Educational chord annotation
I have signed a development agreement with Musescore. While I am a novice musician I love music and have been a ballroom (and other) dancer for over forty years. I have just now begun to play the piano and organ.
One of the early things that I have learned in this environment is that you need to learn 80% chord dominant. I have also learned that in piano chords must be played across octaves while on the organ or electronic keyboard chords can be played between the F's.
What this discussion is about is that for beginners reading chords from a staff can be complicated to say the least. Chord names can make this simpler if you already know your chords. As a novice and beginner yo do not. This task deals with the optional display of the keys of any chord as a superscripted option in the chord names with an option of keyboard or organ (between the F's) formation.
Interested let me and the staff at Musescore know.
Carl
Comments
Like the note names plugin ?
I don't understand this request. Can you post a picture of what you want to see close to chordnames? In particular, I don't understand what you mean by "the keys of any chord"? Are these note name, a small keyboard like in this plugin?
What do you mean by 80% chord dominant???
Certainly not the usual meaning of dominant in musical terminology ie the 5th note of the scale.
It is also not clear wht you mean about chords being played between the F's????
If you mean that chords on the organ are always played in the octave bound by the 2 F's nearest middle C, then I can assure you as a professional organist that that is definitely not the case - chords are played anywhere on the keyboard and by either hand on any keyboard.
First of all let me apologizes to all you professional musicians and composers out there. Especially those who learned to may before the existence of many of the electronic and computer assisted instruments out there.
I should let you all know that I never touched and instrument with the intent of playing quality music until 6-weeks ago. It was then I purchased a $12,00 Lowrey Chord Organ with an MCS system. After two weeks I went to an instructor who evaluated my skills. I have now been placed in classes with people who have been playing three to five years. I have also written a score with 32 measures, repeats and codas which I have played back using WAV and MIDI files.
How many of you out there remember what it was like to learn chords when you first began? That's where I am at. At this point it is extremely hard to read and recognize chords from a score. It is even still hard to read them and play them from chord names.
By the way, I have chosen to never use MCS shortcuts to play chords. Choosing instead to finger all the chords as they should be played. The exception is that on an MCS organ they can be effectively played between F's in a single octave and thanks to LOWREY MCS can be played in any octave on the lower keyboard. That does not mean that I have not practiced rolling chords piano style already only to help me learn.
As to what I mean my key annotation, this would only be a display or print option. It would have a switch in the GUI to display piano chord sequence across octaves or organ sequence between the F's. In the later case GMaj7 would be super-scripted with F#GBD if played between F's or BDF#G if play on a standard keyboard within the middle C octave.
In reply to In response to all by Carl M Jacobson
Are you saying that you want someone to write code that will produce simple chords (major triad, minor triad, seventh etc.) from the chord name and place the notes of that chord (by automatic inversion) between the lower and upper F's on a treble clef (or the lower and upper As, perhaps, on the bass clef)?
Or, are you offering to write this code but want help in suggesting how to implement it?
In reply to Are you saying that you want by underquark
I have been an engineer and programmer since computers first came on the seen. Before that I wired EAM Boards. I can and have programmed serious application in almost every language out there.
My personal feeling is that this and other things I have asked for in MuseScore are not that difficult to implement. I just need the source and a quick introduction to the architecture from one of its developers.
If there are others out there who would like to review, critique and test (validate) the work if I get permission to implement this their help would always be welcome.
it should be noted that most of the functions I suggested need to be implemented in the core software. They would be difficult if not impossible to implement as simple plugins.
In reply to I Can and Will CODE IT - All I need is the source code AND by Carl M Jacobson
All the source code is obtainable from Github.
You will need to set up your own GitHub repository and then clone a fork from the MuseScore respository.
Documentation of the source is a little sketchy, but there are people around who will be able to talk you through the basics either through Mscore-Developer mailing list or IRC.
In reply to All the source code is by ChurchOrganist
You all need to understand that at this point I am still a very amateur musician but a very experienced programmer. On the other hand I have loved music all my life and am a very talented ballroom and social dancer (50-years+). Since starting lessons I have become enamored with music itself and music theory and have already written a very simple score using this software.
My music teacher has already placed me in a class with people with 3 to 5 years experience and I am keeping up or leading the pack.
I will be downloading and linking to the source code in the next week. It should be understood, however, that I will still be practicing on the organ a minimum of 30 hours a week.
There are already a number of things in MuseScore that I look forward to improving on. I will try to keep you all informed as I progress. Some of the things I want to address are small nuisance issues, ease of use issues and minor bugs. These are things that I have noticed after designing, architecting and developing various software application over the last 40 years. Obviously though my main focus will be on various enhancements I would like to see in the software.
If there are issues or things you are interested in please let me know.
Carl
In reply to Thanks for the info by Carl M Jacobson
I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but the current version of MuseScore - 1.3 - is based on a pretty old snapshot of the code. For the past several years, most development work has been proceeding toward 2.0, which is getting "close" to release. Bug fixes are certainly welcome, but be sure to verify that the bug still exists in the development version - many have been fixed in the past several years. There are a number of other pretty significant changes too, which is why it is has been taking so long. So you might want to spend some time playing around with a nightly build (see Downloads link in menu at right of this page) before proceeding further. No sense making a list of things you want to fix only to find out they already are fixed. And realize that there probably won't be any additional new features for 2.0 at this point - there are more than enough of those already! So definitely focus on bug fixing rather than new features.
In reply to I'm not sure if you are aware by Marc Sabatella
I will download and set up a build environment as soon as I can. I will use it for my future efforts.
I will read up on the development process, checkin, checkout, quality assurance and last stable vs nightly or weekly builds. I may have some question when I get to that point.