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

1201
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation

Quote
Afterall, no performance is ever absolutely perfect.

Absolutely. And that's what makes us prefer live over canned, isn't it?
1202
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation
Well, you're right and you're wrong, Rick. You certainly don't want to leave the vocalist hanging out there by herself (or himself) by charging ahead with your concept of the rhythm and tempo, no matter what; and you do want to try to cover her (or his) mistakes. But if those mistakes become obvious to the audience, it is not necessarily your fault as the accompanist. You may have a singer who simply can't carry her part of the ensemble. In those cases, I think it's fair to say that the vocalist can't stay with the piano....no matter how much the pianist tries to stay with her. Ensemble is really everybody's responsibility.
1203
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation
Well, that's fair, Lawrie. The root of "amateur" is, after all the Latin word for love. And most of us love music, so we're all amateurs in that sense. It's just that some of the bad ones are so exquisitely bad. And, right, those are the ones that are most offended by a description of their shortcomings. There's a cut on Cleo Laine's album Live at the Wavendon Festival that consists of two versions of Gershwin's "The Lorelei" - first done gloriously, as only Cleo and a few others can, then done the way it might be done by a talentless contestant at an amateur jazz festival. Have a listen if you get a chance - it's even better than Jo as Darlene.

Cheers,

Bill
1204
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation
Sorry, Rob - didn't mean to offend. I was thinking of my brother-in-law's wedding, where the soprano consistently chose the enharmonically wrong version of the note she was singing - if you could find the note in the middle of a vibrato about a third wide. She was also unable to stay with the pianist, who had to keep adjusting the tempo. Think Florence Foster Jenkins, or Jo Stafford in her persona as Darlene Edwards. But I digress.

I agree that analyzing the score is beyond the expected scope of NWC. But it might be nice if the Audit Enharmonics tool at least took into account the surrounding notes in the same staff. One beat ahead and one behind would help a lot. I just tried feeding it the line A-Bb-A. It "corrected" the Bb to an A#. That's the kind of behavior that I think could and should be programmed out of it.
1205
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation
Amateur vocalists at weddings. I don't think you have to say any more. My sympathies.

I find the transposing tool useful in several different circumstances. One, of course, is preparing parts for transposing instruments. But I also use it when I have a multi-measure theme that is repeated in a different key, or (for atonal music) at a different scale position. The tipping point, for me, is about four measures. Under that, it's easier to write out the notes again in the new key; over, it's easier to use the tool and deal with its shortcomings. One thing I wish for devoutly is an Audit Enharmonics tool that can deal effectively with some of the issues we've raised in this thread. But I'm afraid that's a long way off.

Cheers,

Bill
1206
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation

Quote
It's not the fingering that catches me, it's the need to think.

Exactly.

Rick (and K.A.T.) I find myself wondering something. NWC has an "Audit Enharmonic Spelling" tool that is primarily used (in my experience) to correct accidentals following staff transposition. This tool has a strong bias toward sharps and naturals, and (again, in my experience) tends to get about half the accidentals wrong, from a functional standpoint. After a transposition: do you use this tool and then correct the wrong accidentals by hand? Do you correct the wrong accidentals by hand from the beginning, without bothering with the tool? Or do you simply never use the "Transpose Staff" tool, and thus never need the "Audit Enharmonic Spelling" tool at all?

[My own technique is the first one: use the tool, then correct by hand.]

Cheers,

Bill
1207
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation
Thanks, Lawrie, Globbilink, and Warren, for chiming in here.

Rick, when I got home last night and read this line from you:

Quote
I feel sorrow for musicians that cannot read a vocal line and play it. How can they ever learn phrasing?

I had just returned from a concert by an old friend who is a well-known musician on the Northwest U.S. folk circuit. The well-known musician was, in fact, upstairs in my house at that moment getting ready for bed, as my wife and I had arranged the concert and were putting him up for the night. He had admitted earlier in the evening that he cannot read a note of music and has to learn everything by ear. I have to say, I thought his phrasing was pretty damn good.

As you may have deduced by now, my musical life (like Lawrie's, and I suspect like most of us) is somewhat schizophrenic. I play guitar, pennywhistle and Celtic harp in Irish sessions around my area, and at one time my wife and I were part of an established Irish band. But I also have an MA in theory and composition and write "serious" music (chamber music, primarily). One piece, a set of variations on a theme of Arnold Schoenberg, has entered the basic repertoire of a pianist at our local university, others have been played multiple times here and in various other cities around the Pacific Northwest. And I also like to sit down at the piano and play swing-era tunes from lead sheets - it's great therapy when you're down.

