I stand corrected on the piano music. And you're right, Rick, re the upwards/downwards problem mentioned earlier - although that, too, has ready-made code available (currently used for slurs and ties). We'd need a new drop-down list in the Note Properties dialogue box. That would require changing the layout of the dialogue box, since the line with the drop-down lists is already full. When you start fiddling with one thing, you find it affects everything else. I still think it would be worth it.
David, you're right that the slur and the phrase mark can't be told apart at a glance. Fortunately, the computer doesn't have to know how to recognize one from what we see - it can recognize what object class it's dealing with by its label in the program. And we don't have to be able to tell them apart at sight in order to use them differently. Just being able to put a phrase mark over the top of slurs (including grace note slurs) seems reason enough. And the end point problem on slurs might be more easily correctable if not all of them were actually slurs. Just speculatin'. . . .
If I understand your problem correctly, the best answer might be to create a second, layered staff and put the repeated lyrics on that. The two staves can be otherwise identical, and when layered they will look like just one. Lyric line vertical spacing is adjustable, so the two sets of lyrics can be made to avoid interfering with each other.
If you have only one lyric line, another option would be to simply use a second lyric line (which you would normally use for a second verse) for the repeated lyrics.
Thanks for the feedback, Rick. I agree that MIDI and playback should ignore phrase marks. Less complicated to program, and not really necessary (although the end of one phrase should be audibly separated from the next, even in legato, so maybe they shouldn't be ignored completely: perhaps the first note after either a slur or a phrase should be treated as marcato, no matter what playing style has been chosen). As for slurs on stems, perhaps they could be dispensed with. Genuine slurs are a lot shorter than phrase marks, and it should always be possible for them to go notehead to notehead - as they do in most printed music. I think the spacing issues would sort themselves out, as they do now for slurs vs. ties, but I could be wrong. The handles for the ends of slurs that Lawrie has been advocating would definitely help solve the issues you raise.
Good morning, everyone (or good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you are) -
It occurred to me this morning that a lot of the complaints we have about slurs could be resolved if the program would treat slurs and phrase marks differently.
Currently, we create phrase marks by using extended slurs. This is convenient but wrong. The two forms of notation look much the same, but they have different functions. According to my good old New Dictionary of Music [Arthur Jacobs, Penquin, 1958], a phrase mark is "a line linking written notes and indicating that they belong to one phrase," while a slur is "a curved line grouping notes together and indicating that in performance they are to be joined smoothly together - sung in one breath, played with one stroke of the bow, etc." If NWC could recognize this difference, many of the problems associated with slurs could be dealt with - because they really arise out of confusion between the two different functions.
From a programming standpoint, this shouldn't be too hard. A new object class would have to be defined, but it could use the same drawing routines as slurs do (the end points would have to be different). The program would "see" them differently, so all the tricks it currently uses to keep objects from interfering with each other should be adequate to allow slurs and phrase marks to coexist over the same notes. The biggest problem might be fitting them into the UI. They would clearly belong in the "Notes" menu, along with slurs and ties. <Alt+;> could work for the keyboard shortcut. A phrase-mark button might look like the current slur button, but with the curved arrow over the stem instead of under the notehead. All this probably would be messier to program than the objects themselves.
By putting his slurs on a separate layer, Rick is essentially separating slurs and phrase marks already. We've all probably used Rick's trick once in a while when we needed both types of mark over the same notes. The beauty of layers is that they can easily handle situations like this. Still, it would be useful if the program itself recognized the difference between the two marks and didn't try to make one substitute for the other - with all the possible confusion that entails.
Two days ago, my wife and I went on a hike in 80F weather. Today it's supposed to snow. That's spring in southern Oregon....
Highlight the G and press <alt><enter> to bring up the note properties box. Put the cursor in the field labeled "Extra Note Spacing." You have the option of adding one, two, or three spaces before the note.
Hope this helps. For future reference, though, please note that questions like this belong in either the "General Discussion" or "[NWC2] General Discussion" sections of the forum. The "Tips and Tricks" area is designed for posting new techniques you have come up with and discussing them with other users.
