Rests in the Soundslice editor

Here’s information on how to work with rests in the Soundslice editor.

Adding a rest

To add a rest to the left or right of your current selection, use the “Insert beat (left)” or “Insert beat (right)” commands.

Note: we’ll always add that rest, even if the current bar’s music already equals the time signature. We deliberately don’t enforce rhythmic stability, because we find this makes editing more natural and less forced.

Changing a rest’s duration (relative)

• With the rest selected, hit the minus key (-) to increase the rest’s duration. Hit the plus key (+) to decrease the rest’s duration.
• Or: Search the editor for “Increase duration” or “Decrease duration.”

Changing a rest’s duration (absolute)

• With the rest selected, click the appropriate rhythm (e.g., “Eighth note” ) in the editor’s left panel.
• Or: Search the editor for “Set quarter note,” “Set eighth note,” etc. (Apologies to our UK friends, but we use the American nomenclature for these, instead of “quaver,” “semibreve,” etc.)

Changing a note (or chord) to a rest

• With a note selected, type “r” to delete the note and put a rest in its place, using the existing rhythmic value.
• Or: click the “Clear notes; set to rest” icon in the editor’s left panel.

Deleting a rest

Select the rest and hit your Delete key. On a touch device, use the trash icon in the touchscreen interface.

Moving a rest up and down

In multivoice music, we’ll automatically move rests up or down to communicate whether they’re in the top or bottom voice. If you’d like to override our automatic positioning, click and drag the rest up or down:

Per convention, rests are limited to being positioned on a staff line. That is, you can’t position them in between staff lines.

Full-bar rests

It’s common for sheet music to use a whole-note rest to communicate “rest for the entire bar” — even if the time signature is not 4/4. Strictly speaking, the notation is incorrect because the rest’s duration doesn’t match the time signature, but practically speaking this makes the music easier to read.

For example, here we use a whole-note rest even though the time signature is 3/4:

Soundslice calls this situation a “full-bar rest.” To mark a bar as having a full-bar rest, click the rest, then use editor search to find the “Toggle full-bar rest” command. This will change your music to use a whole-note rest visually but preserve the time signature rhythmically.

If you don’t do this, Soundslice will use the rest’s duration, not the time signature’s duration, when playing the audio.

Multi-bar rests

See our separate help page on multi-bar rests.