Hit'n'Mix User Guide

Rips Panel
This is where you can keep up
to three tracks (called Rips) at
once and mix between them.
Click a slot to change the
current Rip displayed. Click the Rips tab at the left to open/close
the panel.
Load Rip/MP3/CD track... Click to open an audio file in an empty
slot. If an MP3 or CD track is chosen, it will be loaded and
converted into Rip format. This is a new format created by
Hit'n'Mix out of necessity, to allow individual notes to be stored
and manipulated separately in a track. See section Loading an
MP3 or CD track below.
Keyboard equivalent: Ctrl+O (selects top‐most empty slot first).
NEW Click to create an empty Rip. Great to use as a clipboard for
ideas and snippets of songs. Alternatively start a mix from scratch.
Keyboard equivalent: Ctrl+N (selects top‐most empty slot first).
SAVE Once a Rip has been created, you can save it as a Rip (.rip)
file. Rip files take only seconds to reopen in Hit'n'Mix. Hit’n’Mix
auto‐saves all open Rips periodically, once more on exit, and
reopens them when starting up the next time.
If you or your friends want to play a Rip file on a computer that
doesn't have Hit'n'Mix installed, download and play it back using
the free Hit'n'Mix Play software from www.hitnmix.com.
2

You can also choose to save as an MP3 (.mp3) or Wave audio
(.wav) file from the drop down box.
Keyboard equivalent: Ctrl+S (Note: this performs a quick save ‐ the
Save as... dialog box is not displayed if already saved before).
CLOSE Close the Rip so you can create a new one in its place.
Keyboard equivalent: Ctrl+W.
Click this button to copy a selection from the currently
displayed Rip to this button's track.
Loading an MP3 or CD track
Creating a Rip from an
MP3 or CD track takes
some time due to the
cutting edge
technologies involved.
Hit'n'Mix loads a rough
draft of the audio file before powering ahead. If you are trying out
different songs, click Create Rip Now or press Escape after loading
30 seconds or so.
Average timings for creating a 3 minute Rip using different
processors are:
Quad‐Core 5 mins
Dual‐Core 10 mins
Single‐Core 30 mins+
3

Click Cancel & Close or press Escape to cancel Rip creation (no
audio will be available to edit after doing this).
The Notes View
Rips are displayed as a collection of thick colored lines going
across the screen. These are the individual notes in a track. The
higher on the screen they are, the higher they sound. The notes
go across the screen from left to right in time order. Quieter notes
are more transparent than louder ones.
Drums and percussion are displayed as thinner white lines at the
bottom. Also see Skeleton View below.
Hit'n'Mix makes a guess as to what instruments the notes belong
to (a technique called Instrument Fingerprinting) and colors them
accordingly (also see Instruments Panel below).
The horizontal line running through each note illustrates its stereo
4

position over time – a lower line means more of the note is
played out of the left speaker; a higher one means more of it is
played out of the right.
Notes can be selected (for playback, editing, applying effects and
so on) in the following ways: Clicking, Clicking and dragging a
rectangle over them, Ctrl+Clicking/Dragging to add/remove
further selections, and Ctrl+A to select all notes.
Hit'n'Mix even attempts to work out where the beats are in the
song and displays vertical lines with subdivisions to help you
position notes. The 'bar' number at the bottom of each line is
handy for finding your way around a track. The time and pitch at
the position of the pointer is also displayed to the left of the scroll
bar.
A keyboard displayed at the left‐hand side of the screen shows
where the notes would be played on a standard 88‐key piano.
Click this button to play the currently displayed Rip. A
cursor can be placed by clicking anywhere on the
background between notes and removed by pressing
Escape. Playback will start from the position of the cursor or from
middle of the screen if one hasn’t been placed. You can also play
individual notes by clicking on them or clicking and dragging a
rectangle over them. Click the button again or press Escape to
stop playback.
5

Toolbar
Contains menu items to open this Guide, display the Credits
and Exit Hit'n'Mix.
Hit’n’Mix keeps notes and noise
separate. Here you can choose which to
view, edit and play back. See The Notes
View and The Skeleton View.
The overall style of an entire Rip can be
changed from this menu. Hit'n'Mix does
this by shifting the pitches of notes in
the currently displayed Rip to give it a
different feeling (by changing its musical
scale). For example, Far East makes all
notes fall on the black notes of the
keyboard, giving it a far eastern sound.
Of course, if a song is already mainly on
black notes, the change will not be so noticeable and you might
like to try a different style.
Click the menu dial to access a number
of effects that can be applied to
selected notes:
Harmony Notes are played back with a
copy 2 or 3 semitones higher
(depending on the automatically
6

calculated key signature) to create a harmony.
Quantize Pitch At every point within a note, the pitch is moved to
the nearest semitone ‐ an effect used in modern music.
Correct Pitch Shifts a whole note to the nearest semitone without
changing its shape.
Flatten Pitch Makes the whole note one pitch.
Vibrato Makes the note move quickly up and down in pitch in the
way often used by singers, violinists and guitarists. You can add
more or less vibrato by clicking the up/down arrows. Note that
this cannot be used to remove vibrato that existed in the original
recording ‐ use Flatten Pitch or Draw Pitch (described below)
instead.
Slide Pitch Slides the note up or down in pitch. Click the arrows to
specify direction and the steepness of the slide.
Volume Makes a note louder or quieter (use the arrows).
Stereo Position Move a note left or right between speakers
(stereo speakers required). Amazingly this is possible even with
monophonic tracks (like many pre‐1960 recordings).
Keyboard equivalent: 1 (extreme left) to 9 (extreme right) on the
main keyboard sets the position for the whole note (5 is centre).
Once an effect has been applied, it can be applied again to other
selected notes by clicking the section of the button immediately
to the left of the menu dial.
7