So I come at music from various angles. As a composer and a theoretician - and as a pianist - I think structurally. As a folk musician, I think linearly.

The approaches are very different. Thinking structurally, you want to make certain all accidentals are functionally correct. Thinking linearally, you want to make certain all accidentals are easily playable so that music flows without interruption. As Warren stated, string players (my wife is one) tend to reach up for sharps and down for flats; so do wind players (by lipping) and vocalists. So it is best if the accidentals are functionally corrrect. But if you have to choose between correct and playable, every monophonic instrument player I know prefers playable. They bend the notes anyway - consciously or unconciously - to make them fit the functional sense of the music, which is usually pretty clear from context. As pianists, we can't bend notes. That is actually unusual among instrumentalists. Maybe that's one reason pianists are so adamant about getting the accidentals right: if you can't hear the difference, you have to see it in order to understand what the composer is driving at. Equal temperament is a curse as much as a blessing.

One last story. A few years ago, I  wrote a piece for soprano, flute, bassoon and vibes that was performed by a local chamber group. I made sure the accidentals in the soprano part were functionally correct in order to aid her intonation. The head of the composition department at the local university got a look at the music and told me I should change a couple of E#s to Fs to make it more readable. "This is the 21st century," he said. "We don't need to think about common practice functions any more."

Generally, I think that attitude is wrong. But in certain cases - the primary point of this thread - I think it is correct.

Pardon me for going on so long, but I think David has raised an important issue.

Cheers,

Bill
1208
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation
No offense taken, Rick. You're a pianist, and when I put on my pianist's hat, I agree with you. Pianists tend to think harmonically, and when you do that, the spelling has to be correct; from that standpoint, spelling a chord wrong does seem sort of silly. But it's not so silly from the standpoint of a wind player, who associates written notes with certain patterns of open and closed holes, and who suddenly comes across a written note he hasn't seen before. Which note is that, enharmonically? Which holes do you leave open, and which do you leave closed? Because of cross fingerings, you're not just raising or lowering one finger; you have some decisions to make. And if you're sight reading, having to make decisions can be disastrous.

....Oh, well. Perhaps we should leave the last word to Papa Haydn:

Quote
If an idea strikes me as beautiful and satisfactory to the ear and heart, I would far rather overlook a grammatical error than sacrifice what is beautiful to mere pedantic trifling.

Cheers,

Bill
1209
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation
The D# may very well be correct. The question David raised was not what was correct, but what was playable. In some cases, for some instruments, the playable note may be the enharmonic equivalent of the correct note. It pays us, as composers, arrangers, or transcribers, to know what those cases are and to notate accordingly.

Here's another example - one that doesn't involve notation, so the principle may be clearer. Wind instruments (such as the reeds that David plays, or the pennywhistles that I play) get most accidentals through cross-fingering.  Often, there is more than one way to get any particular accidental. Some ways are more awkward than others. If the accurate way is awkward but there is a nearly in-tune fingering that is simple, wind players will usually use the accurate, awkward way in slow passages and the simple, approximate way for rapid passagework. When I am playing a D whistle and come across a C-natural, I am going to use three fingers in a slow aire but only one finger in a reel. Intonation is more important for slow music, attack is more important for fast music.

I think what David and I have been arguing is that the same thing holds true for written accidentals. They should be notated correctly for instruments that can play them that way, or for instruments (such as the piano) where it doesn't matter. Where it does matter, it's better to use the incorrect but playable enharmonic equivalent.
1210
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation
Well, I think David was pointing out that the bottom notes on the bass clarinet are also a special case.;-)

