Backing Machine Guide
What is the Backing Machine?
The Backing Machine plays a full accompaniment (percussion, guitar, bass) for a tune while displaying its score. You can listen to how a piece sounds with live backing before adding it to your repertoire.
Loading a Tune
Use the Search panel to find tunes by title, type, or key from online sources (The Session, Folkwiki…). Alternatively, click Paste ABC to instantly load any ABC notation you have copied to your clipboard — handy for pasting tunes from websites, text files, or another application.
Start / Stop
Press the Play button in the score toolbar to start playback with full backing. Press Stop to stop. The current bar and beat are highlighted in the chord grid in real time as the music plays, driven by note-event timing for accuracy.
Rhythm Style — Auto-Detection
When a tune is loaded, the backing style switches automatically to match its R: (rhythm) field. If the rhythm is unrecognised or absent, the style resets to 'Unknown' so you can pick one manually. Styles span nine families: Irish, Breton, Scottish, English, Cajun, Canadian, American old-time and bluegrass, and a World family covering klezmer (freylekhs and bulgar), Balkan odd metres in 7/8 and 9/8, Latin patterns (son clave, rumba, samba, bossa nova, baião), reggae, afrobeat and Nordic polska and schottis. A tune in 7/8 that names none of them still gets a Balkan pattern rather than no backing at all. Use the Family and Style selectors in the backing panel to override at any time.
Session Mode & Phrase Length
Session Mode controls how the backing pattern evolves over time. Pulse keeps a single repeating pattern. Session introduces subtle variations every phrase, as in a real session. Groove adds more pronounced rhythmic variations for a fuller feel. Phrase Length (4, 8, 12, or 16 bars) sets how many bars make up one phrase before the pattern cycles.
Chord Grid
The chord grid below the score shows two chord slots per bar (half-bar resolution). Click a cell to select it, then use the chord suggestion tool to assign or change a chord. Click the same cell again to deselect it. Below the grid, "Add chords to ABC score" writes the grid's chords into the tune, and "Remove chords from ABC score" strips every chord back out of it — the grid keeps showing its own suggestions either way.
Guitar & Bass
The backing includes an acoustic guitar and a bass line driven by the chord grid. Open the Instruments section in the backing panel to enable/disable each instrument and adjust their individual volume.
Percussion
Open the Rhythm section in the backing panel to choose percussion instruments (Bodhrán, Spoons, Foot Stomp…) and adjust their volume and reverb. Multiple instruments can be active simultaneously.
Tempo
Adjust the playback tempo with the BPM slider in the score toolbar. The backing engine will follow the tempo in real time. When a backing style is selected, five tune-specific tempo shortcuts appear below the slider: Very Slow (~40 % of session speed), Slow (~55 %), Practice (~70 %), Near (~85 %), and Session (100 % — the standard speed for that tune type). Click any preset to set the BPM instantly.