Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Messages

This section allows you to view all Messages made by this member. Note that you can only see Messages made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - William Ashworth

1001
Announcements / Re: NWC2 Beta 2.27 is now available
OK, I can see the possibilities in setting up a "jump staff." However, this function might be better served if users were allowed to insert cue points and a "goto cue" function was added to the "goto bar" function. (Others have also suggested a "goto section letter" function; cue points could take care of that, as well.)

I like the ruler idea. Another way to handle knowing which measure you are in would be to add that information to the status bar - which has also been suggested by others.

Cheers,

Bill
1002
Announcements / Re: NWC2 Beta 2.27 is now available
Quote from: Rick G.
Just another reason why a HotKey is needed to toggle layering.

Right. And another possible tinker with the program that could come out of this is that it might automatically apply an "exclude from bar count" on the top staff to the equivalent bars in the rest of the staves of the score. I can think of no reason why one would want different counts in the different parts, although I may be missing something.
1003
Announcements / Re: NWC2 Beta 2.27 is now available
OK - found it. And you're right: it was user error after all.

The four measures between movements were removed from the count in the flute part (at the top of the score), but not in the remaining four parts. So when the cursor was in the flute part, the jump was correct; when it was in any other part, the jump was off by four measures after the break between movements. Simple as that. It was concealed by my habit of throwing the cursor into the second staff of a system when navigating a score. When I first loaded the score, of course, the cursor was in the top staff, and the goto worked. On subsequent tests, I put the cursor in the second staff, and the goto failed.

Mea culpa oops. Thanks for sticking with this, Rick, until the real cause turned up. And apologies to Eric, who got the program flow right after all.

Cheers (faintly),

Bill
1004
Announcements / Re: NWC2 Beta 2.27 is now available
No confusion, Rick. It's going to the wrong bar. However, I've found a further oddity about it: it doesn't happen the first time I invoke the goto command. The program gets that first call right: on all subsequent calls, it gets it wrong.

Here is the specific situation. I have a three-movement piece for wind quintet which I decided, for ease of distribution by .pdf, to notate in a single file. To separate the movements during playback, I used four bars of rests, making them invisible and excluding them from the bar count. So the first movement ends on bar 114; there are four invisible, unnumbered bars; and the second movement begins on bar 115. The problem develops when I try to invoke a goto command across those four inter-movement bars - say, from 60 to 120. The first time the command is invoked, I end up, correctly, in 120. The second and all subsequent times, I end up in 116.

I think what is probably happening is this: On that first jump, the program decrements the count properly for the four uncounted bars and then stores the decremented count. On the second and subsequent jumps, it uses the stored count but treats it as a raw count that needs to be decremented. So the bars are subtracted twice. The problem does not compound, so the second (wrong) count must be thrown away. I would guess the program checks the register the count is stored in and doesn't change it if it contains a non-zero amount.

And, by the way, you can throw away my statement that the problem only happens from within selections. (The "my statement" register contains a non-zero amount. ;-) That was an artifact of testing the first time without a selection and the second time, with one. I pounced on the wrong variable - a common problem when I was debugging my own programs, and part of the reason I no longer do programming.

Cheers,

Bill
1005
Announcements / Re: NWC2 Beta 2.27 is now available
Quote from: Rick G.
I can't duplicate this behaviour. Goto properly observes |XBarCnt:Y in my tests.

Interesting, Rick - that helps narrow it down. A little more experimentation shows that it occurs only when I invoke the goto command from within a selection. Try that.

Bill
1006
Announcements / Re: NWC2 Beta 2.27 is now available
There seems to be a small problem with the "goto" box as currently implemented. If you have set any barline properties to "exclude from bar count," the measure numbers in the score will ignore them but the measure numbers in the goto box will not. This means that if you attempt to go to a measure following the excluded bar(s), the goto command will take you to a different measure than anticipated.

I don't use this function often, so I don't know if this is a carryover or a result of the change that has just been made.

Just tryin' to help.....