We Celtic harpers have an advantage over concert harpists, in that the concert harp's pedals change an entire pitch class at once (all Ds; all Cs; etc.); whereas we change strings individually, so we can have a D# in one octave while we have a D-natural in another. On the other hand, you can't change sharping levers with your feet, so we have to free a hand to achieve an accidental. You gain a little, you lose a little.
1211
General Discussion / Re: Writing a Symphony
A couple of observations on brass. First, if you want to get a really good feel for the overtone series and how it relates to brass instruments, listen to the opening and closing horn solos in Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, in which the horn player is instructed to play without valves. The entire melody is played on overtones, the way horn players used to play up through the Baroque (trumpet players, too, by the way - Bach's trumpet parts were written to be played without valves). Second, if you want to get a really good laugh, listen to Mozart's Musical Joke, in which the horn players are given exquisitely wrong notes to play - exactly the notes you would expect to hear if bad horn players were trying to play a different (but recognizable) passage properly.
1214
General Discussion / Re: Silly notation
For a singer or a string player, Eb and D# aren't the same note. The D# is a few cents higher than the Eb. The basic rule for enharmonically equivalent accidentals is to write sharps when a stepwise line is tending upward and flats when it is tending downward. For non-stepwise lines, you look at the harmonic meaning of the note: e.g, a diminished 6th is rarely encountered, so the interval D#-Bb would normally be written as Eb-Bb (or D#-A#) instead (there are, of course, exceptional times when a diminished 6th is actually what is desired by the composer).

However, I agree with David that what musicians are used to seeing needs to be kept in mind. In the case he is speaking of, writing an Eb would probably be the appropriate thing to do, at least in the part the bass clarinet is reading from. Guitarists read in the same range as bass clarinetists - down to the E below the treble staff, with an occasional D thrown in (the sixth string has to be tuned down a step to get it). If I were writing notes down there for a cellist, I would be writing them in bass clef. But guitarists never read bass clef, so guitarists have to read all those ledger lines and just deal with it. The clef change that would help the cellist would hinder the guitarist. Same with enharmonic changes to accidentals.

Another example: I play Celtic harp. On that instrument, accidentals are obtained by sharping levers - levers near the tuning pegs that press an artificial bridge against the string, shortening it by a half-step. Technically, I can obtain an Eb on the harp by engaging the sharping lever on a D string. But if I were to encounter an Eb in written music, I would be more likely to simply stop playing and say "I can't get that note," because the fingers simply aren't trained to pluck a D string when the eyes see an E. Sight-reading is basically a habit: in at the eyes, out at the fingers, without engaging the brain at all. If the brain has to be involved, things slow 'way down.
1215
General Discussion / Re: Writing a Symphony
Of course you may copy, David - but thanks for asking first. And along with Wish I was in Walla Walla, don't forget Witch Doctor ("oo ee oo ah ah ting tang Walla Walla bing bang") and the triplets trio from Band Wagon ("Every winter we come back home to Walla Walla Walla")....

Cheers,

Bill
1216
General Discussion / Re: Writing a Symphony
Well, you've got the documents, so I guess it had to be October. Maybe it was just the spring in the music (and in my steps).

But it wasn't the Whitman gym. That was an impossible place to play. They rented a venue a couple of blocks from campus - I think the Masonic hall. It was smaller than the gym, which is probably why they didn't open it to the city. The band was situated midway down one of the long sides of the room, opposite the main door, which was in the other long side (that's the door I met Duke in). Chairs were set up in a U around the bandstand. An odd arrangement, but it worked. As to the confusion with Spokane, we Whitties are used to that. There's a college there called Whitworth. People mistake us for each other all the time.

By October 1965 I was in grad school in Pullman. I don't recall even hearing about the Wa-Hi concert, although I could conceivably have gone down for it if I had known: it's only about 120 miles. And I had wheels. Maybe it's because the woman I am now married to had chosen to go into the Peace Corps and was at that time 12,000 miles away.

Anyway, back to your original point: the Duke was a master orchestrator and a master composer whose music deserves to be studied for the way he handled the instruments as well as the way he handled the notes. The brass chords in "Take the 'A' Train" (you know the ones) still send shivers through me every time I hear them. People can argue all they want about who was the greatest composer of the 20th century, but Duke Ellington should certainly be on the short list. So should Thelonius Monk, but that's another story.

Cheers,

Bill
1217
General Discussion / Re: Writing a Symphony
I took a look at your sites, David. Nicely done and impressively complete. I'll recommend them to Duke-o-philes (I know a few).

A few memories of that concert. It took place in the spring of, I think, 1964. I was a junior music major at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Duke brought his band to town to do a gig for the Whitman community. They sort of snuck him into town - it was a small venue, and they wanted to make sure everyone from Whitman who wanted to be there could get in, so they didn't announce it to the local papers and radio stations. There are probably plenty of Ellington lovers who will tell you there was no Duke Ellington concert in Walla Walla that year. But I was there. Along with all the rest of the music department - every student, every faculty member, even the janitor. Believe me, we all got there early.

