Thanks, Rick! The font idea is brilliant! Shall try it immediately!
Not sure if the reference to avant-garde notation was to my work or not, but I'm certainly not doing anything avant garde. Am merely trying to transcribe Byzantine music (written in psaltic neumes, 'psaltika') into Western notation. Accurate transcription of the eight tones relies on clearly marking the expected micro-tones of the mode in the key signature.
NoteWorthy Composer is brilliant for this work, because I can write a program to scan the Byzantine music document and output the appropriate NWCTXT file--including all the bent pitches to represent both the different tuning and the micro-tonal accidentals. It works great for me, and easily allows me to train Western ears to hear the correct musical intervals.
Any other ideas on how to create a custom key signature? Having one as text and manually creating line-breaks in not an option, as I need to be able to print the music in several pages sizes.
It seems Finale can do this. I was hoping NoteWorthy could do it, so that I can keep poking my friends who are Finale advocates in the eye!
It does not import non-standard (i.e., non-Western) tuning very well. I work a lot with Byzantine music and am planning on writing my own utility to cover this gap.
If anyone has found anything else lacking, let me know, and I'll see how easy it is to add it to the script/program. (The new NWC2 text format is great for allowing this bi-directional access to formats such as MXML.)
If the above-mentioned proposals are ever incorporated into NoteWorthy Composer, I'd like them to be optional.
I use muted notes extensively. I have several staves, each staff having its own bent pitch (the first having no pitch bends). This allows me to truly represent Byzantine or Eastern music.
Although I do it programmatically, essentially each staff is a copy of the first. The notes whose pitches are bent are not muted, all other notes on that staff are muted.
1. Review the Byzantine music piece (written in psaltiki neumes) and break it down into the smallest meaningful instructions to the chanter/musician. These are in the following areas: type of tuning (partly similar to a scale in Western music), first note after a change in tuning, pitch movement (i.e., moving higher up the scale or lower down the scale), duration of the sound, any flattening or sharpening of the sound from the pitch that note would normally have in that tuning, and then any ways the note should be played (tied to next note, slurred with next note, forte, trilled, shake, tremolo).
2. I then parse all these instructions and turn them into three things: (i) commands for NoteWorthy Composer in NWCTXT language; (ii) MusicXML and a Byzantine extension in comments, which I use as a file format for storage; (iii) MIDI instructions. Work on the latter two is not complete.
I've transcribed now well over a hundred pieces of Byzantine music, programmatically producing NCWTXT files, which I then import into NoteWorthy Composer--in effect, I can now programmatically transcribe Byzantine psaltiki neumes into Western musical notation.
All thanks to this wonderful feature! All of these transcriptions necessarily include multiple staves, bent pitches, and additional (but muted) text or notes. All of this is very easy programmatically, and I am yet to find a bug using this interface!
Many thanks to the NoteWorthy team for the great NCWTXT interface!
I'm trying to enter a non-standard key signature, which looks like Eb major (Bb, Eb, Ab), but the Eb has a diagonal stroke through it (representing a half-flat). I am using Ertugrul's font to give me the half-flat symbol.
How do I get my user-defined key signature to appear at the beginning of every line?
I can't seem to find any option or combination that will do this. I am not keen to force line breaks and manual stick the key signature in after every forced line-break. That is the only kluge that occurs to me.
When I print my scores to PDF, I select the option "Download as Soft Font", which downloads any fonts into the PDF, so I don't depend on any downstream computer or printer that may be attempting to read the the score I've created.
Has worked fine on the hundred or so computers that have read my scores so far.
I know it's only Western music you're looking for, but I am building quite a collection of Byzantine music that I am auto-magically (thanks to NoteWorthy version 2) transcribing from Byzantine psaltiki notation to Western notation. Almost all tunes require bent pitches, some requiring six or seven staves to implement this. These melodies sound wrong (and certainly not "Eastern"), if they are played with Western tuning. Let me know if you need any samples.
Thanks, Rick. The only reason I need the slur to cross staves is because I've had to split the staves so that I can bend pitches in different ways on different staves and then layer them all together. Thereby achieving Byzantine tuning for the particular piece.
I'll try the tenuto suggestion, which I hope will work.
Many thanks, Lawrie. I missed this post of yours. Not sure the font creation is worth it. There'll be a lot of work. Perhaps Unicode will come in soon. BTW, do you know if you can have two lines of lyrics, each in a different font?
I have tried splitting each note or notes that need bending to the same amount and in the same direction onto their own staff. I did this by creating a new staff and copying all the notes from the first staff onto the new one. Then muted all but the notes to be bent in the new staff, and muted those to be bent on the original staff. Plays OK, I think (pitch-bend commands at beginning and end of staves), although it is an onerous task. Shall try the Harmonic Analyser suggestions and will look into editing the Beta 2 output file, as also suggested.
How though do I maintain a slur, which now has notes on several staves? For example, I have a group of four notes, the first and third are muted on the first staff, the second and fourth are muted on the fourth staff. It plays as if these notes have not been slurred. Is there anyway to force the slur across all layered staves?
Thanks, Peter. So, I move each note that must be bent to a different staff, adding rests on that new staff where the other notes were. And adding rests on the first staff, where the moved notes were. Then I layer the staves so they appear and play as one? Each staff should have a pitch bend command at the beginning and one that resets everything at the end, is that correct?
Lastly, if it's not too much trouble, how do I set the pitch to the exact frequency I want?
How do I change the frequency of a note throughout the score? I am transferring music written in Byzantine psaltiki (neumes) into Western and would like the score to sound correct when saved as a MIDI or played through NoteWorthy Composer.
In the example I am looking at now, I am working in the Soft Chromatic scale on Di (Tone 4). I need to set E (the E above Middle C) to 323.34159 Hz (instead of 329.6275569 Hz), the A-flat to 423.37849 Hz (instead of 415.3046976), etc. There are about 6 notes, for which I need to change tuning. There are about 8 notes, for which the tuning is the same as the Western concert pitch (i.e., A above Middle C at 440 Hz).
I thought this was done with multi-point controller commands, but these changes appear to be only temporary.
Is there any way to get slurred notes (same pitch) to play back (in MIDI) as one extended note--as you would do on an instrument?
I'm training a choir and we have no instruments with us, so I'm playing back the MIDI on my phone to teach them the new tune, then we sing following the music a capella.
Many thanks, Lawrie, for the offer, but I don't think it will work.
In other programs, I can copy characters from the character map--even the medial shapes of letters (the form they take when found in the middle of a word)--but they don't join up.
As was said above, it's the Unicode font that is missing, as the font has the instructions for post-processing the characters.
Thanks anyway! We'll just have to wait until NoteWorthy Composer has Unicode support.
Thank-you. I wasn't looking for right-to-left support for the music, if that's what you were implying.
Unfortunately, merely selecting characters from a character map--should it work--will not suffice. Arabic may have up to four forms of each letter, depending on the context. I can choose these forms from a character map, but the forms do not link. Only a proper script with its support will work. I presume this means Unicode?
Has anyone succeeded in placing Arabic text in the lyrics of NoteWorthy Composer?
I saw a hint about using a different Times New Roman font, but installing this font and writing in Arabic, did not seem to work. I have just a line of question marks in my lyrics. (Although when I type the Arabic text into the Lyrics text box it appears correctly.)
This text is an example of Arabic, if that helps: "اهلاً وسهلاً".