Cheers,

Bill
1007
General Discussion / Re: Tuplets
This must be done behind the scenes, using hidden time signatures and tempo changes. Basically, you will need to temporarily increase the time signature to make room for the extra notes in the measure; change the tempo before and after the "multi-tuplet" so that playback speeds up for the tuplet and then slows down again immediately after; and use a text entry to indicate the number of notes in the "multi-tuplet." The tempo change can be calculated from the number of notes you are adding; e.g., for five in the place of four, the temporary tempo needs to be 5/4 of the "normal" tempo. I've attached an example.

Hope this helps....

Bill
1008
General Discussion / Re: Extra Notes for extra lyrics
Definitely better, Bill, but I'm still getting staff lines cut, especially in mm. 2-3. (In m. 1, the middle line is cut halfway through by the bases of the "I's", giving it a curiously serrated look). I fear each of us must ultimately adjust to fit our own printers.

I liked Rick's post about the clipboard format. That string of suggested characters to represent different types of slurs looks just like the way swearing used to be represented in the comic books of my youth - and that's exactly how I feel when I'm trying to adjust one of these broken-slur workarounds.

Cheers,

Bill
1009
General Discussion / Re: Extra Notes for extra lyrics
Well, Bill, I hate to be critical - especially of someone with such a nice name :) - but on my machine, your dotted tie also dotted three of the staff lines and wiped out half of one of the noteheads. The point really is, as I said in my previous post, that one needs to make a careful choice of user fonts and characters to get the best results. What I posted had the virtue of demonstrating the idea without recourse to user fonts,  but that was about its only virtue. I would never use exactly that in a score.

Cheers,

Bill

P.S.: I hit "post" and got the notice that David had replied before me - thanks, David. Your comment about both versions cutting staff lines interested me, because the one I posted doesn't cut them on my machine. It appears that printouts vary from machine to machine more than we think. Another very good reason to ask for native versions of many of our workarounds - including this one. (Sorry, Eric, but there it is....)
1010
General Discussion / Re: Extra Notes for extra lyrics
Here's a "quick and dirty" version of a dotted tie using digital whiteout. You will have to change the color of Highlight 7 to white (the ability to do that is on the options menu under "colors"). I've used a font that's natively available in the program to create the holes in the tie: a much neater job can be done with a well-chosen combination of characters and user fonts.

Cheers,

Bill
1011
General Discussion / Re: Extra Notes for extra lyrics
Another standard means of doing this in vocal music is with a broken tie: e.g., if there is one word in the first verse (a half note) and two words in the second (two quarter notes), you represent the half note by two tied quarter notes and make the tie out of dots or dashes to indicate that it is only used when necessary. Unfortunately, NWC doesn't do broken ties - although there are ways to fake it using "digital whiteout".
1012
General Discussion / Re: Accent Placement
Well, I think you're right. But that doesn't preclude the use of a rack of movable type to stamp the playing instructions and other text into the copper sheet, and I think that's what they did - although the letters could have been individually stamped, instead. Hard to tell at this remove, and it doesn't much matter. There's certainly some misalignment, whatever the method.
1013
General Discussion / Re: radio shack midi keyboard HELP!
Quote from: NoteWorthy Online
it is generally a good idea to use a powered USB hub with any device that derives its power from the USB port.

OTOH, there are a few peripherals that demand to be plugged directly into the computer. My external HD is happier that way (everything else prefers the powered hub). So maybe the best advice is: if you're having trouble with a USB device plugged directly into your machine, try a powered hub - and vice versa.

Cheers,

Bill
1014
General Discussion / Re: Accent Placement
Quote from: Rick G.
The 'c' is too low and the 's' too high.

And the 'm' is tilted. The type was racked none too carefully. But you're certainly right about the readability of the music. Just goes to show that technically correct and correct are sometimes two different things.
1015
General Discussion / Re: radio shack midi keyboard HELP!
I've had the same experience as John. I have four USB devices (mouse, keyboard, printer, external HD) plugged in permanently; all others I plug in only as needed. I've noticed that the computer often lets me know it's found a "new device" when I plug in something it's recognized umpteen times before. My digicam and my GPS unit usually trigger this behavior; other things may do it occasionally. At first I chalked it up to plugging into a different port, but I've only got two empty ports and it's happened more than twice with each unit. So I dunno. My current theory for the cause is M$ updates. But maybe I'm just cynical.