Warren, if you go back to your original post (reply #1 in this thread), you'll see that you didn't mention a tempo change. I'm sure that's why David said your tip had nothing to do with playback. It's only after you enter the tempo change that the music becomes playback-friendly.
PB, one of the great joys of working with NWC to many of us is the myriad options it gives us to, as you put it, "fool the program." Much of the power of the program lies in our ability to do just that, and I think it's been designed that way. It's almost like being able to hand-engrave the music. The great master among us at doing this is Rick G. You might want to check out some of the hymn transcriptions he's posted in the newsgroup.
That being said, I would certainly appreciate native tuplets beyond the standard triplet. A duplet would be particularly nice....
You may be right about the "poor man's copyright," John. It was something recommended back in the Folk Era by people such as Pete Seeger and the folks at Sing Out! magazine. With a dated notary's stamp across the envelope seal, it should establish how early the person who is claiming copyright had a copy of the work. What it cannot do is prove that no one else had a copy first.
Rick and Lawrie are both right, as usual. Slurs remain the area in NWC that need the most work in order to get results that look like professionally engraved music.
One little quirk of U.S. copyright law is that if a work is published without a copyright notice before it is published with one, the creator of the work loses the right to copyright it and it goes directly into the public domain. That is probably why Eric included an automatic copyright notice on every work. You have to fill in your name and the year to make it valid. But if you do that, yes, the work is covered automatically by copyright. Registration is, as Lawrie says, merely a means of making it easier to prove copyright to a work. There are other ways. One old standby, which I believe still works, is to send a copy to yourself via registered mail, have a notary stamp the unopened envelope after you receive it, and store the unopened envelope in a safe place. Cheaper and simpler than copyright registration. But the copyright notice must be on the work.
And I agree with Lawrie re the length of copyright. It should be for the creator''s lifetime, period. Here in the U.S. it has been extended by a variety of laws so that anything copyrighted after 1926 remains in copyright today. That is an oversimplification, but it is reasonably close to the truth. Before about 1976 it was necessary to renew the copyright after 26 years to keep it valid, so a few things fell out; but there are now processes for a creator's heirs to reinstate those copyrights, and many have done so. I do believe it is unfair to a creator to make him or her re-register after 26 years; but, much as I love my children and grandchildren, I don't believe they have a right to control my work after my death. Let it go public. As Woody Guthrie approximately said, "anyone who plays this song has my profound thanks 'cause that's what I writ it for in the first place."
I wonder if there's something else causing trouble with the Audit Barlines function. As Lawrie says, Warren's method should work. I've used it myself enough times to be pretty confident of that. Have you, perhaps, used a pickup? Audit Barlines won't work with pickup notes at the beginning of a piece; you have to temporarily remove them and then replace them after the audit. This is something that should probably be fixed (but it seems to me a lower priority than some other things, like getting the slurs right)....
Steele, I have had the experience of posting a suggestion in this forum, having Eric post a quick reply asking other users if they agreed, and then having the suggested feature appear in the next beta release of NWC2. I suspect many others could say the same thing. Don't take lack of a roadmap for lack of response to users' wishes.
I hear you, Tony. But I'm kinda glad that the iTrees are in plain text format and don't require a special piece of software, or a special section of NWC, to edit - just a decent text editor. And you shouldn't have to do it very often. I keep just two trees - a GM tree for MIDIs I send to other people, and what I call my "composing tree" which has all my favorite soundfonts on it, all plainly labeled. I can see there might be occasions when one would want to create others, but so far I haven't run into any. When I need an instrument I don't have, I just add it to the composing tree.
Thanks for jumping in here, Lawrie, and of course you are technically correct. I just prefer to define the iTrees and then let them do the work of assigning soundfonts. That way I only have to look up the patch and bank numbers once, and I don't have to memorize anything.
