by G.W. Childs IV

Every music application has some way of color coding regions, clips, tracks, etc. However, isn’t it interesting how you don’t see anyone using them, with exception of people, like myself, who create demos for music software?

Let me be the first to say that colors are not a silly thing to add to your tracks. It’s not childish, and it’s not meant to make things prettier. Color coding a clip, region, etc, can really help you quickly identify parts, which makes editing and arranging much easier.

For example: I can decide that any part colored red is a rhythm part. As I go back through my song, I can clearly see all of my rhythm parts and differentiate those parts from the green guitar parts.

Second example: I can color code all of the clips or regions green that are apart of my song intro, the chorus could be blue, the verse could be yellow. When I go back to edit my song, I can clearly see all of the parts that make up my song and can jump around accordingly.

Finally, one of my favorite things about the color feature is one of the most simple: Colors can mean whatever you want them to. You can set up a color coding system for the way that your brain works.

However, I wouldn’t get too complicated, occasionally, you may want to pass a song along to a friend to do some work on and if you can easily explain what the color coding means, he can follow your system and this helps the collaboration go even more smoothly. When he returns the song to you with his revisions, you’ll be able to clearly hear and ’see’ what he’s done.

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