Bill
1016
General Discussion / Re: multiduration chord buglet
Nice, Rick. Even nicer, Rich - and it demonstrates that NWC is capable of doing it right. So getting the correct behavior from the get-go should require merely teaching the program to recognize the situations in which it's needed. Until that's done, either this workaround or layering allows us to get scores that look and sound right. A little extra effort, but it's minimal. Maybe correcting it doesn't need to be a high priority.

But I agree with Rick that muted grace notes shouldn't affect MIDI. Like most others here, I use them extensively to control the print output. Usually that means using a separate playback staff. It would be nice to be able to dispense with that.

Cheers,

Bill
1018
General Discussion / Re: multiduration chord buglet
Correction: NWC doesn't have it quite right. Placing a Bb against a Bnat gives you the first measure in the attached example: sounds right, but looks wrong. To achieve the correct appearance (second measure) requires layering.
1019
General Discussion / Re: multiduration chord buglet
The concern here was never about correct vs. incorrect notation. It was about correct notation producing the wrong sound. Two notes sharing the same notehead should also share the same accidental. If the accidentals are different, two noteheads are required. NWC now has it right (thank you very much, Eric).
1020
General Discussion / Re: Repetita juvant
Quote from: Rick G.
Question for the group: I've often seen (usually Baroque) music with D.C. senza replica which is "do again without the repeats". Anyone know what what should be used for "do again with the repeats".  Modern practice seems to be to omit the repeats (usually taking the last Special Ending).

Hi Rick -

I've never seen the instruction, but I would think any musician who understands senza replica would also understand con replica.

Cheers,

Bill
1021
General Discussion / Re: Accent Placement
Quote from: K.A.T.
So that everyone is able to check it out.
Now some people are out of the loop...

Well....this is the NWC2 section of the forum. Normally, one would expect those hanging out here to have NWC2 installed. And it's important for the examples to match the version of NWC being talked about, else they might exhibit different behavior in critical places.
1022
General Discussion / Re: multiduration chord buglet
Thanks for the fix to the accidentals problem on shared noteheads, Eric. But Rick is right - the new slurs do act a little strangely in certain situations. Hopefully you will be able to fix these in the next release.

Cheers,

Bill
1023
General Discussion / Re: Accent Placement
Quote
I would love to be able to put all articulations (including staccato) outside the staff automatically.

So would I.

Bill
1024
General Discussion / Re: Importing 6/8 and 3/4 midi files
Quote
I've heard other folks say that NWC is dead, and little work is being done on NWC2, that it'll never come out

Well, it often feels that way as we wait for the next beta release. But, actually, NWC2 is out. The betas are rock-solid: you don't need to be a geek to use them, they are in no way incomplete, and you don't risk damaging anything. Many improvements over 1.x, and the product continues to improve with each release, which is why it's still beta. It is far from dead. Sounds like you have a lot of effort invested in NWC 1.x files. It will definitely be worth your while to move to NWC2.

Cheers,

Bill
1025
General Discussion / Re: Accent Placement
I have also been bothered by the placement of accent marks within the staff, where they are difficult to read, and where they almost never appear in printed music. However, there is nothing abnormal about accent marks above the stem instead of above the notehead, and this will solve the problem much of the time, as Lawrie points out.

It would still be nice to have some control for those times when neither head nor stem placement will get the accent into the white space above or below the staff, or when accents collide with other score marks.

Bill
1026
General Discussion / Re: How to install soundfonts
As sort of an aside here, John (or anyone), do you know how Garritan Personal Orchestra and similar products fit into this? Do they require a card that accepts soundfonts, or can the output go to any old sound card?
1027
General Discussion / Re: multiduration chord buglet
Quote from: Rick G.
But "stickler" is far too kind a moniker :)

Yup. Ugly-looking thing, isn't it? And not a chord symbol you want to see, either, if you're cold-reading the piece. But in context, the sound is glorious, and yes, functionally, it really is an F7+5-5.

Cheers,

Bill
1028
General Discussion / Re: multiduration chord buglet
Thanks, Eric, for offering to at least look at this problem.

