Playing your song

Tabula plays your song back in the browser using General MIDI, so you can hear an arrangement without leaving the editor. Playback honors your tempo map, repeats, alternate endings, dynamics, and techniques — it sounds the way the score reads.

It plays the way a person would, too, rather than like a sequencer: a chord on a guitar is strummed — down on the beat, up between — and each note lands a few milliseconds off the grid, a little harder on the strong beats. That feel is the same every time you play and for everyone listening; a MIDI export leaves it out.

The transport

The playback controls live on the right of the toolbar. On a tablet or a phone they sit higher up, beside Tracks and Find action — the same buttons without the readouts.

• ⇄ Play together — start or join a session where everyone hears the same playback; it fills in, with a count of who’s in, while you’re in one. See Playing together.
• Play / pause — the round button, or press Space.
• Stop — the square button, or press Esc. Stop returns the playhead to the start; pause leaves it where it is.
• Loop — repeat a passage; see Loop a passage.
• Position — the elapsed time readout (0:00).
• Tempo (BPM) — the song’s whole-song tempo. Editing it here changes the song’s tempo for everyone. To change the tempo starting from a bar instead, click its ♩ mark on the score or use Bar ▾ → Tempo from Here — see Tempo.
• % — your practice speed, as a percentage of the written tempo. Nothing is saved to the song, and it changes only what you hear — unless you’re leading a playing together session, where your speed is everyone’s.

Playback starts from the cursor’s position, so you can click into the middle of the song and play from there.

Loading sounds

The first time you play, Tabula downloads its sound font — about 40 MB, so on a slow connection it can take a little while; you’ll see a percentage on the play button. It’s cached afterward, so subsequent playback starts immediately, even offline.

Follow along

Turn on Follow (in the action bar) and the view scrolls to keep the playing bar in sight as the song plays — handy for reading along or rehearsing.

Loop a passage

Select the bars you want to drill and press Loop (⟲, beside Stop), or Shift+L. Playback repeats that range until you press Stop; with nothing selected, it loops the bar under the cursor. Loop is yours alone — nothing is written to the song. When you’re playing together, the leader’s loop is the session’s: everyone in it hears the same bars repeat, and members can’t set a loop of their own until they leave.

Mixing while you play

The track sidebar doubles as a simple mixer. For each track you can:

• Mute (M) or Solo (S) it — solo a part to check it in isolation, or mute the click-y parts while you focus on the rhythm section.
• Adjust its volume and pan.

These settings shape what you hear on playback without touching the notes.

They’re yours alone and kept per song: muting a click track in one song doesn’t quiet anything in another, and the balance you set on a song is still there when you come back to it. Nobody else in the band hears your mix, and nothing about it is saved into the song itself.

Want everyone to hear the same thing?

Solo playback is per-person. To play a passage for the whole band — synchronized, so everyone hears the same downbeat at the same moment — start playing together.