Split Midi track to double staff

Hi, Thanks for the alternative viewpoint. I can't fully agree, as a composer needs space to as you say, prepare the dots on paper with a pencil. The computer way of course is more comfortable and I see it as a boon send compared to the laborious way in which Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin and company all wrote down their compositions. But you know what, You start with a blank manuscript and like painting by numbers you start to fill the staves. Your idea starting with a rhythmic structure " pre-supposes " that it's a regular piece ie constant time. Let me share a few thoughts for the night.

Music notation was invented as a means of somehow documenting the composition for others to play. But in the real world of music and performing we have an entity that makes music more beautiful I call " light and shade ". To create that is not all softness and dynamics in a performance it's also very much faster or slower performing of the melody down to an individual note being emphasised almost to a pause in the music and re-commencing. In a real performance the conductor of an orchestra does this based NOT on bar lines and time signature but variables we come to know as expressions, which litter a musical score and actually makes a nonsense technically of a musical score. Midi,is notationally speaking overlooking the obvious need to drag music scoring into the 21st Century and is modelled on perceived past requirements and does not reflect accurately a musical performance " as heard ". That is the fault of the programmers who don't understand the needs of composers, only musicians who play the scores.and the two are different fulfilling requirements. So this was a missed opportunity to be innovative and perfect midi notational screen displays to intelligently allow for Light and shade performance by if necessary allowing custom bars of different eg BPM content - but even that would not go far enough. On the other hand a simple midi recorder eg RedDot should be able to faithfully capture a midi light and shade performance and it couldn't care less about bars and staves etc, because for the first time, electronically we capture what we play. Yet when it comes to creating a notational interpretation, it's as crude as working by candle light in the dark ages. Can you see, the problem ? Notational software cannot even create a decent midi file from its own notation let alone record in real time a performance properly when it is trying to write notes on the stave and " anticipate " what the next few bars might be, so the cache and buffering and screen writing methods used by all software is by experience flawed. Better, to capture raw midi, create a suggested screen representation " post " recording with highlighted bars and zones requiring clarification and re conforming to the accepted mathematics of note timings , EVEN allowing for intermediary custom bars and overide editing capabilities that include bar line nudging or removal or insertion elsewhere in the phrase.

Finally, as a composer, why would I wish to be constrained by a suggestion of a predetmined rhythmic structure ?. . It''s like telling Michaelangelo he must paint within a graph paper style grid. When in fact he is painting a distorted image on a curved domed ceiling, which is intended to reflect a 2D plain illusionary corrected perspective when gazing up ? Imagine looking at your reflection in a spoon and the image being correct and not bent. Now how innovative is that by a painter, who thinks outside the box. Well, music is no different, but the tools to assist us are underdeveloped and miss the features that we need to compose our individual creations.

I hope that others understand the fundamental issues her and that the good writers of this software are listening with interest to be bold enough to feel inspired to incorporate this common sense approach to modern music needs. We have fabulous DAWS but ancient midi and notational software interpretations of music that is like a blind man asking " what colour is the wind ? " Hope things improve as am so frustrated with all the stuff out there inhibiting creativity.

thanks for listening to my rant

Steve

Hi David, No offence was intended and is merely frustration on my part not to be able to use notational software from a composers point of view. I would be the ideal person to give programmers an insight and ideas on how composers work and why they need simple fundamental scratchpad features before pressing an " automate " or " auto conform " button that tries to tidy up what you have done.

Was hoping I could open minds to the general failures of notational software programs that have missed the core point of their mission statement to make a worthwhile product available to us users. It is not intended to be a criticism but a simple observation where others may not have seen the wood for the trees. The reason I can see the wood properly is because I am looking in at an early planting stage before the woods become a mass of foilage and fully developed, and in planting the saplings I have a choice on control on my own spacing of the saplings eg further apart on flat ground and closer together on inclines where I want the roots to bind the soil to avoid future landslides of ground etc. Sorry about the analogy.

My Pianist cannot get his head around some of my phrasing, simplybecause the beat stops and freeform takes place over a partial bar before it picks up again. His body clock cannot cope with what I am doing to play in time. My explanation is simple, he doesn't know the tune and therefore he cannot accompany something he doesn't know. Despirte his Diplomas in Music etc, he says I can't do this and I can't do that. My response is Rubbish ! a composer can do whatever he likes, and should not be constrained by some music rules invented centuries ago but never updated to make allowances. Music notational software is meant to be reasonably representative of the composers work but never is.. He is quite offended by what he sees as a musician composer who studies music at grammar school 50 years ago and despite less expert knowledge ignores the rules and what he has learnt. What rules ? Who has the right to say how Chopin intended his music to play, and are we so naive to believe that a piece of manuscript paper handed down over the centuries that relies more on expressions above the stave to convey the piece than the dots below, is an accurate representation. I think not. If you were a witness to a Chopin or any Classical Composer performance, you would have hained from the witnessing the feel and performance . But as with all things our memory of that performance becomes muddy with time and even with notes to remind us drifts into something that could be quite different.. I saw Jimi Hendrix live twice, and even IF I could play like him and had the dots , do we honestly believe it will be representative of what he played ? Light and Shade is the key and no-one tod ate has found a programming way to cope with that element of music. Handling note pitch, velocities and duration is chicken feed compared to " really " interpreting what is going on in the performance, and that is where notational software is based on old traditions and music language now past it's sell by date, so we need 21st century notational tools that does away with " expressions " which are all way tool subjective for me as a composer to guide others how to play the tune. It's as crude as Leonardo DaVinci having post it notes all over the Mona Lisa, telling us what the colour mix was, and which way to make the brush stroke when painting etc. It is an absurd unintelligent approach to what is now a $ billion dollar music industry where technology blows us away and yet we rely on an electronic midi piano roll but with no control over the speed of the roll in technical terms which as I said makes a nonsense of the time signature system. One minute the guy is winding two turns of the handle every 5 secs, and then he does 1.5 turns and later 3 turns etc no consistency, but at least that is what conductors do. They speed us up and wind us down, and that's hardly music correctness technically , when we could document precisely thye raw midi file to be 100% what we want as a composer and not rely on stupid conductors who " try " to guess what the composer intended. - which is the truth of how absurd our music world is.

Very few drummers can hold perfect time, but that doesnt make the music poor. If it;s quantised and becomes perfect time, the we lose the human feel and end up with house style robotic stuff.

These threads are very interesting to me to see how others see music, thanks

This is the center of the discussion or, at least, it *should be* the center of discussion. Programming a computer means taking a complex problem, splitting it into a bunch of elementary minuscule problems, then finding a way to put together those pieces and bits via mathematic procedures in order to solve The Big One.

Whenever one starts to talk about "instinct", "feeling" and such he makes apparent that he has no idea of the process and its potentiality. Now, I'm a really poor self-taught programmer who can put together nothing but elementary low-end programs, but I know as much as neededto grasp what a huge amount of difficult work the developers of MuseScore had to face. And the challenge gets increasingly challenging as the size and complexity of the software grows with new features and nug bug fixes.

Operating a software requires some level of awareness of what's behind hitting keys on a PC keyboard and dragging a mouse to and fro. Whenever one reaches such an awareness, he can appreciate the wonders of software like MuseScore, effectively use it and ask for *realistically achievable* features.

Computers-are-not-allmighty.
Software-developers-aren't-either.
That's it.