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Messages - TonyQ

1
General Discussion / Re: Tranposing part of a staff?
Many thanks for the "<Ctrl+Shift>" way of doing this.  I'd often wondered why there wasn't something like that ... but now I know that there is and it's just that I hadn't found it!  That works fine and is exactly what I need.  Thank you.  As for the other way of doing it, I suspect I may have not had sufficient key signatures in place when I did it ... but now I don't need that method any longer.
2
General Discussion / Tranposing part of a staff?
Apologies if this is already covered somewhere, but I've searched and cannot find it ...

Sometimes (too often!) when I'm setting music, I make mistakes.  Equally, when I'm arranging music I sometimes change my mind later.  I'm sure we all do, at times.  Is there then a way to "move" - transpose - part of a staff?  I can see how to transpose a whole staff, but I only want to apply it to a selected part.  For example, in what I've just arranged, I want to transpose 3 fairly complicated bars down an octave.

I tried to copy the selected bars to a blank staff, along with the key and time signatures, transpose that (which worked) and then copy and paste the result back into the original staff, but it "untransposed" on pasting it back.  Have I missed something straightforward, please?
3
General Discussion / Re: Smoother piano sound during playback
Thanks, Rick G.  That is the sort of effect I'm trying to achieve, but it's going to be extremely tedious to have to put sustain pedal marking throughout the music that I'm doing :-(  I was hoping to hear that there was a way to modify the "attack" of the notes and perhaps the "decay" of the sounds overall, but I guess there isn't ...

I'd never noticed the "Performance Style" before.  That looks as though it should do what I'm after ... I hope!

Thanks, both.
4
General Discussion / Smoother piano sound during playback
I realise that I can use phrase markings to control the smoothness or otherwise of notes, but if I want a smoother piano sound from NoteWorthy Composer, is there a way to do it for the whole of a piece?  At present, all the piano sounds are quite disjointed, whereas I'd like a much smoother sound overall.

Thanks for any suggestions.

T
5
General Discussion / Re: Relative speed changes?
Thanks for the explanation, Rich.  I understand what needs to be there for it to work at present.  What I had in mind was that at the end of a ral, for example, I might put a "Relative Tempo" of say "-10%" and it would work that out based on the actual tempo before that.  Clearly that doesn't exist today, or someone would have pointed me to it.  Shame!

Instead, I'll have a look at Warren's modify tempos tool.  It sounds as though that should do pretty much what I need.

Thanks.
6
General Discussion / Relative speed changes?
I have a massive collection of songs in NWC, having used the program for many years.  It's fantastic, and I keep finding new features that I'd missed.  I wonder if this is one of them ...

Most of the songs I enter are there to print out a piano score and parts for other instruments.  To that end, I usually don't actually bother setting the tempo on them.  In a few cases, however, I want to produce a midi file as well, and then I have to set the tempo correctly.  (When I don't, it leads to some very odd pieces of music!)  I've also learnt to use tempo variances - things like ralentando - and that's where the question lies.

Is it possible to specify a ral (or rit, etc.) as a percentage of the original tempo?  I suspect it's not.  It would also need an "a tempo" command afterwards.  The benefit of this would be enormous to me, because I sometimes change my mind as to how fast a song should go.  If the rals were just a percentage, then I'd only need to change the tempo once at the start, whereas without that, I have to change every one of the tempo commands in the song ... with potentially disastrous consequences if I miss one.

Thanks.
T
8
General Discussion / Turning off playing of notes as they are entered in the editor?
I don't even know what to search for to see if this has been discussed/answered before, so apologies if it has!

Is it possible to turn off the playing of notes as I enter them in the editor?  At present, I have to mute the sound from my computer, and then I forget to unmute it when I try to play what I've entered.  I never use the feature of playing as I enter notes and so I'd like to disable it completely ... but I can't see an option to do so.

In case it makes a difference, I'm on V2.75 on Windows 10.

Thanks,
T
9
General Discussion / Wishlist requests
2 wishlist items, please

1) I usually use the "Extend the last system" feature, but while it's often ok, it sometimes ends up looking silly because the last system is so long with others on the line fairly cramped.  Would it be possible to scale the spacing of all the systems in the last line of music to fit the width of the page as an alternative, please?  It would look better on the page at least some of the time.

2) I struggle quite often with getting music onto a set number of pages.  As a pianist (of sorts!), I can't play and turn pages, so I often want to get the music onto two pages but to keep it as large as possible.  I usually end up doing a lot of juggling of margins, the spacing of staves and sometimes the fonts, and I usually succeed.  Sometimes, however, it just doesn't work as I want it to, with one system left onto the next page.  If there any chance of being able to scale all the systems in a piece by a percentage, so that I can achieve what I want?  I suspect in the problem cases that I have, if everything were reduced by just a few percent, it would then fit.  However, having no idea how the layout engine works, I've no idea whether this is possible or not.

Thanks,
10
General Discussion / Re: Numbering verses in lyrics?
Ok, thanks for the responses - at least I haven't missed something very obvious!

Could this be added, if it's not there already, as a feature for a future version, please?

Thanks,
11
General Discussion / Numbering verses in lyrics?
I frequently need to number the verses in lyrics.  Currently, I do this by putting the number on the beginning of the first syllable, separated by an underscore.  It looks something like this: "1._The day ..."  This works, but has the disadvantage that the verse numbers don't line up because the first syllable of each verse differs in width.