Two moments remain crystalline. One came near the end of the break, when I stepped outside to get a breath of fresh air and came face to face with the Maestro himself, who was coming in the same door I was going out. We came within six inches of bumping into each other. Naturally, I was too flustered to say a word. The second moment came toward the end of the second set, when Cat Anderson - it had to have been Cat - was playing a descant on trumpet a couple of octaves above the staff. I no longer remember the tune, but I certainly remember the effect it had. We had a young hotshot French horn player named Ted Pflute who was teaching brass at the college, and he was sitting in the front row. Midway through Cat's descant, Ted got up and walked over to stand directly in front of him, staring intently at his lips and mouthpiece. Cat stopped for a breather, and Ted said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear over the band, "You can't play that note!" Cat grinned, said "But I'm playing it!", put his horn back to his lips, and went even higher. On the last chord, he was playing what was probably a triple-C: I have certainly never heard another trumpet go that high. Duke gave the cutoff, Cat pulled his horn down, looked out at the crowd, pointed his mouthpiece at us, and touched it with his index finger. And the applause nearly ripped the roof off the auditorium.

Great times. Great music. Thanks for allowing me to remember.

Cheers,

Bill
1219
General Discussion / Re: Writing a Symphony
Quote
he was talking about using the voices of instruments, the orchestration.

Which was what Ravel was talking about in the last sentence I quoted, and disclaiming any attempts at virtuoso treatment, no matter what others thought. My own sense of Bolero agrees with its composer, but I admit I'm in a minority. I do agree that Ravel was a master orchestrator. I just think you should look more at, say, La Valse, if you want to see that mastery at work. And I continue to think that Bolero is a poor choice to point a beginning composer to. But that's just my opinion.

Cheers,

Bill
1220
General Discussion / Re: Writing a Symphony
Well, Ewan, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here. There's no point in arguing over what is largely a matter of taste. I would like to give you Ravel's own take on it, though. This is from the London Daily Telegraph of July 16, 1931:

Quote
I am particularly desirous that there should be no misunderstanding as to my Bolero. It is an experiment in a very special and limited direction, and should not be suspected of aiming at achieving anything different from, or anything more than, it actually does achieve. Before the first performance, I issued a warning to the effect that what I had written was a piece lasting seventeen minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral tissue without music - of one long, very gradual crescendo. There are no contrasts, and there is practically no invention except in the plan and manner of the execution....Whatever may have been said to the contrary, the orchestral treatment is simple and straightforward throughout, without the slightest attempt at virtuosity.

The elipsis covers a note about the origin of the tune. I found this in a book called Composers on Music, edited by Sam Morgenstern [Pantheon books, 1956]. The creator of a work may not always be the best judge of it, of course, and you and I are still entitled to our own opinions.

Cheers,

Bill
1221
General Discussion / Re: Writing a Symphony
Well - uh -

"Bolero" is one long orchestral crescendo: that is really the only effect you can study in that piece. Ravel wrote it as an experiment in making things louder without having any single instrument play louder (it just adds more instruments to increase the volume), and he was amazed when his experiment became popular. Personally, he hated the thing. Or so several generations of music history students have been told.

And, yes, you should write sounds that sound right to you. But you also have to know what instruments make those sounds, and what their limitations are. Low tones on a flute, for instance, are quite a different animal than high tones on the same instrument, and if you write them expecting the high-tone effect you are going to be disappointed. Many instruments "speak" slowly in their lower registers, and if you write rapid passage work down there all your listeners will hear is the attacks. And so on. MIDI is not a reliable guide to these things, unless you have an extremely good sound card with sampled sound fonts, and even then it's questionable.

If you really want to learn orchestration, you should study scores, not just listen to recordings. Find something you like the sound of, then get hold of the score for that piece and find out how it's done. And don't be afraid to ask about specific effects: most composers love to talk about their craft, and we are usually pretty good at analyzing other composers' sounds as well as describing our own.

Cheers,

Bill
1222
General Discussion / Re: How to display an invisible text in order to select it and delete it?
Quote
How often does anyone intend to print layered staves unlayered? Ever?

Actually, there is a standard use for printing staves unlayered - in SATB choral music, which is printed sometimes on two staves and sometimes on four, a situation that is easily dealt with in NWC by writing each part on a separate staff and then layering the men's and women's parts as needed to create a two-staff version. This is, in fact, the way the SATB template is set up.

However, I think I agree that the default in print preview and for printing should be layered - as long as there is an easy way to override. It would save me a lot of cursing when I find yet again that I've forgotten to turn layering back on.