This menu allows you to select what
happens when you click on a note:
Move and Resize Click and drag changes
a note's pitch (vertical) or playback time
(horizontal). When the pointer is at the edge of a note (so that it
becomes a double‐ended arrow), clicking and dragging
horizontally makes that note longer or shorter. If the note belongs
to a selection of other notes, the length of the entire selection will
be adjusted.
If Alt is held down whilst dragging a note vertically, pitch is more
finely adjustable. In addition, notes will slide into adjacent notes
to maintain a flowing melody.
Keyboard equivalent: The up and down arrow keys can be used to
raise or lower the pitch of a note or a selection of notes in
semitones.
Draw Pitch Click and drag allows you to draw a note's pitch in
detail ‐ great for making slides or expressive guitar sounds.
Split Note Click to split a note in two. The parts can then be
edited separately. The first note is selected automatically.
Makes a copy of the selected notes/noise – click this to
make the mouse pointer flip around. Then click anywhere
in a Rip to place a copy of the selection.
Keyboard equivalent: Ctrl+C copies, Ctrl+X cuts, and Ctrl+V pastes
(to the cursor position) just like other Windows applications, even
between Rips.
8

Removes the selected notes from the track.
Keyboard equivalent: Delete.
Undoes the last editing operation (you can undo a number
of times, up until a different Rip was selected and edited).
Can also be used to reverse an accidental click of a Rip's CLOSE
button.
Keyboard equivalent: Ctrl+Z.
Contains links to the Hit'n'Mix website, Facebook
and Twitter pages.
The Instruments Panel
Hit'n'Mix colors notes according to the
instruments it thinks they belong to. This
is very difficult for a computer to do and
will not always be perfect. If you need to
set the correct instrument, select the
note(s) and then click the appropriate
instrument name to the left of the sliders.
Clicking to the left of (on the > symbol which appears) or double‐
clicking an instrument name selects all notes belonging to that
instrument ‐ useful when applying the same effect to a whole
instrument. Therefore you will often find it easier to set the
correct instruments for the most important notes before
commencing any major editing.
Each slider to the right of an instrument name works like a mixer:
9

During playback the volume of each instrument is adjusted to the
level currently indicated by its slider. The sliders can also be
dragged in real‐time during playback.
If a slider is double‐clicked in its left half it is turned off and all
other sliders are turned to full. If a slider is double‐clicked in its
right half it is turned to full and all others are turned off.
If an instrument name is grayed out, it means Hit'n'Mix thought it
wasn’t present in the audio. If it was, click the name (ensuring
nothing else is selected) and Hit'n'Mix will have another go at
recognizing the instruments used. Make sure you do this before
applying any instruments to notes as your changes will be lost.
Click the Instruments tab at the left to open/close the panel.
The Skeleton view
Double‐clicking on the background between notes reveals the
Skeleton view ‐ the sounds in the audio that could not be
10

ecognized by Hit'n'Mix as notes. These include noise, percussion,
and vocal consonants like 's' and 't'.
To select these sounds, click and drag the mouse over a section.
You will hear the section when you release the mouse button.
With the exception of the Make Copy button, you can delete,
copy & paste chunks of this audio in the same way as notes in
Notes view. This is useful for removing noise and copying
percussion sounds.
A section can be assigned as belonging to an instrument (e.g.
Voice or Percussion) by selecting it and clicking one of the
instrument names in the Instruments Panel. Edits made to notes
in the Notes View will then also apply to regions of the same
instrument played at the same time in the Skeleton View ‐ for
example, deleting, copying, and pasting.
You may find Hit'n'Mix has already marked out sections of the
Skeleton view in yellow (for Voice) and white (for Percussion).
Double‐click once more on the background to return to Notes
view.
Problems Obtaining Pure Sounds
For a computer to recognize the notes in fully mixed audio and
make them available for highly flexible editing is an incredibly
demanding task. There may be some situations where notes may
not sound as pure as you might wish:
1. When playing back notes from the Notes View, you may
11

only hear tonal parts of the audio, sounding like a noise
filter has been applied. To hear the notes along with the
noise belonging to them, go into Skeleton View and
mark out sections in the same instrument as the notes
you wish to play, as described in The Skeleton View.
2. Two notes with the same pitch cannot be separated. So
for some notes you may hear, say, a guitar note and
voice at the same time.
3. Sometimes one instrument interferes with the sound of
another. Usually this is only audible when playing back
individual notes. However if there is a problem, try
copying a cleaner note from elsewhere and edit that
instead.
4. Occasionally some of the audio of a note is missed and
exists in the Skeleton view. This means you can still hear
it even when the note has been deleted from the Notes
view. The best solution is to double‐click to display the
Skeleton view and delete the necessary section.
5. When there are many notes played at the same time, the
original audio of some notes can sometimes be lost
altogether, simply because a waveform (the format used
by MP3s and CD tracks) cannot hold that much
information. (The ear and brain is very good at piecing
sounds together when played at the same time ‐ but not
so good when played separately.) In this case, try
experimenting with different notes, or copying a cleaner
note from elsewhere and editing that instead.
12