Is there an easy of achieving verse numbers all vertically aligned?  (I say "easy" because I'm loathe to go to the trouble of putting a hidden note ahead of the start of the melody in order to align the verse numbers with that!)

If there isn't currently an easy way of doing this, could this be considered as a feature request for a future version, please?  Perhaps on the Lyric configuration window, there could be a simple checkbox for "Number the verses".  That would cope with a large number of situations, but not, of course, with a song in which the chorus comes first, which would need the ability to put aligned verse numbers elsewhere within the lyrics ...
12
General Discussion / Problem with stem direction, beaming and transposition
I seem to have some odd behaviour with the stem directions and beaming, particularly when I'm transposing.  I'll use this snippet to try to explain:

Quote
!NoteWorthyComposer(2.51)
|Locale|ACP:1252
|AddStaff|Name:"Staff"|Group:"Standard"
|Clef|Type:Bass
|Note|Dur:8th|Pos:-4
|Note|Dur:8th|Pos:0
|Note|Dur:8th|Pos:3
|Note|Dur:8th|Pos:0
!NoteWorthyComposer-End


If I select the first two notes and beam them, they end up with the stem forced upwards instead of the default.  Is this the expected behaviour?  It seems rather odd.  Likewise, if I select the second two and beam them, they end up with the stems forced downwards.

While this doesn't matter a great deal normally, it becomes important when transposing.  It means that the stems of beamed notes don't switch direction correctly when they are raised or lowered through transposition.  If you beam these notes in twos and then transpose the stave up, say, 9 semitones, the first pair of notes still have their stems upwards whereas they should by default be downwards.

The other related thing is that once this has happened, it doesn't seem possible to restore the default setting of stem direction - I can switch it between stems forced up and forced down, but not back to neither.

Is this expected behaviour?  I'm sure this didn't happen in previous versions (I'm on 2.51) though I have to admit that I have previously only transposed by a couple of semitones, so perhaps I just didn't notice the effect.  It would be more useful, and more intuitive, to have stems change direction appropriately on transposition unless they have been explicitly forced up or down.
13
General Discussion / I just found the most amazing feature ...
Maybe you all know this already, but I just found the most amazing feature of NWC! A million thank yous to the developer(s) for the "Filtered Properties" feature - it saved me no end of time!!!

Imagine this: I had about 200 songs which were laid out on three staves - one for the melody, one of the remainder of the "right hand" accompaniment, and one for the "left hand".  On the melody stave, I had inserted guitar chords as "text" above the stave.

Now, my task was to transpose the songs for alto saxophone.  (For those who aren't familiar with transposing for the alto sax, the notes go up by 9 semitones, which is a lot!)  When I simply transposed the melody line, a lot of the notes went so high that they crashed into the guitar chords.  Oh, and the saxophonist in question had already said "Just leave out the guitar chords".  So, I decided that I should really have these songs on four staves, adding one that contained only the guitar chords, so that I could choose when I print the music whether or not to include the chords.

Ok, that's a (relatively) simple task of duplicating the melody stave, replacing all its notes with rests, removing the chords from the original melody stave, and then collapsing the chords stave onto the melody stave.  But when I did that, the guitar chords didn't seem to line up properly, and I found that I needed to choose the "Best fit forward" option for the text.  I wasn't looking forward to having to select each item in turn and change that option ... and I discovered the "Filtered properties" feature.  In case you don't know, this lets me operate on a filtered selection.  I could simply select the whole stave, filter to just the text items, and then change that feature.  I used the same method to select all the rests, and only the rests, on the chords stave and to set them to print only on single stave printouts.

This is a brilliant feature.  I just wish I'd found it years ago.  Thank you.

P.S. Just one question: is it possible to delete all the filtered items?  When I've selected everything on a stave, can I delete all the text items, for example?  I can't see how to do this with filtered properties.  It seems to need a "Filtered delete" feature ...
14
General Discussion / Re: Automatic beam of quavers (eight notes) in 4/4 time
Rick, thanks for your reply.  Although the "default rule" is that beams do not cross beats, there are a small numbers of cases that are very widely accepted in which this rule does not apply.  One of those is that quavers that form the first minim or last minim (but not the middle one!) of a 4/4 bar are beamed as one set not two.  The link I posted earlier lists those exceptions, and I'm sure they can be found on many other sites on the Internet.

(This was one of the (almost) "trick questions" that regularly came up in the (UK) Associated Board Grade 5 Theory paper, which many of us in the UK will remember with dread!)
16
General Discussion / Re: Automatic beam of quavers (eight notes) in 4/4 time
But Warren, the automatic beaming is wrong with quavers (eighth notes) in 4/4 - the first bar in your example.  It should group them as two lots of 4, not four lots of 2.  This is one of those cases that breaks the rule of "beam each beat separately" - it's explained a bit more at http://labspace.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=469788, for example.

(The big thing is that it used to work correctly, and now doesn't!)

Tony
17
General Discussion / Automatic beam of quavers (eight notes) in 4/4 time
I've just applied the latest update to NWC - to V2.51 - and I think it's broken the automatic beaming of quavers in 4/4 time.  Previously, it correctly beamed 4 quavers at the start or end of the bar as one set, whereas it now beams them as two sets of two.  Could we please have the previous behaviour back because it is musically correct?  (If you wish, then provide us an option to do either ...)

Thanks,
Tony