Rev. Unegbu, I suspect you can find some music of interest to you at the Cyber Hymnal, here http://www.cyberhymnal.org/
If they are midi files, you can download and save them, then open them in NWC to see what the scores look like. You will need to do some tinkering to get the appearance you want, but it is do-able.
Consider using the lyric editor to reduce the tedium of manual bar numbering, when you want to print the bar number for each bar.
Configure the lyric editor to one lyric line, aligned at the top, syllables aligned at the left. The lyric will consist only of numbers: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 etc. The only entries on the staff would be
a hidden, muted quarter note on beat one of each bar,
hidden rests as needed to pad out the measure to the right number of beats to align each bar with the underlying score, and
a bar line.
Each number will appear just after the bar line of each measure, when this staff is layered to the next one.
Some tinkering will be needed if you have to number a special ending. Let's say there's a four bar passage, the 4th bar is a first ending. You would have to consider if the second ending bar (second time bar in England?) is numbered 8 or 5, and if you decide it's 8, then change your lyrics to 1 2 3 4 8 9 10 etc
So what part of the world are you in, Joe? I'm on the west coast of Canada, and we're just 3/4 of an hour into '04 now.
Happy new year right back at you.
To start, go to File, New, and select the appropriate format - I suggest starting with a blank score.
Press C to select a clef, press G to select a time signature, press Tempo to select the speed.
A note is entered with the enter key if you wish to use the keyboard. Use the up and down arrows to get to the right position on the staff, then select the note value, then press enter. If you want a rest instead, press space.
Note and rest values are 1 = whole note, 2= half note, 3= quarter note, 4=eighth, 5=sixteenth, 6=thirtysecond.
Accidentals are created with the 7 (natural), 8 (flat) and 9 (sharp).
A bar line is created with the tab key.
This should get you started. The help feature is useful, and if you get stuck, come back to the forum and someone will help you.
Ben, you asked about sixlets and ninelets and chord names. Seems to me that all of the replies until #13 (yours) were right on topic. If you don't want the answer, don't ask the question!!!
To answer your NEW question, enter a quarter rest first. Set it to stem down. Move it up or down, to where you would like it to be. Then, enter a whole note, with the stem set in the opposite direction, just as you would enter any other note in a chord (ctrl-enter)
I believe the rule is the shorter value element must be entered first, and the stem direction must be different. It doesn't matter that neither the quarter rest nor the whole note has a stem, the program requires you to pretend they do.
As a final comment, Ori, you have made some very good suggestions and requests here. NWC will undoubtedly take them into consideration, although Eric and his staff might not adopt all of them.
I support most of your suggestions, as well as the comments/suggestions by Stephen and Tony.
20) to change all my previous written tempo to be played faster or slower.
It would be nice to be able to change all of these in one step, but in the meantime, to make it a little easier to work within the existing program, use a separate staff as a "conductor" staff. Fill it with hidden rests, but put all your tempo markings on it.
Place it at the top of the score, and layer it. Allow layering when it's time to print, disable layering when you want to modify the tempos.
17) a tool for merging staffs. 18) a tool to compare two staffs.
17 can be achieved with layering in many cases, but not all - there will be some conflicts in stem direction.
18 is best done by playback of the two staffs. Make sure the instrument voicings are different, and just listen. You will need a soundcard, but I think you have one.
You may get a growl of some sort where the harmony is too close - i.e., a half-tone apart - so this is a good way to detect entry errors.
Re 15) to allow preferences in the "enharmonic spelling" tool - this is so important.
Agreed. To a certain extent, you can achieve this using the transpose tool instead. The transpose value should be zero, and then you can set your new key signature preferences.
I tested this idea on a key signature of Db major, and it transposed successfully to C# major.
Re wish "7) to allow lyrics editing on the score itself."
There's a workaround for the single raised word, but it's a little awkward. You need two lyric staffs, one as outlined in my message above, and the second with only one note, placed where you want the raised word.
In the first lyric staff, replace the word you want to raise with an underscore. The next word will then be placed at the next note.
Re wish number 6) keep lyrics hidden - but not deleted.