Rick and Lawrie, I agree that it is highly unusual for two notes with the same pitch name but different chromatic inflections to occur simultaneously, and when it occurs it is probably better to write them enharmonically to avoid the notation problem. But if a composer is thinking analytically instead of practically, you may see it. There's an example in Thelonius Monk's 'Round Midnight, at least in the printed lead-sheet version I have. Toward the end of the first period of the music, in m. 13 (on the words "it really gets bad"), Monk calls for an F7+5-5. That would be F,A,Cb,C#,Eb. If the chord were written out in the music, of course, it would be likely to be written F,A,B,C#,Eb. That would be easier to read, but functionally wrong, and a stickler for detail might prefer the version with two different chromatic inflections of the C.

I suspect examples could be located in the music of Brahms, Richard Strauss, and other highly chromatic late-Romantic composers as well. Curiously enough, I wouldn't expect them in atonal music, no matter how chromatic it gets. That's because, with no tonality, the spelling of a given note becomes less important than its actual pitch class, freeing the composer to spell everything enharmonically. You do still have to pay attention to upward and downward leading tendancies, of course, and use sharps or flats as appropriate to those situations.

All this is pretty much a sidelight. The problem here was that I didn't want different chromatic inflections on the two notes of the chord, the music wasn't written with different chromatic inflections on those two notes, but the program was playing them that way anyway. So Rick is probably right in calling it a bug (unexpected and unwanted behavior). But don't let's get into that again....;-)

Cheers,

Bill
1029
General Discussion / Re: Modifying properties of a tied note
You can do this without layering, but you will have to erase the quarter-note E in the first chord (<cntrl><backspace>) and replace it with a half-note E (<cntrl><enter>). Set the attributes of the new note (half note, tied to the next note) before you enter it. NWC does not allow the selection of individual notes in a chord, so you can't change a chord note's attributes after it's been entered.
1030
General Discussion / multiduration chord buglet
Open the attached NWC2 file and hit play.

The minor seconds you hear on each beat (but don't see) are caused by the fact that I entered the 16th notes first, followed by the quarter notes. Since I had entered the accidentals with the sixteenths, and the quarter notes were entered on the same pitches (which already had accidentals connected with them), I didn't bother to add accidentals to the quarters. And the program, being a literalist, went ahead and saved them as notes without accidentals. So you have F#(16th) against F-natural (quarter) on the first beat, and similarly on the remaining three beats. The last beat is particularly interesting. The program gave the quarter note I entered there a sharp, even though I had indicated a natural for the sixteenth. This is because of the way NWC handles chords containing two different durations. The duration of the chord is taken from the shorter note, but the chord spelling begins with the lowest note. In this case, that is the stem-down quarter note - which, since the sixteenth with its natural sign hasn't occured yet, takes its chromatic inflection from the sixteenth-note F# earlier in the measure.

OK. There are two simple ways to handle this. The easier way is to enter the quarter notes with the chromatic spelling you want in the first place, instead of assuming they will take the accidentals already entered for the sixteenths. The cleaner way is to put the sixteenths on one layer and the quarter notes on another, bypassing the multiduration chord problem altogether. Because I'm naturally lazy, I chose the first way in this particular case. But shouldn't the program do this for you? If you've already entered an F#, stem up, shouldn't a stem-down F entered on the same staff at the same pitch level take the sharp as well, unless you specify otherwise? That's what would happen if you were hand-writing the music. It's also what happens when you copy the music to NWCtext and then paste the text into another staff. Why can't it happen here?

I've called it a "buglet," but it's really more of an oversight. Whatever it's called, it would be nice to have it corrected.

Cheers,

Bill
1031
General Discussion / Re: display suggestion
Quote from: David Palmquist
It can get messy.

Oh, it certainly can!

But making one staff being longer than the others doesn't alter the local measure numbers - it just adds extra measures at the end of that staff.

Of course, in your scenario, equivalent measures in different staves temporarily don't line up. But that's a problem with or without measure numbers. My method of dealing with it is to count the number of measures I'm about to paste in and add that many barlines at the insertion point in all staves. Then I can tell at a glance which staves have been realigned and which haven't. (Rests aren't necessary, unless you're going to do playback: the extra barlines will do the job all by themselves.) Sometimes I throw in a double barline across the entire system right after the point I'm planning to add measures. Keeping that in alignment assures that I've kept all the following material in alignment as well.

