Swing Playback

• Jan 19, 2014 - 10:00

Firstly, apologies if this issue has already been solved.

I posted a song which I wrote on the piano playing with a swing feel. Using the 'swing playback' feature it sounded OK on my computer but as we all know, the swing feel isn't saved, so when I uploaded it here it sounded completely different. I know this is primarily a site for notation but music is, after all, an aural experience, so I wanted the playback to be true to the way I wanted the song to be portrayed.
I discovered that if you save as a midi file it retains the swing playback.
I f you then load that into musescore it keeps the swing feel even when Play Panel option is set to straight. Unfortunately the notation then looks a bloody mess and pretty well unreadable from a playing point of view.
I have since discovered that you can 'tidy up' the notation back to its original look but the swing feel stays. You can then save this as a musescore file for upload and the swing stays while the notation remains readable.
How this works I have no idea, but I've tried it again on a much shorter snippet and it worked there too.

Here is the original upload with messy midi notation http://musescore.com/user/141397/scores/147272

Here is the readable version WITH swing http://musescore.com/user/141397/scores/156453

Straight snippet http://musescore.com/user/141397/scores/156464

Swung snippet http://musescore.com/user/141397/scores/156465

Hope this all makes sense.


Comments

hey that's exactly why I haven't uploaded anything for general viewing/listening. That's a great discovery on the swing playback but how did you manage to clean up the original messed up version? The reason I ask is that I have several pages of a 17 instrument score that would need 'cleaning'. If its a fag, then I won't bother.

In reply to by onscuba

Great discovery though it was for me, yes it's a bit time-consuming. On my score http://musescore.com/user/141397/scores/147272 saved as a midi and then re-loaded you can see semi-quavers that weren't in my original score. On importing the midi file you are asked what is the shortest note you want to import ( I didn't think anything of this at the time so I must have allowed semi-quavers even though my score didn't originally have any). This time I said quavers so that got rid of the semi-qs.
You'll also see loads of tied notes all over the place which weren't there originally (There were some that were mine!) so I deleted those. That's when I first discovered that I could revert to my original score and not lose the swing beat. Just a fluke discovery. I can't even think now of what I was trying to do.....
Unfortunately when I tried to cut and paste from original to imported midi it didn't keep the swing. Now that would have been just perfect!

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