2. Your first song

This chapter walks through making a short, simple song from an empty project, touching every main part of the window once: adding a track, playing it, sequencing it, recording, exporting, a setting worth knowing about, and saving.

1. Start from an empty project

Start Nebula. File > New (Ctrl+N) gives you a clean, empty, unsaved project — one bar, no tracks, tempo 120 BPM. The project's name (top of the PROJECT panel) reads "Untitled" until you save it.

2. Add a track and give it an instrument

Click + Track above the timeline. A new track appears in the track list, ready to hold notes. Now give it a sound: click an instrument in the browser's INSTRUMENTS tab (say, Modular Bass under BASS) — this both sets the sound for the currently selected track and shows it on the instrument screen so you can play it straight away.

Rename the track by clicking its name in the track list and typing.

3. The one-instrument screen

Whichever track is selected, the bottom of the window is that track's instrument screen — one panel, not a maze of tabs. A small switch on the right chooses what it shows:

• Keys/Pads — play the instrument. A further switch chooses Keys (a piano, scrollable sideways with the mouse wheel and zoomable with Ctrl + wheel, with Octave buttons and Z/X on the keyboard to jump octaves) or Pads (for drum-style instruments — see chapter 4).
• Grid — the step sequencer (next section).
• FX — the instrument's own effect chain (chapter 5), plus, for the Sampler, Drum Rack and FM synth, the card where you drop sounds or shape the FM operators.

Above the switch, two toggles — Chords and Echo — change how the keys/pads behave while you play (chords play a stacked triad instead of one note; echo repeats what you played). The instrument's own sound knobs (Volume, and a handful of others specific to that instrument — Brightness, Resonance, Attack, Release for a modular voice, for example) sit underneath.

4. Sequence a pattern on the step grid

Switch to Grid. Above the step grid, choose the step division (1/16, 1/8, the eighth-note triplet, or 1/4) and the clip length in bars (1, 2, 4 or 8) — this both sets how fine the grid is and how long the clip becomes. Click steps on for the notes you want; click a lit step again to turn it off. Press Play in the transport bar to hear it loop.

For a quick starting point instead of drawing from scratch, use the note-icon (♪) button on the track's row in the track list: it drops a ready-made 4-bar pattern onto the track (a beat if the track's instrument is a drum kit, a short arpeggio otherwise) that you can then edit.

5. Record yourself playing

Instead of the step grid, you can play a clip in by hand: select the track, open Keys/Pads, press Record in the transport bar, then play the keys or pads. Press Record again (or Space) to stop — what you played becomes a new clip on the timeline, and it can be undone like any other edit if it did not come out the way you wanted.

6. Add a few more tracks

Repeat steps 2–5 for a couple more tracks — a drum kit (any instrument under DRUMS) and a lead (under SYNTH) make a reasonable small arrangement together with the bass line from step 2. Drag clips along the timeline to place them where you want; drag an instrument or an effect from the browser straight onto a track to drop it there.

7. Export it to a WAV file

When it sounds like something, click Export in the top-right of the transport bar. This writes the whole project to a WAV file right away, using whatever format is currently set as the default (see the next paragraph) — no dialog, no waiting for a save-as prompt. The small ▾ next to it offers three variants:

• Default — one file, the default format.
• Bulk — one file for every format/quality variant you have ticked in Settings > Export, written one after another (a small counter in the top bar tracks progress).
• Custom… — opens Settings > Export so you can choose exactly what to render.

Exported files land in Documents/Nebula/Exports/; File > Open exports folder takes you straight there.

8. A setting worth knowing on day one: Export format

Open Options > Settings (Ctrl+,) and look at the Export page: it chooses the default export format, the bit depth (16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit float) and the sample rate (44.1, 48 or 96 kHz), plus the checklist of variants a Bulk export writes. Set these once for the way you usually work, and every future Export button click uses them.

9. Save the project

File > Save (Ctrl+S) the first time asks for a name and writes a .nebproj file into Documents/Nebula/Projects/; after that, Ctrl+S just saves. The dot next to "PROJECT" in the panel header shows when there are unsaved changes. File > Save As keeps the original and starts a new file from the current state.

That is a complete song, start to finish, in the window alone — no external tools needed. The rest of this manual goes deeper on each part: instruments and sound design (chapter 3), drum racks and your own samples (chapter 4), the built-in effects (chapter 5), mixing and every export option (chapter 6), the full shortcut list (chapter 7), and — for scripting, hardware controllers and AI assistants — chapters 8 through 11.