As to the ease of shifting to print preview - aw, gee, Rick, the button's right there in the button bar ;-)

(I have to admit I'm an anomaly among longtime [since 1995] & heavy NWC users, in that I do use the mouse a lot. As I mentioned to David in another thread, this may be because my "mouse" is a trackball, which is more accurate and a lot easier on the forearms than a regular mouse. Everyone should try one sometime.)

Cheers to all -

Bill
1223
General Discussion / Re: font with circled numbers?
Thanks, Rick - that works. It also shows what I was doing wrong. I was using the Windows calculator to convert the hex numbers to dec, but I did it backward. Should have realized what was happening when the dec number came out smaller than the hex (duh...) but it's a long time since my programming days.

Cheers,

Bill
1224
General Discussion / Re: font with circled numbers?
Well, Rick, I have a factory install of XP (authorized American version) on a Dell laptop. I've run the repair facility on the install disk within the last three days, and it found nothing wrong with the fonts. The Wingdings font works as expected in other programs, such as MS word. It doesn't work in NWC; or, rather, it gives unexpected results (wrong characters) for the circled numbers, which are the parts of the font I need. The circled numbers are not characters that can be input in TNR or similar fonts and then simply converted to the Wingdings font, because they have no equivalents in the standard character set. For other input alternatives, I've tried (a) copying the circled numbers from Wingdings using the Windows Character Map; (b) feeding the numbers in using ALT-keypad, first converting the key code given in Character Map from hex to dec; and (c) doing the same thing without converting (I didn't expect that one to work, but nothing else had). Am I missing something obvious?

It's not critical, because Combinumerals works just fine, but I'm curious.

Bill
1225
General Discussion / Re: font with circled numbers?
Follow-up: When I wrote reply #2 (above), I hadn't actually tried the wingdings font. It turns out that NWC doesn't support the part of the Wingdings character set that includes circled numbers. For others facing this problem, I recommend the Combinumerals set that Ewan and John pointed us to. The freeware version does the job nicely. The right size for the font for string numbers appears to be 3/4 the size of the system font (e.g., if your staff metrics are set to 16 pt, set Combinumerals to 12).

Cheers - and thanks to Ewan and John -

Bill
1227
General Discussion / Re: How to display an invisible text in order to select it and delete it?
....and if you want the music to sound an octave higher during playback in NWC, as well as look right on the page, then in addition to what David suggests, you will want to add a new clef at the beginning of the 8va section that tells NWC to play that section an octave higher. Assuming you are in treble clef:

  • place a new treble clef
  • highlight the new clef and press [alt][enter]
  • in the "notation properties" box, change the "octave shift" field from "none" to "octave up."

The following music will now sound an octave higher. Be sure to place a normal treble clef at the end of the 8va section. You can make both clefs invisible, if you want to - their effect will remain the same.

And let me add my welcome to David's.

Cheer,

Bill
1229
General Discussion / font with circled numbers?
Is anyone aware of a font that includes numbers with circles around them? These are used in string music to indicate which string to play a note on. I've checked the Scriptorium fonts that looked possible (Boxmarks and Boxmarks2, Lawrie's Musikdings, NWslur, and Fretqwik). I can keep on checking, there and elsewhere, but I thought I'd just ask....

Bill
1230
General Discussion / Re: Writing a Symphony
Quote
is there anything more I need to be looking at or keeping in mind?

Well, lots....;-)

For starters - if you are not already familiar with them - I suggest you find recordings of Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide To the Orchestra and Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf (these are often paired on the same disc). The Britten piece is a set of variations that features each instrument of the orchestra in turn, so you can hear what each sounds like and how a master composer handles each one in terms of idiomatic writing. The Prokofiev is a story told to an orchestral accompaniment, where various instruments act out the parts of the story as the narrator reads it, which is what I think you are trying to do, and again, it is masterfully handled.

You can also look at the score of the Britten, as written out in NWC. It's in the Scriptorium, which is worth a visit anyway to see how other people work with the program (and get some great music). The Britten piece is at http://nwc-scriptorium.org/ftp/classical/b/britypgo.nwc

And you'll find many of us willing to answer specific questions as they come up. Good luck!
1231
General Discussion / Re: Quintuplet Problem
Always glad to help. If it were my piece, I would leave the hemiola in m. 2 but convert to 3/4 in m. 3, 4/4 in m. 4 (extended to include the 2/8 measure that follows it), and then the rest as written. Fewer barlines that way, and closer to the pulse of the music. Do you know how to slur across staves in NWC? It will require the use of at least one layered staff.

