In SwarShala 3.1.0, you can now 'draw' the pitch bending of a stroke (meend) exactly the way you want, by defining the exact curve between the initial note and the destination note. Moreover, various curve templates are provided that can be reused, or slightly customized by moving the points on the graph.

The x bar of the graph spreads across the length of the selected cell. So if you start bending at the middle, it's like bending at the middle of the cell. The y bar of the graph corresponds to the intensity of the pitch shift, which is defined in the Half notes to bend box below. So normally the graph should end straight at the highest point, but in some cases you would wish to end slightly below or slightly above. Now you have full control over that.
When you move the mouse over an existing point and then click, you can drag it. When you click outside an existing point, it just adds a point to the graph. You can also remove an existing point by dragging it outside the graph area.

You can save the current graph you are working on as a Template, which can be reused later on.

Previous SwarShala version had a slight problem with the meend playback. Meend, would effect the notes still sustaining from the previous cells. In that case, that sustain was also pitch bent, and the result was not sounding very good. This problem has been solved with 3.1.0 update. This new version of SwarShala keeps only the notes that are pitch bent within the main channel, and all other notes are played on the alternate channel. This corrects the problem and sounds much more natural.

Volume envelope was already available in previous SwarShala version. With SwarShala 3.1.0 version you can however now draw your volume envelope on a volume envelope graph. Defining a Volume Envelope is now made very easy by a system of curves you can drag to define the way the volume fluctuates along the selected sequence. So, now you can actually draw a graph which guides the volume fluctuations in the selected sequence.

An example of a Volume Envelope graph.

Resulting Volume Envelope

You can now easily create an articulation for a specific stroke. This means that instead of just playing the stroke straight, you can specify a different stroke to "touch" for a short time before resuming the initial stroke. For that, a new dialog allows you to specify the articulation stroke with its specific settings (emphasis, pitch, octave and style), the position at which you wish to place the articulation, and the position at which you would like to resume the initial stroke, and the meend functions you can use - if you so wish - to and from the artculation stroke.

Set Articulation dialog box

Example: See below a sequence of 12 beats. Suppose we want to have an arcitulation at 9th beat. Instead of playing a plain 'Ma', we want to have a touch of Pa in between, so that the sequence becomes Ma-Pa-Ma, where Pa is touched just for a short while, as a passing note.

In the 'Set Articulation' dialog box, we will specify the following settings:
Articulation Stroke: Pa
Position in % within the cell: 40
Resume stroke at %: 60
Meend to articuation: straight up from half (choose from available templates)
Meend from articulation: down from 60% (choose from avaiable templates)

We'll leave the other parameters with their default values. The resulting cell looks like this:

You can now start and stop playback by using your space bar in Compose Pane.

In Stroke/Cell Properties dialog, the Emphasis and Pitch controls now range from -30 to +30. This allows you to put more/less weight on specific strokes in a sequence. Also step in the spinner control (up and down arrows) is now of 4 allowing you to increase/decrease the value faster. If you want a value that is not divisible by 4, you can always type it manually in the control.

The Stroke/Cell Properties dialog is now modeless, which means you don't need to close it to be able to continue other actions, it can stay displayed while you click on cells one after the other, and it refreshes accordingly so that stroke modulations are easier to enter. To commit the changes, you can then press a new Apply button. Clicking anywhere outside a cell hides the screen.

Certain sequencers were not reading the Pitch Bend Range (sensitivity) control that is placed at the begining of each track, because its 5 MIDI events were placed on the same tick and where somehow read in a different order. This setting defines the amount of notes that a maximum pitch bend triggers. We have now placed each of these events on a different tick so the problem is solved, though you must use the "gap before MIDI files" option in the Preferences dialog for it to take effect.

Now theer are mute and volume check boxes control on each track in Tracks view. The mute check box immediately silences the specific track. Just note that if all tracks are muted, the composition playback just stops.
The volume spinner control lets you change the volume of each track on the fly. This is very useful to fine-tune the volume balance of your composition.

The playback engine has been completely redesigned to allow real-time variation of speed, volume & pitch, specially useful in Practice pane. Playback starts immediately and lasts as long as you don’t stop it (therefore Duration drop down list in Practice Pane has been removed). You can then decide the speed at which you want the performance, the volume of each part (melodic, rhythmic & drone) and the pich requested, while the playback continues.
Also note that this also applies to Compose pane, both in Sequence and Tracks views.