Soundfont assignment in NWC is done using instrument trees, and yes, different soundfonts assign different instruments to the same number. (Except for GM - general MIDI - which is the same across all sound cards. Or, at least, is supposed to be the same.) To learn more, go to the "instrument trees" section of this forum and click on "getting started with NWC2 instrument trees." Or just click this link.
I started computing on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III - the one we all knew as the "trash-80". 48 great big K of RAM. A proprietary version of BASIC, essentially BASICA with a few Tandy-originated quirks. Entered the PC-compatible world with a Tandy 1000, clock speed 8 mhz, and had to rewrite all the programs I had written on the trash-80 so they would run in GW-BASIC. Put slowdown loops in some of them because of that blazingly fast 8 mhz speed (the z80 chip on the trash-80 ran at 4 mhz). A few of those programs are still running on my wife's Win2000 machine today, reconfigured as QBASIC programs. One I eventually rewrote in C and released as a shareware game....which went nowhere....but which I recently found online on a site devoted to legacy games. That was great, because my only existing copy was on a floppy, which my current laptop can't read. I was able to download my own game and start playing it again.
....memories, memories. Computers can do so much more today, but oh, gentlemen, didn't we have fun!
What did you use in DOS 5 that wasn't availiable in DOS 3.1?
IIRC, DOS 5 was basically the debugged version of DOS 4, which was almost as buggy as Vista. The improvements over DOS 3 included a file management shell and a help system, both of which I found very useful. Ver. 5 was also, I think, the first version of DOS to include QBASIC, which was certainly an improvement over GW-BASIC, IMHO.
So I think there was some significant improvement there. But I certainly agree with Rick that there hasn't been much improvement in the last 12 years, other than the elimination of the aritificial barriers on file and hard drive sizes, which were a legacy of Windows' origin as a DOS GUI. It's nice to have those removed. Also the 512-files-per-directory barrier. All of that stemmed from an early decision by the MS crew that no one could ever possibly need any more than 64K of RAM. They were soon proved wrong, of course, but multiples of 64 ruled the PC world right up to the release of XP. You might say they still do.
If you count, you'll find out that your problem always happens on the tenth staff that you add. That's because NWC assigns a new MIDI channel to each new staff, and MIDI channel 10 is, by convention, reserved for percussion instruments. The solution is to go to the staff properties (click on the problem staff to make sure it's the active staff, then press F2) - click on the MIDI tab in the "staff properties" dialog box - and enter a different number in the box labeled "channel." Most sound cards will allow you to use up to 16 channels. Instruments can share a channel, if necessary, but it's best to make them compatible (for example, violins I and II, or oboe and bassoon, or soprano, alto, tenor and bass)
I downloaded my original copy of NWC off CompuServe and then registered it, I think via check mailed to Eric, a few weeks later. Still have the floppy I stored the downloaded copy on, but I don't have anything I can read it with any more. There is no date or version number written on the floppy, but it is stored with copies of Cakewalk 2.01 and the original version of MusicEase, both of which I quickly rejected in favor of NWC. According to the version history on the Website, Ver. 1.0 was released in October 1994 - lyrics weren't added until ver. 1.20. IIRC, my trial download didn't do lyrics, but the version I registered did. So it appears that I first tried the program late in the life of ver. 1.10 and have been registered since shortly after the release of 1.20. Deductive dating only, which may be inaccurate. The earliest printed NWC music I can find in the house is dated 1996.
But I sure remember fanfold paper. I was using it in a daisy wheel printer, since publishers wouldn't accept 9-pin dot matrix; I later went to a 24-pin, then to laser and finally (last year) to ink jet. When I got the laser (1995), I had most of a box of fanfold left. We tore off the tracks and separated the sheets and went ahead and used it. Kept us in paper for quite a while.
I suspect you're right about NWC's development arc, Rob. When I first started using the program back in the mid-1990s, it was still having trouble with some pretty basic things, e.g., repeat signs: those were so bad that I used to draw them in manually to get them right (and I don't think first and second endings were even available). But I loved the interface and had faith that the program would develop into what it is today, so I went ahead and registered, I think in 1996. I'm not at all sorry that I did that. And there is more to come!