Bill
1232
General Discussion / Re: Quintuplet Problem
Here's another way to look at it, using shifting meters, which I think is what is really causing the problem here (Rick started to put his finger on it back in reply #4). I think you'd also want to use some slurs to group the notes in each run, but I haven't tried to do that in this "quick and dirty" version. Hope it helps -

Bill
1233
General Discussion / Re: Wouldn't it be cool if...
It's worth noting, here, that the default value for the volume MPC, which is 64, doesn't match the default volume setting NWC assigns to a staff, which is 127. Nor does it match the default velocities assigned to any of the dynamics - it's close to mp (which is 60), but noticeably different to the ear. It appears to have been chosen because it's midway on the volume scale (0<127). That was a logical choice during the code-writing and testing process, but it's probably time to rethink it now. Simply changing it to 127 to match the default staff volume would be an improvement; fiziwig's idea strikes me as almost as simple, and even better.

Worth noting, also, is that the default of the tempo MPC does match the default staff tempo (120). Why not volume, as well? Or why not set both to match the current values of the staff, as fiziwig suggests? Just wondering....:)
1235
General Discussion / Re: Right click menu bug?
Re select all: perhaps it's time NWC joined the rest of the Windows world in using [cntrl][a] to call that function. Adding a new staff could be switched to [cntrl][plus], which isn't currently doing anything. I suspect veteran NWC keyboard users would adapt quickly, and it would certainly make life easier for newbies.
1236
General Discussion / Re: 2007 Software Review Notation Pragrams
Well, you're right, Lawrie - I didn't look at the date of the original post. You had all the fun while I was out of town instead of just offline...;)

But I'm still curious about the absence of Sibelius and Finale. Very curious.

Bill
1237
General Discussion / Re: 2007 Software Review Notation Pragrams
Great job, guys! I was away from the forum for a couple of hours and by the time I got back the storm had hit the Top Ten Reviews website and the review was already fixed. Mostly. It still has a few errors (cross-staff beaming? Not without workarounds), but it looks much better than what was originally reported (and reacted to) here. All done before I knew anything about it. Shucks - some folks jest have all the fun....

....but you know what really interests me? Look at their list of top ten notation products. No Sibelius and no Finale. Did they fail to test them, or did our favorite little notation program actually score far enough above them to knock them out of the top ten and off the review list altogether? I'd give worlds to know....

Cheers,

Bill
1238
General Discussion / Re: three requests
Hi David -

I have an external keyboard and a trackball attached when the machine is at its usual place on my desk, and I use both - the keyboard for entering notes, rests and barlines, the trackball for almost everything else (including adding accidentals and changing note durations, which I do with the button bar). I usually get to the properties dialogues by right-clicking in an empty space in the score, unless I'm making changes to several items, in which case I use alt-enter and the arrow keys. Same thing with moving between staves: pg up or pg dn if I'm making similar changes to several staves at once, otherwise click with the trackball. I have wondered occasionally if my use of a trackball instead of a mouse is part of what drives my choices in the mouse/keyboard debate, as the trackball is (1) always in the same place, so the hand finds it quickly, and (2) makes fine adjustments more easily than a mouse. Don't know if this actually matters. (I detest touch pads, by the way, so I use the keyboard almost exclusively if I'm working away from my desk.)

Cheers,

Bill
1239
General Discussion / Re: three requests
I work on a Dell laptop with a 14" screen. Considerably better than the old Osbornes (which came with a 3" screen and a magnifying glass, if I remember right) but still not adequate for more than six staves, and that's a stretch. My screen is set at 1400x1050 pixels, which is enough resolution for higher numbers of staves, but they get awfully tiny....
1240
General Discussion / Re: three requests
Hi David -

You're right, of course - tiny files are one of the things we all love about NWC. I wasn't suggesting it would make the file awkwardly big on the hard drive. What it does do, though, is make it awkwardly big on the screen. Piano scores, plain, take up two staves and maybe 1/3 of my screen. Add playback staves, you have 2/3 (see my earlier whine about the inability to turn hidden staves on and off without jumping back to the beginning of the score: for this reason, I often leave the playback staves visible). Add a layered staff each for the RH and LH staves, and you've filled the whole screen. Add your suggested top staff with only barlines and tempo changes, and the score now requires scrolling. Probably not a big deal, since you won't be working with that top staff much (if at all), but something in me rebels against creating a piano score - a piano score! - that requires scrolling vertically to see all of it. Call it a personality quirk and condemn it all you like, but I'm stuck with it.