You can already do this with a workaround.
Complete the notation of your music on the staff. Copy all of it to a new, second staff. Set the staff properties of the second staff to lines, 0, ending bar open, staff muted, layer with next staff. Set note properites of all elements (notes, rests, bar lines, etc.) to visibility = never.
Use this second staff for your lyrics. Each word or syllable of the lyrics will appear when there is a note to anchor it to, even though that note is invisible.
When you want to see lyrics, display this second staff; when you don't want to see the lyrics, use page setup to hide this staff. For convenience, you should probably mute this second staff as well.
The lyric offset is measured from the upper or lower boundary of your staff. If your upper staff height is 15 units and you offset by 3, the lyrics will move inward to a position of 12 units from the centre line of the staff. This is on the first tab, the configuration tab, of the lyric editor dialogue box.
Good thing I wrote "I don't think I've ever seen..." instead of "There's no such thing as...", eh?
I accept your explanation of how the subdivision works - I didn't know that before, and it makes sense to me. Thank you for the explanation, I appreciate it.
I thought I had seen it the other way as well - playing fewer notes in an expanded amount of time - in some pit orchestra charts, but for the life of me I can't figure out why it would have been needed, so it was likely just my imagination. Back to the eggnog.
Where you write "... sextuplets and I have resorted to using the correct 6 notes beamed, but splitting them into 2 groups of triplets" - have you considered just tripletizing the entire 6 note group? You'll get one bracket instead of two, and you'll still get the right time values.
I gather that you're inputting directly from a midi keyboard. You could try slowing the music way down to improve input accuracy, then adjust the metronome marking later.
At screen 2 of the midi import window, uncheck map each MIDI channel to a new staff.
Put a huge number in the maximum single track chord size.
As a last resort, try layering - you'll have to clean up stem directions, etc., though, so it might just be easier/quicker to edit everything manually.
Flutes read in concert pitch so don't need to be transposed.
Tenor saxes need to read 14 semitones higher than the sound. So a choir middle C would be written as a 4th line D for tenor sax. Use Tools Transpose +14
Alto sax is only 9 semitones - Use Tools Transpose +9
Well, for playback it doesn't matter if you can see the staccatto sign or not. For printing it does. I tried to find a solution for you, such as using a layered staff with a hidden note set to staccatto, but that hid the dot too.
The text idea was the best I could come up with. It's a workaround.
NWC will not do everything, but generally you'll find an acceptable workaround. That is the strength of this amazing program.
I'm quite content with Soundblaster Live!, which I bought with my computer, a year or so ago. I have a soundfont from http://www.hammersound.net/ (can't remember which one), and the piano is quite true. Some other instruments are good too, but some leave something to be desired.
The Soundblaster Live card was relatively inexpensive, I think perhaps $60 or $70 Canadian. I think the shop disabled the sound chip that was on the mother board.
Soundblaster has a number of products out there, I've seen messages where people seem to have some problems with Soundblaster Audigy, but I don't know if those are real problems or just newbies not quite sure how to make it work.
I have a 5 speaker system plugged into the soundcard. That is a woofer, with its own amp, and four smaller satellite speakers. This product is from Logitech, the people who also make mice, and is very satisfactory. Mine was reconditioned and cost about $40; new it would have been double that, I think.
You can certainly spend a lot more to get something much better, but my setup meets my needs (jazz recordings - 1920 to 1970).
Soundblaster comes with software called Creative Wavemaker. Write your music in NWC, and when you play it back, if you've turned Wavemaker on, it will capture the sound signal going through the sound card, and turn it into your wave file. Wavemaker supports stereo, and will allow you to do some editing on either left, right or both tracks.
I'd play around with 16th notes or 16th note triplets on that last beat in the hidden staff, rather than 32nds, depending on how fast you like the trills to be.
Yeah, those English teachers sure know how to get in the way don't they? It was the same in my day.
I found this on the web : "..."as"should've been used instead of "like" because the former's a pluperfect particle, whereas the latter's a conjunctival incantation. Or whatever...