With a feature like step playback,, We could work directly with NWC as an aid to sight reading which would be absolutely wonderful for us in the choral community in general,,,
I have to disagree with this statement. Sight reading includes more than just getting the pitches right - you have to get the rhythm right as well. Far better to take it ve...r..r..ry slo..o..o..owly, but in time. You can do that, as David suggests, with a tempo track. Add a hidden track with a slow tempo on it. If there's more than one tempo in the piece, keep the proportions the same (e.g., if the piece goes from 120 to 140, the "learning" tempi might be 60 and 80). Make a second version of the track with the correct performance tempi and store it in a separate file. Then it will be a simple matter to change tempi back and forth as needed.
You will still have to use an extreme rubato to "tune" the choir and get the individual chord sonorities correct prior to performance, but by the time you're doing that the singers should already know the piece.
There's no way to do it directly, but you can do it indireclty by entering the lyrics as text. Define a user font the size and characteristics you want for your lyrics font, then place words or small groups of words individually. You will have to play around with spacing and staff placement to line the words up properly with the notes, and with the other lyric lines. It helps to place lyrics entered as text on a separate staff, which can then be layered with the melody staff.
But Cyril is right about the cancellation effect in flutes. It actually happens in other instruments, too, just not quite as effectively because of their more complicated overtone structures. Cancellation is one of the reasons a single soprano can cut through the sound of an entire Wagnerian orchestra - because the orchestra doesn't produce the full volume of all the instruments added together. Some of the volume is subtracted by waves cancelling each other out.
The other thing that can happen, though, if flutes are detuned slightly from each other, is the combination tones I mentioned in my last post. What happens there is that the peaks and troughs of the sine waves go in and out of phase with each other at a rate that sets up a second frequency - much lower and growlier, with a piercing quality that can drive your ears nuts. It feels like they're being produced inside your head. Recorders are particularly prone to this - as any other recorder players out there can testify.
All this has a bearing on my problem because what is happening is that the first harmonic of the English horn is cancelling the flute. That was pretty clear from the beginning. What was needed was smarter people than me to figure out how to deal with it in the artificial environment of the MIDI generator. Which is why I come regularly to this forum, and thank all of you (especially Barry: I had tried pitch bending, but it was the pitch bend plus the panning that did it.)
Thanks, Barry - I hadn't thought of tuning the EH and the flute a few beats apart. If they're not far enough apart to produce combination tones, it should work.
But I think Kevin was talking about a real-world effect, not a MIDI effect. Same principle, of course. Flutes are tricky because they lack almost all overtones. The chorus effect makes most instruments sound richer - with flutes, it just sounds like more flutes. Or sometimes less, as Kevin pointed out.
Thanks again. I'll go try it.
Bill
<edit> Well, that helped a bit. So did panning the five instruments into roughly the horizontal positions they take on stage. I can live with it at this point. Thanks again to everyone who contributed to this discussion.
Thanks, David, for the further suggestions. You're probably right about the vibrato. I tried messing around with pitch bends - also volume bends - without much success. I also tried changing the dynamic of that single note in the flute to a triple forte (the music is moving generally at forte). Interesting result, there: I could hear the flute, faintly, but an octave higher than written. That tells me that the fundamental of the flute is, in fact, being masked by the first partial of the EH, and there's probably not a lot to be done about it. The phenomenon is, unfortunately, strongest with the the EH on the F above middle C and the flute an octave above it - exactly the notes I had written for them. Held for four beats. Oh, well. It's a heads-up re potential performance pitfalls, at any rate. Perhaps I will simply rewrite the part.