Cheers,

Bill
1032
General Discussion / Re: display suggestion
Quote from: Rick G.
Bar number is a nebulous concept in NoteWorthy. It could be the bar number as seen on the printout which is taken from the topmost visible staff, the bar number of the current staff or the bar number as seen by MIDI.

Good point. I think we can discount the MIDI view, because we're mostly looking at ways to help navigate the editor. But the question of insertion point vs. current screen position is one I've gone back and forth on for quite a while. My original post suggested using the insertion point, but I'm not sure that's the one that would be the most helpful.

The most common scenario I run into is trying to determine what part of the score I'm looking at. What are the numbers of the measures that are currently on the screen? If I've scrolled away from the insertion point, I have two choices. I can use the thumb in the vertical scroll bar to scroll up and look at the measure numbers (provided that I've activated them); or I can click somewhere in the window and then use <control><g>. If I use the first method, I've lost track of my vertical position in the score; if I use the second, I've moved the insertion point. And I don't really want to do either one of those things.

I guess what I'd really like to see is two changes, not just one. Put the insertion point in the status bar; but also change the measure numbers so that they display on the staff that is currently at the top of the screen instead of on the top staff of the score. If there were a button-bar button and a keyboard shortcut to turn measure numbers on and off, so that screen clutter could be reduced when needed without moving the current window back to the beginning of the score (snarl snarl snarl), my joy would be complete. At least for a moment.

Cheers,

Bill
1033
General Discussion / Re: display suggestion
<control><G>, <esc> is fine if you're just curious. If you're trying to position a score whose top staff has scrolled off the top of the screen - carrying the measure numbers with it - it's extremely tedious. (It's possible to use <control><G> to navigate directly to the measure you want, of course, but if you're only scrolling horizontally by a couple of screens' worth of data it's a lot easier and faster to just move the thumb in the scroll bar - if you can figure out where you are.)

And I agree with Richard that the [% used] field is unnecessary. The wind quintet I'm currently working on would have to be 8450 measures long to use up the whole staff. That would be 285 hours of music. I don't think so.

Bill
1034
General Discussion / display suggestion
This may have been suggested before: but it would help me a lot if the information in the lower RH corner of the editor screen included, along with the name of the staff, the number of the measure in which the insertion point is located.

Cheers,

Bill
1035
General Discussion / Re: Real Music Composition Software
Let me be clear about this: there is nothing wrong in using a computer to generate inversions, retrogrades, sequences, etc. That's the grunt work, and any method that will lighten that load is helpful. NWC already does transpositions, checks for redundant accidentals, etc. - same idea.

Nor is there anything inherently wrong with mathematically-derived music. Computers have been used to do that, as I indicated earlier, since 1957; but it's been done much, much longer. Plato advocated it. In the 14th century, composers were heavily into mathematically-related techniques such as isorythm (the same rythmic pattern applied over and over to different melodic material, which might or might not be the same length as the rythmic pattern), crab canon (harmonizing a melody by using the same melody under it, but in reverse), and others. Guillaume de Machaut was the greatest master of this, but there were many others. In the first half of the 20th century, the total serialists came along, deriving everything mathematically - opposed by the stochastic composers, who did everything by throwing dice (or some equivalent chance method). Remnants of both of these schools persist today.

Some of the music produced by these methods is very beautiful, some is ugly but intellectually satisfying, and some is just plain ugly. The challenge is to sort these out.

That's where the composer's ear is necessary. And that, I think, is where computers will never be able to do the work. Computers operate by rules, and beauty doesn't. Simple as that.

Most of the music I write is based on a tone row, and one of the earliest stages of work on any piece of this type is to prepare a chart of all the forms of the row that will be used in the piece - original, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion - in all possible transpositions. I do this (with a great deal of help from NWC). Since there is more than one way to arrange this chart, I always make at least two different forms of it, and sometimes three. I print these charts out, and while I am composing, whether at the computer or at the piano, I refer to the charts constantly. But the charts are not the music.

In that last sentence, I think, is where my argument with the original poster lies.

