Today we’re excited to announce a powerful new feature for people using our notation/tab editor: you can customize the keyboard shortcuts! We’re also providing several presets, based on other popular notation software, and you can switch between these shortcut sets easily.

Keyboard shortcuts in notation software are a touchy thing (pun intended?). Lots of musicians invest time in memorizing shortcuts for their preferred software, and it can be hard to switch software once you’ve developed muscle memory. For those of you coming to Soundslice from other notation software, we want you to get productive quickly, so we’ve added several presets based on other apps.

To see the available presets, open the Soundslice notation editor and click the “Shortcuts” icon at the top of the page. You’ll see the new shortcuts panel appear on the right:

This will show you all of the currently available keyboard shortcuts in one convenient place. At the top, you’ll see a drop-down menu with all the available presets (including any that you’ve created yourself). For now, the following presets are available:

• Like Finale™ Simple Entry
• Like Guitar Pro™
• Like Sibelius™ Notebook Entry
• Soundslice default

Choose a preset, and the editor will immediately begin to use those shortcuts. We’ll save your preference automatically.

Creating your own

For power users who want more control, click “Edit” next to the currently selected shortcut set. You’ll get a window that shows you all available Soundslice editing commands (currently 186) and lets you assign a keyboard shortcut to any of them!

You can then give your shortcut set a name and save it. It’s only accessible to your account; it’s not public. (But if you’re particularly proud of it, drop us a line and we’ll consider adding it to the list of defaults.)

Creating your own keyboard shortcut set is available to anybody with a paid Soundslice plan.

As part of this, we’ve added several editor capabilities, all of which can be assigned to a keyboard shortcut:

• “Move note up/down diatonically” — changes the pitch of the selected note(s)
• “Add bar to the end of the slice”
• “Copy beat to the right” — copies the selected beat immediately to the right
• “Append note with interval of a 9th” (we already had intervals 2-8)
• “Set fret 10” through “Set fret 15” — in case you want to assign a single key to each of those higher frets
• Set double sharp/flat — previously doable only via “Toggle enharmonic”

As always, we’d love to hear feedback on this new feature, and we hope you enjoy your new powers!