So - great idea, wrong personality to work with it. And I'm sorry I didn't make myself clearer in my earlier post re file size. Reading it over, now, I read it the same way you did. Mea culpa.

As far as why we're here - yes, we're here to help each other (thank you), but we're also here to beta-test the next version of NWC. That includes making suggestions for improvements. I appreciate workaround ideas, use them, and have contributed some, but they usually aren't a substitute for improvements to the program. I think part of our task, as beta testers, is to make a case for improvements vs. continued use of workarounds, so sometimes we have to attack the workarounds. It's best if we can do that without attacking either the program or each other. Recent events in other threads have made us all supersensitive to this, and I suspect we're all a bit testy. We'll get through.

Cheers,

Bill
1241
General Discussion / Re: three requests
Hi Rick, Lawrie, David, Rob -

Thanks for all the input.

David, your idea of adding a top top staff with nothing but barlines and tempi (and perhaps dynamics) is definitely useful, but I think more in ensemble scores than in a piano score. In ensemble scores it adds a smaller percentage to the size of the file (because there are more staves to begin with) and serves the additional purpose of being available to layer with each part as you produce it, reducing the work load of part preparation considerably. In piano scores the staves are more closely tied together (including beams and slurs across staves), there are fewer of them to begin with, and no parts will be prepared from them: so the extra staff seems sort of superfluous. I may find myself using one, but I haven't yet; it seems better to simply switch existing layered staves for the workaround, which is what I did this afternoon after posting.

Rick and Lawrie, I definitely agree that blank scores should default to measure numbers: plain. A choice in the editor options dialogue might be nice for those who don't like it.

And I love the idea of a ruler....but it seems a long way off.

Cheers,

Bill
1242
General Discussion / Re: three requests
Thanks for the input, Rob. I deal with the big leap back to the beginning by always turning measure numbers on in my working draft, whether I want them in the final copy or not - which feeds back into my barline number request - and glancing at the measure number before turning on/off hidden staves. Same basic idea as yours. But it would be very nice not to have to do either one....
1243
General Discussion / three requests
Three small requests which I have not seen discussed elsewhere in this forum (although they may well have been....:)

  • Could the "preserve width" box in instrument patch properties be unchecked by default?
  • Could barline numbers be user-changeable?
  • Could the program maintain its position in the score when staves are hidden (or brought out of hiding)?

Instrument patches currently are entered in the program at full width, even though they are always invisible. This creates a big white space in the on-screen score which is disconcerting. I always immediately uncheck the "preserve width" box, but it would be better from my standpoint if it were unchecked by default. Does anyone actually prefer to see that white space there? Is there a purpose for it? If not, can we get rid of it, please?

The barline number issue arose in the piano score I'm currently working on. I have two staves that will be layered together to form the right-hand staff of the final score. One has most of the final composite staff on it; the other has just a few items. For ease in working with the score, I have placed the staff with most of the items on it next to the left-hand staff, which means that the other - call it the "workaround staff" - is the top staff in the score. Hence, it gets the barline numbers. Now I want to beam across a barline. That means eliminating a barline in the workaround staff, which means the barline count from there to the end of the score will show one less than the actual number.

There is an easy workaround for this, of course. Eliminate the barline in the lower of the two staves instead, and do the beaming there. But it would be better from my standpoint (neat freak that I am) to eliminate the barline in the workaround staff and advance the number of the next barline by one to compensate. There would undoubtedly be other uses for this capability, as well.

And finally: does everyone else get as annoyed as I do when I'm working with muted display/print staves and hidden playback staves, I change something in the display that requires a change in the playback, I check the box in the "contents" dialogue to make the playback staves visible, and the program blithely puts me back at the beginning of the score, forcing me to go hunting for the measure I had been working in? Is there a reason for this behavior, or has it simply not been dealt with?

I would love to hear others' opinions on these issues.

Cheers,

Bill
1244
General Discussion / Re: MP3 to Midi converter software
You know this, Rick, and I suspect Tom knows it, but for the benefit of those who might have suddenly become mystified by your last exchange:

  • A MIDI file stores instructions to the sound card to manipulate generic sounds that are stored in a sound bank on the computer.
  • A WAV file stores a digitized copy of the composite sound wave generated in the air by actual music (or other sounds).
  • An MP3 file is a WAV file that has been put through a compression algorhythm so that it can be stored in a smaller space.