Cheers,

Bill
1038
General Discussion / Re: Real Music Composition Software
Actually, Gongchime, that's been done for at least fifty years. I have a recording of something called the Illiac Suite for String Quartet, composed in 1957 by an Illiac computer at the University of Illinois programmed by Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson. Parts of it are interesting, parts of it are beautiful, but it is all lifeless. The things you describe that a computer can do are all techniques for making music; they aren't music. It would be nice if the computer could produce retrogrades, inversions, etc. for the composer, but it will never be able to figure out where to put them for the best musical effect: that takes a human ear.

Regards,

Bill
1039
General Discussion / Re: suggestion re MPCs and initial staff settings
Sorry to have been silent for a while. Busy weekend.

Barry, you'll note that in my first reply re the expression controller I said "dunno if it's my soundcard or me." OK - it's me. I simply never use it. Thanks to Bill Denholm's post, I now understand why others might prefer it, but for my purposes, changing the volume controller has always worked well. And there are a few MIDI setups that don't have expression controllers. I found one (SoundEngine, from 1994) with a little bit of online searching: more searching would probably turn up others. They may all be legacy setups, but if someone is using one, MIDI playback that depends on the expression controller won't work, or at least will sound wrong. So, while there are reasons to use expression controllers, there are reasons not to as well.

Just for the record, I solved my problem (held note crescendo from mp to mf on the first note of the piece) by placing an mf instead of an mp at the head of the crescendo, dropping the staff volume immediately by the difference between mf and mp (using an absolute MPC), then raising it slowly back over the five held beats of the note (using a linear sweep MPC). I did this on a separate playback staff, but it could be done using invisible dynamics as well. And I can think of several other ways to handle it, none of them wrong. It's nice to have all these options, even if the one I would prefer (a lower default staff volume) isn't available.

Rick and Peter, thanks for the exchange re how soundcards reset their parameters. You've helped explain why the lower default staff volume isn't available. I'd still like to see the default MPC volume settings match the default staff volume. That would be philosophically neater, if nothing else (and actually it would be a lot else).

Thanks to all,

Bill
1040
General Discussion / Re: suggestion re MPCs and initial staff settings
Thanks for the comments, Leigh. Nice to be back on topic. ;-)

Actually, the default note velocity (if you haven't set a dynamic) is 110, which puts it just slightly above ff. See a more complete discussion here.

But I agree with you re the built-in conflict between a lower staff volume and a higher dynamic level. If the default staff volume were to be lowered from 127, I think I would lean more toward making it 92 (the equivalent of f). That seems sufficiently high, but it still leaves about 1/4 of the total dynamic range as headroom to go into for crescendos. And you can always turn the volume knob up....

The bigger issue, as you indicate, is the inconsistency between the default staff volume and the default settings in the volume MPC.

Cheers,

Bill
1042
General Discussion / Re: suggestion re MPCs and initial staff settings
I appreciate the suggestions, Milton, but the point isn't that I don't have a satisfactory way to create volume changes on held notes. I do.

The point is that the current defaults for the volume MPC are not the same as the defaults for the staff volume. This adds unnecessary work for most users, who presumably will be either beginning or ending a volume change with the default staff volume most of the time. Matching up the staff and MPC defaults would mean that the default value of the MPC usually could be used for at least one controller value. Now, it usually can't.

Not a cry for help....just a suggestion to improve the product....
1043
General Discussion / Re: suggestion re MPCs and initial staff settings
Thanks for your quick response, Eric. I understand the potential difficulties of having the volume MPC pick up its initial value from the current volume of the staff. How about simply changing the defaults from 64 to 127? Given that the default staff volume is also 127, that would be correct about half the time.

Barry, I've tried using the expression MPC. Don't know if it's my sound card or if it's just me, but it doesn't seem to have any effect on my machine. I do know (or at least have heard) that it's a MIDI parameter that isn't always supported by sound cards. That means it isn't the best possible choice for changing dynamics on a held note, especially if you expect to post the MIDI on the Web or otherwise share it with other users.

Cheers,

Bill
1044
General Discussion / suggestion re MPCs and initial staff settings
I am working on a wind quintet that begins with a crescendo from mf to f on a flute note that is held for five counts. I know how to handle this, of course: set the initial staff volume low enough to handle the difference between mf and f (110 or lower), then use an MPC to raise the volume gradually over the length of the held note. However, this brings up two questions:

  • Why is the initial staff volume set at the top of the range? and,
  • Why, if the initial staff volume is set at 127, is the initial MPC volume set at 64?