You can now drag the right border of a cell to the left or to the right, to decrease/increase its duration by a certain number of subdivisions of a beat. The following cell is also resized accordingly. This allows you to create a more human feel or even some swing effect to the rhythmic/melodic pattern.

You can now select multiple style choices for each sequence. These styles are defined once per base, and can then be viewed in Sequence Properties dialog, where you can click as many as applicable. This was required since a sequence can be used for multiple styles.
You can add Styles to be selected within your base through a new File | Define Styles option.

You can now give a more realistic feel to your Practice session by defining for each section (rhythmic, melodic andtanpura) some parameters that alter respectively the quantization (precision of strokes), the volume and pitch of played notes/strokes. You can also add a Swing effect.
All these parameters are fully customizable in their frequency and intensity. You can open the Humanize and Swing dialog box by clicking on the humanize button.

Humanize and Swing dialog box

You can now search your current base for components of a specific style and/or nr of beats through the Edit | Search Components option. This displays a list with the path of each component meeting the selected criteria. Double-clicking on one of the components automatically selects it within the Sequence panel.

You can now specify the way Khali and Tali bars are set within a given rhythmic or melodic cycle, through the Components | Set Bars option.

To allow for easier updates of our bases in the future, we have included all fine-tuned components within new read-only folders: Loops and Fills. These read-only folders will appear reddish in color. You can play the sequences in these folders, but won't be able to modify them. If you want any changes in them, you can simply drag a copy of the sequence/folder to your own (user) folders, so that they become editable. In this way, when we release new versions of our bases, you can just copy paste your own user folders into the new ones and there you go.

A special case is if you want to create new sequences for Practice pane, or enhance the new ones. For this you'll have to understand how Practice Pane selects sequences from Bases. Practice Pane picks up sequences which are placed in Loops/Cycles or Practice/Cycles folders in bases, and which have 'Style' defined as 'Practice Cycle'. While sequences in Loops/Cycles/Subfolders, can't be changed, as these are locked, sequences in Practice/Cycles folder can be changed as required.

So what if you want to make changes to sequences that are there in Loops/Cycles folder? You can drag a folder/sequence from Loops/Cycles folder to Practice/Cycles folder. You can then make the changes in the sequence as required.

For example, if you want to change an existing TinTaal pattern and want to see it in Practice Pane, you can drag it from Loops/Cycles/TinTaal folder to Practice/Cycles/My TinTaal folder. There you can change the pattern, set its Style to 'Practice Cycle', set the 'From' and 'To' tempo preferences. Save the base. Now turn to Practice Pane, Choose Tabla. If Tabla is already the default rhythm instrument, choose some other instrument and then choose Tabla again so that Practice Pane reads the latest changes. Now you'll see that your TinTaal pattern appears as 'My TinTaal.

Overriding the lock

If you'd rather update directly the sequences in Fills/Loops folder, you can always shortcircuit the locking mechanism by activating the #OverrideFoldersLock=1 line in the resources/SwarShala.prop file. For that, you can just remove the # sign before the line. Of course, when new versions of our bases are released it's up to you to sort out what has been changed or not.

Version 3.1.1

From version 3.1.1 onwards, we have added the possibility to define multiple loop ranges in a composition. These ranges can be defined in the Tracks | Set Loop Ranges menu option. This displays the following screen:

As you can see, a Loop Range is defined by a from/to beat+offset combination, a number of loops (a value of 1 means the sequence will loop once, means it will play two times) and a caption that will then be displayed in the header of the composition for that loop range:

Just note that you can also define Loop Ranges with a Number of Loops value of 0, meaning they will not loop, but the caption entered will still be displayed on the composition header. This can be helpful to document parts of a composition.

Another interesting feature allows you to save your practice sessions under a specific name, so as to be able to reload them later on. You can thus customize any nr of sessions and load them at wish.

SwarShala will also keep track of the latest sessions open and will reload them the next time the program starts. This is also the case now with the last loaded composition.

To allow you to create a precise volume envelope on large sequences, the Volume Envelope dialog now has a horizontal zoom function.