furnace/doc/1-intro/quickstart.md

quick start guide

first things first: thank you for taking the time to understand Furnace, the world's most comprehensive chiptune tracker. it's amazingly versatile, but it can also be intimidating, even for those already familiar with trackers. this quick start guide will get you on the road to making the chiptunes of your dreams! it will probably take about an hour from start to finish.

this guide makes a few assumptions:

• you've already installed Furnace.
• you haven't changed any configuration or layout yet.
• you're working with a PC keyboard. Mac users should already know the equivalents to the Ctrl and Alt keys.
• you're comfortable with keyboard shortcuts. if not, a lot of this can also be done using buttons or menus, but please try the keyboard first. it's worth it to smooth out the tracking workflow.

if an unfamiliar term comes up or you need more clarification on a term, refer to the basic concepts and glossary docs.

if you're not already familiar with the ImGui style of interface, you might want to take a quick glance at the UI components documentation. if at any point something goes wrong with the interface – something gets moved to where it's inaccessible, something closes a window or tab unexpectedly, or the like – it can always be reverted to its original state by selecting "reset layout" from the "settings" menu.

with all that said, start up the program and let's get going!

I've opened Furnace – now what?

there's a lot going on, but the most prominent part of Furnace's interface is the pattern view – the spreadsheet-like table that takes up most of the screen.

{{ pattern view }}

click to place the cursor somewhere in this view. it will appear as a medium-blue highlight.try moving around with the up and down arrow keys. also try the PgUp and PgDn keys to move around faster. the vertical axis represents time, and the view scrolls around a highlighted row that stays put in the center; this is called the playhead, and it will follow along when the song is playing.

now try the left and right arrow keys to move between columns. while we're at it, use the Home and End keys to quickly get to the first and last columns. pressing them twice will also shuttle you to the top or bottom row. when you're done, hit Home twice to return to the top-left.

if the playhead is dark red, use the space bar to turn it grey. this puts the keyboard in play mode, which will let us try out notes before committing them to the track.

now, let's play a little! try the first seven letters on the bottom row of the keyboard (for QWERTY, these are ZXCVBNM). they should sound out the seven notes of a C major scale, like the white keys of a piano. similarly, the row above that has the black keys. once you're tried those, move two rows up to find the same arrangement but one octave higher, and it extends a little further into the next octave also. to change octaves, use the / and * keys on the numeric pad. (if you don't have a numeric pad, the keys can be remapped; the keyboard doc explains how.)

press the space bar to change from play to edit mode. now try playing some notes; they should appear in the pattern view, one after another.

{{ notes in one channel }}

each channel is a group of columns separated from the others by a faint vertical line, and each channel can only ever play one note at a time. to hear this in action, move the cursor back to the top and press the Return key to start playback. you should hear the notes you entered played back quickly, one after another, each cutting off the previous note. if you let it play long enough, it'll wrap around to the start to go through them again; press Return again to stop playback.

now let's clear out those notes. you could delete them individually with the Del key, but let's try something else first. click and drag to select them all. you'll know they're selected when they have a medium grey background. try moving them around by clicking in the selected area and dragging it to another channel. (this may not work with some input devices.) then hit Del to delete them all at once.

{{ selection area? }}

you'll usually want more than one note playing at a time. move back to the start of the pattern in the leftmost column of the leftmost channel – this should clear the selection area. put some different notes next to each other in the same row. only enter notes in the first column of each channel; we'll get to those other columns later. (don't do more than six notes at once yet. we want to stay in the channels labelled "FM" for now.) once those are in place, go back to the top row and use the Return key to start playback. they should all sound at the same time as one single chord.

{{ notes across three channels }}

that chord will ring out for quite some time, but let's try stopping it early. a few rows after that chord, use the Tab or 1 key to enter a note off (sometimes called "note cut") in each channel that has a note. it'll appear as OFF in the note column. now try the shortcut F5 to play from the start without having to move there. you should hear the chord as before, then it will abruptly stop where the note offs are, as though letting off the keys of a piano.

{{ notes across channels with note offs beneath them }}

of course, errors can happen. let's pretend those note offs were a bad idea and undo them with Ctrl-Z. Furnace keeps track of multiple levels of undo. undo will work for the pattern view, any text entry box, and a few other places; try it out here and there along the way to get a sense for what it can undo for you! for now, let's change our minds again and put those note offs back with redo, which is Ctrl-Y.

before the next part of this guide, save the current module – the tracker file that contains everything needed for a song. Use Ctrl-S and pick a good spot on your computer for the file. Furnace modules always have a filename that ends in a .fur extension.