Yeah, I think it's a masking phenomenon....of a sort. I suspect the English horn font's upper partials are strong enough that flute tones can't be heard through them. A flute tone is as close to a pure sine wave as you can get out of a musical instrument, so there are very few partials above the root, and that very strong first partial of the double reeds is covering the root. I could cut the EH horn volume down, but that would affect the balance of the rest of the piece (or else sound very weird for one note). And I could, as you suggest, go looking for different soundfonts; but, having tried the two quite different flutes I had on my machine already, I'm not encouraged by that approach, either. I tried pitch bending, hoping to get the EH partial and the flute root far enough apart to allow the flute to be heard, but that didn't work particularly well. Guess I'll probably just have to live with it. But thanks for trying.
Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this problem: I'm writing a wind quintet, substituting English horn for the oboe. When the EH and the flute are in octaves, the flute disappears, as if the notes had been muted.
Changing the EH to an oboe doesn't fix the problem. Changing MIDI channels doesn't, either. I also tried using a flute from a different sound bank - same result. Ditto a piccolo. Apparently my sound card simply won't play flutes and double reeds in octaves.
I'm using an SB Audigy II on a PC card, plugged into a Dell laptop running XP.
My current solution has been to patch a soprano sax into the flute part for the octave notes. The timbre shifts, but it's not radical, and at least I can hear the notes. Has anyone else experienced this, and if so, how have you dealt with it?
Dwight, you've given us the keys for different pages and then told us about differences between verse and chorus. It would be helpful if you could relate the two. Which pages are verse and which are choruses?
David, Dwight is listed as a "member." I don't think he can post attachments. I think he has to upgrade to "tester" to do that.
It is possible to use Garritan Personal Orchestra with NWC, but it requires some tweaking. There are several threads here in the forum dealing with this. Go out to the main forum entry screen (you can do that by clicking on "NoteWorthy Composer" in the path at the top and bottom of each thread) and type "garritan" into the search box near the top of the screen. You should get a number of useful hits.
A good way to go for non-techies is a stand-alone sound card that plugs into the USB port. These usually come with a decent set of soundfonts, and often can be loaded with others. And you don't have to open up the computer - all you have to do is plug 'em in and turn 'em on.
And Lawrie and Tony are right - don't skimp on the speakers!
Yes, more control over what we in the book trade call the "front matter" (title and authoring information and related data) is definitely in order. It's been requested several times; beyond that, we can only hope. It might help, as Lawrie suggests, if you went to the wish list and requested it again.
A part of your question that hasn't been dealt with is your inability to access the help files when using Windows Vista. You might want to check out this thread, which explains that problem and may give you some hope of getting through it.
The Staff Metrics commands change the printout, but have only an indirect effect on the screen display. To change the size of the staff on the screen, use "zoom in" and "zoom out". You'll find those commands on the "view" menu. (You can also use the magnifying glass icons in the button bar, or the keyboard shortcuts <alt><+> and <alt><->.)
NWC is not a WYSIWYG program - it just looks that way.
There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking a piano reduction of a string score will put 1st and 2nd fiddles in the RH and viola and cello (and bass if present) in the LH. If the arranger is detail-oriented, he/she may indicate the original instrumentation via the stems: up for 1st fiddles, down for 2nds, up for viola, down for cello and bass. This can help when attempting to determine how to bring out the individual voices....if you're a good enough pianist to bring out individual voices....(not I, at least not most of the time).
The beams across barlines serve a similar purpose to the stem directions. In this case, they help indicate note groupings and accents. Beaming should never be done by rote: it's there to help the performer read and interpret the score. Same with stem directions.
So, Bill, what do you really think of Vista? C'mon, don't hold back, now...
Well, gee, David, I thought I just told you....;-)
Those who want to follow this further may want to go this thread, which includes some notes from Eric about how hard Microsoft has made it for software developers to move programs to Vista (as well as a few more comments from Yours Truly about what a wonderful operating system it is).
Bottom line here, Duncan: Vista is a buggy, ill-designed, poorly implemented, resource-hogging operating system that should never have been released. Professional IT guys are abandoning it in droves and "upgrading" - their word, not mine - back to XP. Sound card issues are among the most common, most frustrating, and most difficult-to-solve parts of the Vista disaster. Please don't blame NWC for microsoft's problems. Your best move would be to follow the IT guys back to the previous OS and pray that Microsoft gets it right next time.
