Building a Cue from Scratch

This chapter walks through creating an adaptive cue from nothing — choosing a profile, composing clips, building scenes, layering them, and exporting the result.

1. Define the Musical Context

Start in Score Map > Profiles. Create a new score profile that defines the sonic identity for this cue:

• Name: “Forest Exploration”
• Tempo range: 90–110 BPM
• Intensity range: 0.2–0.6
• Palette tags: orchestral, woodwind, ambient
• Key/Scale: D minor

The score profile does not produce sound — it defines the musical constraints that make your cue coherent with the rest of the score.

2. Create Motif Material

In Score Map > Motif Families, create a motif family:

• Name: “Forest Theme”
• Link scenes that will carry this motif

Motif families track thematic material that recurs across cues and contexts. Even a single cue benefits from naming its core musical idea.

3. Compose Clips

Switch to Clips. Create clips for each musical layer:

• Clip: Forest Melody — A gentle woodwind phrase in D minor
• Clip: Forest Rhythm — A quiet percussion pattern
• Clip: Forest Pad — A sustained ambient layer

For each clip:

• Choose an instrument (built-in or sample instrument)
• Set key and scale
• Create intensity variants (low, mid, high) for adaptive layering
• Use motif transforms (transpose, invert, octave shift) to generate variations

4. Build Scenes

In Scenes, create scenes for each game state:

• Forest Exploration — Layer the melody, pad, and low-intensity rhythm
• Forest Tension — Add the mid-intensity rhythm variant, increase volume on the pad
• Forest Combat — Full intensity variants, add combat percussion layer

Each scene is a stack of stem layers. Set layer order, gain, mute/solo, section role, and intensity value.

5. Set Up Bindings

In Bindings, create trigger bindings:

• Forest Exploration: when region == "forest" and inCombat == false — priority 10
• Forest Tension: when region == "forest" and danger > 0.5 — priority 20
• Forest Combat: when region == "forest" and inCombat == true — priority 30

Higher priority wins when multiple bindings match.

6. Define Transitions

In Transitions, create transition rules:

• Exploration to Tension: crossfade, 2s
• Tension to Combat: bar-sync
• Combat to Exploration: crossfade, 3s
• Combat to Tension: crossfade, 1.5s

7. Automate

In Automation, create lanes for volume curves, filter sweeps, or intensity parameters. Set up macro mappings. Add section envelopes to shape dynamics across intro/loop/outro.

8. Capture and Branch

Use Library to snapshot the cue before major changes. Branch from a snapshot to try a radically different version while preserving lineage.

9. Export

The final cue exports as part of the runtime pack — a JSON bundle containing all scenes, bindings, transitions, and references that a game engine can consume.