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Welcome to Opusmodus
Important note before we begin

Hello, and welcome to Opusmodus. We hope youll find Opusmodus a useful addition to
the tools you already use for composing. The Quick Guide and the Three Lessons - to be
found in the Navigator, on the left - are designed to help you get started. The Quick
Guide is a first step reference guide. The Three Lessons are an active introduction to just
some of the ways to compose with Opusmodus. Once youve finished the reading the
Quick Guide and working with the Lessons, go to File > New > Workspace to begin your
own project.

What is Opusmodus

Opusmodus is aimed at composers of all kinds - of art music, concert music, choral music,
film music, jazz, electroacoustic music, music for games and new media, songwriters.
Opusmodus is a comprehensive computer-aided environment for the whole work of
music composition a virtual space where a composer can develop ideas and experiments
for projects large and small. It is the first application to successfully provide what IRCAM
has termed the Composing Continuum: from first thoughts to the finished score.
Opusmodus speaks fluently to MusicXML and Midifile to enable your work to be
prepared to meet the needs of professional performance and publishing. Opusmodus also
allows many other file formats to be present inside its workspace from PDF documents,
MP3 and 4, video formats, as well as Internet links. This means a composer can collect in
one place all the pre-compositional material that so often comes together before a note has
been written. Opusmodus is like a composers studio, when you dont have a spare room
for a studio!

Quick Guide

The Quick Guide is an Introduction to Opusmodus. Theres many helpful illustrations

combined with a clear and concise text. It will prove ideal as an easy to look up reference
guide as you explore and learn Opusmodus, and then create your own scores. In fourteen
distinct sections the Guide takes you through the key features of the interface, describing
the principle components. The Guide is also available as a printable PDF in Utilities >
Documents > Manuals.
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Three Lessons

The Three Lessons have been created to get you up and running as quickly as possible by
introducing you to the main features of Opusmodus. They use an active approach to help
you experience Opusmodus, focusing on three different composing scenarios: OMN
scripting, Algorithmic and OMN and Algorithmic combined.

Next Step

The Quick Guide and the Three Lessons will give an idea about the sorts of things
Opusmodus can do. It will take a couple of hours if you go through them thoroughly, but
by the time youve completed both, you should have a good grasp of how to start using
Opusmodus for your own projects.

Tutorials and further help and guidance

The Utilities panel has a suite of valuable collections to help and support your on-going
work with Opusmodus. Theres a reference guide to OMN - The Language. This is
followed by the 30-Stage Tutorial Guide that provides an introduction to coding using
algorithmic functions and techniques alongside the Opusmodus Notation (OMN). These
are mainly short pieces for solo piano. Then a collection called Howto - how to use
tremolo, how to change tempo, and so on. Finally, theres a large and varied collection of
Score Examples created by composers who work regularly with Opusmodus.

How to search the system

To quickly search the system place the cursor anywhere on the function-name or on any
word in the Composer panel (no selection needed) and press ctrl-tab or cmd-alt-/
/ or you can find the search command in the Help menu.

Midi Playback

To Start/Stop playing the Midi press the space bar on your keyboard. To return to the
beginning of the Midi display panel press the return key . Alternatively you can use the
contextual menu (right mouse click) to control the midi display panel.

Some of the midi files (especially from the web) you will not be able to listen to because
the file might use the external ports. To change the setup use the contextual menu (right
mouse click) in the midi panel and chose 'Ignore Ports'. This will send the midi to the
internal GM sound set after which you will be able to listen to the midi file.
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Snippets - Quick audition and notation

Place the mouse cursor at the end of each expression and press 1 to hear it (audition) or,
press 2 (notation) to display the expression in notation.