Lawrie has explained the theory behind this very well, but there's a shortcut when it comes to actually doing the work. Your piece is written in what is known as a "conductor's score," which means it has all the parts written out exactly as the players see them, transposed to fit their instruments. From your description, I'd guess it's in the key of C, modulating to F. To change it to D modulating to G, you simply have to move everything up by two semitones and add two sharps to the key signature. The parts written in C move up to D, the parts written in Bb move up to C, the parts written in Eb move up to F, and so on. Use the staff transposition tool (be sure to uncheck the "update staff playback" box, as that is there to keep a part sounding in concert pitch when you transpose it for an instrument, such as a trumpet, that isn't written in concert pitch). One word of warning: the staff transposition tool won't add a key signature to a part if there isn't one. If the key signature is F, the signature of the transposed part will be G: but if the key signature is C (no sharps or flats), you will have to add the D signature yourself and then audit the accidentals (on the "tools" menu).
That's the trouble: I'm not sure it's workable, and I don't think, for the purposes that I use the tool, that it would be much of an improvement. But Eric will have the final call, in any case, so we should simply agree to disagree here.
Thanks, Richard, for your quick work on this - and thanks, Eric, for changing all the pointers. I presume this wasn't all handwork. Were you able to do it in a single operation, or did you have to go topic by topic? In any case - not a trivial job, and many thanks.
And this certainly points out the validity of the programmer's eleventh commandment: Thou shalt make backups. Richard, thanks for having had the foresight to do just that.
Sorry, Peter. I'm a modern composer. I rarely use a key signature. But I do care a lot about getting the notation enharmonically correct. I think most of us do. It's the key to getting the musical meaning correct - even in atonal music, where I have been known to use double flats and double sharps if the musical thought requires them. As for the G#/Ab question, here's what you said:
Quote from: Peter Edwards
But this can be decided in favour of G# since that is the leading note of A minor which shares the same key signature.
That's rather unequivocal. And wrong a good portion of the time.
- <sigh> - I'm not trying to start an argument here. It's just that there are serious flaws, from a music theory standpoint, in what you propose - which would require a lot more contextual analysis, in any case, than is necessary to just check the pitch class of the next and previous notes. And we haven't even begun to talk about modulations.
I think David has the right idea. Give us the ability to accept or reject each enharmonic correction before it becomes permanent. That, along with Rick's oft-stated request to let the tools operate on selections instead of only on full staves, would go a long way toward making auditing enharmonics useful again.
Peter, your rule seems a bit complicated for the program to follow, and I'm not sure it would be right as often as you think it would. It ignores tendancy tones (flats go down; sharps go up), and it would break down in cases where the music has modulated but the composer hasn't changed the key signature, because - short of a full harmonic analysis (which, as Rick has pointed out, we really can't expect NWC to do) - the key signature is the only thing the program has to go on. Nor is the matter of G#/Ab as clear-cut as you make it, because the flat sixth (e.g., Ab major in the key of C) is a fairly common chord. Your rule would spell that chord G#-C-Eb, a provocatively bad idea. And what about modern composers who don't use key signatures and don't build chords by thirds?
Not trying to be nasty here, just pointing to some of the complications that have probably kept Eric from tackling the enharmonic audit tool's deficiencies in the first place. I think the best we can hope for is some simple rules depending on immediate context (the notes immediately before, simultaneous with, and immediately after the note whose accidental is being examined, on the same staff).
"Audit Enharmonics" is basically useless in its current state. See the discussion here. Best to do without it whenever possible. Hand-correcting the enharmonics is time-consuming, but you will have to do it whether or not you use the tool. I have stopped messing with it except in those cases where, in glancing over a part after I've used "transpose staff," I see a lot of double sharps or double flats. Auditing the enharmonics can save some effort there. Beyond that, it's questionable.