It seems to me that the default staff volume should be set low enough to provide some headroom for operations such as the crescendo I've just described. It also seems that, whatever the initial staff volume is, the initial MPC volume should match it. In fact, whenever you insert a volume MPC, the initial volume should be picked up from the current volume. This would save half the work of inserting the MPC.

Just a thought....for future consideration....

Bill
1045
Tips & Tricks / Re: Controlling the length of hairpins
Nice work, Peter (since the instrumentation you've chosen is "church organ," I guess I have to point out that it's a swell solution ;-).

Due to the limitations on restchords, though, I'm not sure it will work for everything. And the grace note solution will often be simpler to apply. Results may be better or worse with one or the other, depending on the situation.

As to playback, yes, grace notes used the way this thread suggests will mess it up. Writing a properly-sounding trill messes up the printout, too. In these cases, and in many others, the proper solution is a separate playback staff.

In summary, your method of working with hairpins strikes me as neither better nor worse than the grace note method - just different. And that's good. It's nice to have more than one tool in the toolbox.

Cheers,

Bill
1046
Tips & Tricks / Re: Controlling the length of hairpins
Peter,

Don't be misled by my error (and evidently Rick's as well) concerning the behavior of hairpins with invisible notes. They don't behave quite as I thought they did (should have checked more thoroughly before posting, instead of relying on my memory) and I thank you for the correction. But this is really a side issue. The issue in this thread is how to adjust the length of hairpins when the program gets them wrong, for whatever reason. In Haymo's original post (typo-corrected version posted by Lawrie a few posts later), the problem is a hairpin that doesn't extend the full length of the bar without adjustment (remove the invisible grace note just before the barline and watch what happens). What others here, including me, have been suggesting is methods to go the other way: to shorten hairpins when they crowd the dynamics or extend past a barline into the next measure. There is more than just aesthetics at issue here. As NWC draws the hairpins, they sometimes make the music difficult to read. Since we don't have program commands to shorten, lengthen, or move the hairpins (except vertically, in conjunction with the dynamic that precedes them), tricks like this are necessary, and we are fortunate to have them available.

Is this clear enough?....;-)

Bill
1047
Tips & Tricks / Re: Controlling the length of hairpins
Hi Peter -

Others may feel differently, but for me, I guess, the hairpins in your example crowd the dynamics too closely and require some adjustment to look right in the printout. And though you're right about hairpin visibility in the UI, the hairpins under invisible notes actually are invisible in the printout. If they're in the middle of a line, this doesn't matter (the hairpin connects across the invisible note anyway), but it can matter when adjusting the beginning and end points of the hairpin, which is what we've been talking about here. Dunno if this clarifies matters much....

Cheers,

Bill
1048
Tips & Tricks / Re: Controlling the length of hairpins
I hadn't thought of using the whole note as a grace note. Good idea.

We still need a grace note without a hairpin if we want to stop the hairpin at the barline in the printout:

Quote
!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.0,Single)
|Rest|Dur:Whole
|Bar
|Dynamic|Style:mf|Pos:-7|Justify:Right|Placement:AtNextNote
|RestChord|Dur:8th|Opts:Stem=Up,VertOffset=2000|Dur2:Whole|Pos2:0
|Note|Dur:Whole,Grace|Pos:0z|Opts:Diminuendo,Muted
|Rest|Dur:Half,DblDotted|Opts:Stem=Up,Diminuendo,VertOffset=2000|Visibility:Never
|Note|Dur:Whole,Grace|Pos:0z|Opts:Muted
|Bar
|Rest|Dur:Whole
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End

Cheers,

Bill
1049
Tips & Tricks / Re: Controlling the length of hairpins
Quote from: Rick G.
This would be more flexible if hairpins were always visible, but alas they inherit visibilty from the first note/rest.
Of course, that first note can be headless, stemless and muted. It will still take up space, but if it's a grace note, not much....

But I agree that visability of the hairpins should be independent of the notes. It would make things a whole lot easier.

Cheers,

Bill