"So how did Winston react to the wrath of the righteous? ... A follow-up commercial had a gray-bunned schoolmarm firing off a letter about the grammatical goof, only to be challenged with the jingle, "Whaddaya want, good grammar or good taste?" ...
The rest will appear in the edit window, which is where you do the work to create or modify the music. It should not show in the print preview window nor on the printed sheet of music.
I didn't realize the playback did that. I agree improvement is needed. The uncrossed grace note should rob its full time from the time of the following note, and NWC should differentiate between grace note values.
NWC also needs to give a crushed note too - that's the grace note with a slash across its stem. This type of grace note is played as fast as possible, immediately before the note following it, so does not rob time.
I'm going to screw up the correct names, but I think one is assiaggatura and the other one is appoggiatura.
NWC uses the wrong symbol for the grace note it actually supports.
The only beef I have about PDF creator is the amount of time it takes to save a file in PDF format. That can take 10 or 15 minutes for a 2 or 3 page part on a reasonably fast computer. So when printing out all the parts for a band, you end up with a print cue that takes a couple of hours. You're tied to your machine because it's a two stage process - first "printing" to PDF, then saving the new PDF file. You also can't cancel in the middle of a process, so if you realize you've made a mistake, you can run the same print job, but have to deal with the print you want to abort before saving the good one. And wait the requisite pdf file creation time first. Sigh.
Frank, I agree there are many things that NWC won't do naturally, but the program only costs $39!!! NWC is elegantly simple. I've seen other types of software that got improved so much that they became too complicated for users. The DOS based versions of Microsoft Works, for instance.
One significant strength of NWC is the ability to use various workarounds. Eric was a genius to have a user forum and user tips on the website. These have been a feature for many years. If you can't find your answer, there will often be a user of the forum who can offer you a suggestion or workaround. In other words, the support is A-one.
Zephros, crossing a bar line with this arpeggio shouldn't be a challenge. Use real notes (32nds or 64ths, or whatever) before the bar line and grace notes after it. Do this in the unmuted hidden staff. Use normal notation in the visible staff, but mute those notes. Time consuming? Yes. But this workaround should work.
This is getting considerably beyond my knowledge level. I've only experimented a bit with MPC, because I use NWC primarily for creating notation to print out sheet music.
Ori, you were asking about changing the pitch of a song. I think everyone has been answering on the assumption that your midi output is playing the right notes, but is only a little sharp or flat compared to the pitch your piano or recorder makes when playing the same notes. MPC is probably the right answer to that (I haven't used it for that, so I can only say "probably").
It seems to me, though, that you might be asking how to transpose music in NWC - so for instance you can create a trumpet or clarinet part to be played with piano accompaniment.
Some instruments are "transposing" instruments, so when you play a C on the trumpet, the same note on a piano is Bb. When you play a C on an alto sax, a recorder would play Eb to sound the same.
Transposing a part in NWC is very easy. You do it one staff at a time, by using the "tools/transpose staff" feature. Transpose staff will move the notes up or down by whatever number of half-tones you desire, and the key signature will be changed too. See "help" (F1 in NWC) for more information.
You can also change notes individually or in groups, by highlighting them and moving them up or down with the control and arrow keys. The key signature will not change this way, and there are other limitations as well.
Usually if the bar lines on one staff don't line up with another, one measure has the wrong number of beats in one bar. The easiest way is to find the earliest place they don't line up, and check the note and rest values in both staffs in the preceding bar. After you've done this, you can run the bar line audit tool again.
The bar line audit will split and tie notes into the next bar if the beat count is wrong. I don't think this changes back after you've corrected the erroneous bar, so if you have a lot of such ties, I would make a note of which bar is out of synch (Ctrl-G when in the bar) but "undo" the bar line audit before doing anything else.
The audit bar lines function works well, but only if each bar has the right number of beats in it. If your piece starts with a pickup note (anacrusis?), you should pad it out with hidden rests to make it a full measure.
If you intend to display the measure numbers, then you should set that feature to start from 0 instead of 1 where you begin with a pickup. To do this, go to File, Page Setup, Options, Measure Start.
