E♭, F, G and B♭. By editing your song in a text editor, you can add all other notes.
Loading a song
Your songs are located in C:Users<username>AppDataLocalFRACTOSCSongs. Ignore the .fract1 files (those are backups) and open the .fract file of your song with a text editor.
Since the JSON inside is just one long line, paste it into this tool[jsbeautifier.org] and copy the result back. FRACT won’t mind the change and it makes the content a lot more readable.
Here’s an example of what you should end up with:
Editing patterns
The structure of the file should be self-explanatory; in case it isn’t, this is what we’re looking for:
“Pattern1”: {
“activeButtons”: [2, 70, 1, 2, 60, 1, 0, 55, 1, 12, 67, 1, 12, 72, 1, 8, 63, 1, 8, 55, 1, 4, 65, 1, 4, 58, 1, 0, 48, 1, 6, 60, 1, 6, 53, 1, 10, 67, 1, 10, 60, 1, 14, 70, 1, 14, 63, 1]
},
The array contains three values for each note:
- Its position on the x axis,
- The note itself and
- a 1. I don’t know why it’s there, but it is.
This graphic shows you which value represents which note. Colored keys are notes available in the studio UI.
The results
Save the song and load it in the studio again. While it has no problems with playing the new notes, they obviousuly won’t show up in the step sequencer. The pattern sequencer does display them, though.
I’ve made a small example if you want to see this trick in action without editing songs yourself:
[link]