The problem with converting WAV or MP3 to MIDI is that the music you hear comes into your ear as a single composite sound wave that is created by adding together all of the sound waves produced by all of the instruments that are playing. Your ear and your brain, working together, separate the sounds out again. Computers can record and play back the composite sound wave, and they can manipulate it in various ways, but they aren't capable of separating it into its additive components (yet).

MIDI to WAV or MP3 is a different story, though. You don't have to patch the audio output of your computer into the input; most sound recording programs will patch it internally (the option to do that is usually called "what you hear"). And there are programs available that will read MIDI files, access the MIDI sound bank, and create WAVs or MP3s directly without producing any actual sounds in the process. These can go at processor speed rather than the speed of the music, so they work pretty fast. Having not actually tried one, I don't know how good they are, but the theory they are based on is sound (so to speak;-).
1245
General Discussion / Re: new barline type?
Very nice job, Rick. The dotted barlines look good done in this manner. I think we agree, though, that it would be better to have real ones. As to the system breaks, I am currently transcribing a piece I wrote for piano around 1965. As you may recall, that was an era when everybody tried to get "creative" with notation, and I was no exception. The piece is written in 1/4, so there is a barline every quarter-note equivalent, and all of them are dotted except the section breaks. Of course, I was a student, and students exaggerate everything; and since it's my piece, I'm going ahead and changing all the dotted barlines back to solid ones. But I've seen other pieces that do similar things. Check out Harrison Birtwistle's Ritual Fragment some day - every one of its barlines is dotted. (Try to do that without a system break on a dotted line!)

You are probably right about the 2/2 time, unless you are trying to keep everything the same as it was in the original insofar as possible, which Greenberg was (he was the founder of the New York Pro Musica Antiqua, and he was a bear for historical accuracy). The 2/2 was Greaves' time signature, but he hadn't put all the barlines in, so Greenberg added some - in dotted lines so performers could tell them from the originals.

Anyway, thanks for the input. With all the workarounds possible, this is probably not a high priority item. It's just that it seems so simple to add....
1246
General Discussion / Re: new barline type?
Greetings, Lawrie -

Rick said it for me, except he didn't mention the difficulty Noah Greenberg would have had creating the system-ending barline in the example I attached a few posts above. Doable, but difficult. And we already have the capability to exclude barlines from the measure count - nothing new needs to be added there.

But thanks for the input. Still haven't tried your symbol suites....too much going on in my life....gotta slow down somewhere....

Cheers, Bill

P.S.: just noticed that the two staves I called the "lute part" in that example are actually a piano part. Oh, well - it started out as a lute part, so I feel partially justified.
1247
General Discussion / Re: new barline type?
Hi Carl -

I agree that the rythmic distortion in your second example is minimal. But there is still a detectable pause, even when you place a slur across all four notes.

I'm not knocking the technique - it's a great workaround, and I intend to use it, and thank you very much. It's just that a new barline type would be so simple to implement, and so useful....
1248
General Discussion / Re: new barline type?
Thanks for the suggestions, all of you. I particularly like Carl's way, although you'd have to put it on a layered staff to avoid affecting the playback (unless Rick comes up with something).

But these workarounds, useful as they are, can't do all the tricks a real barline can. I've attached an example, from Noah Greenberg's Elizabethan Songbook (1955). A few things to note are the way the dotted barline crosses multiple staves, the spot where a dotted barline in the lute part lies against a regular barline in the voice, and (particulaly) the system break that comes at a dotted barline. All of these things can be worked around - some more easily than others. A "broken barline" type would take care of all of them, without any significant change in the programming.

So - yes. We can get along without it, thanks to NWC's wonderful flexability in performing workarounds. But it would still be nice to have a real dotted barline.
1249
General Discussion / Re: Muted notes and muted staves
Just ran into a potential problem with muted staves being ignored in playback: when we are using hidden staves for playback and all the visible staves are muted, how will we keep track of where we are in the music while it's playing? Maybe turning off playback on muted staves should be optional?
1250
General Discussion / new barline type?
I would like NWC to be able to do dashed barlines, which are useful in transcribing early music (where the original barring may be inconsistent, and where an editor often wants to differentiate between the barlines in the original and the barlines he has added) and in many modern scores (where dashed barlines are often used to group beats in complex measures). It doesn't seem like this would take much, just one extra option under barline type. In most cases, dashed barlines shouldn't figure in the measure count, but we already have the ability to remove them from that.