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Another NWC wishlist

I hope I'm not being horribly redundant. I've scanned over the forum's more recent threads, and spotted another wishlist; but there are some things missing which I feel would be very beneficial to NWC's later versions.

1) 8va, 8vb controls which function in playback. Using hidden staves for playback and other staves for printing is fine, but it strikes me as a "brute force" solution, and it's a pain to edit both staves down the road if you want to change something major. Scoring parts more than 3 or 4 ledger lines above or below a staff quickly becomes unreadable. Addition of trill and arpeggiation controls would further help to make hidden staves unnecessary.

2) Make the Insert toolbar editable by the user. While this is a fantastic addition to the program, I would love to be able to rearrange the buttons, add my own and pull the ones I don't use.

3) Playing of grace notes. Currently Noteworthy plays grace notes as a short burst of notes beginning at the point where the arrival note would have played. Grace notes, by definition, should sound before the impact of the arrival note. Or possibly make it the composer's choice, as a property of the grace note(s).

4) Ped. symbol should (in my humble opinion) function as a pedal release and pedal down in one. Currently, if the pedal is down, and you add a following Ped. symbol, no release occurs.

5) Simply for cosmetic reasons, addition of linear ("hairpin") crescendo/decrescendo symbols would be nice to have available. Currently I can only add a Cresc. or Desresc. symbol leading to a new dynamic. This makes the notation of swells and other expressive dynamic shifts quite bulky.

6) Playback in loop could be handy in some applications. (Not sure if NWP supports this?)

7) Percussion notation- yes, I admit- I am a percussionist, most of the time. It would be very handy to be able to add some common percussion notation, such as rolls, notes with x heads instead of standard dots, flam grace note (normal grace note with a slash across it), and + signs in the place of the stacatto dot (mallet notation for dead stroke). All of these can be accomplished by hand after printing, but the computer can always do things more neatly. Also, not so much for scoring, but for individual parts, the ability to insert multiple bar rests and the infamous "repeat last measure" symbol (including multiple bar versions) would be invaluable.

8) Lastly, I've discovered a bug regarding printing a score with measure numbers. I recenly scribed a piece, wherein the first 5 or 6 bars were each a repeated section. Using the Local Repeat controls, I was able to reproduce the score precisely. However, in printout, on lines where the first bar begins with a repeat sign, the measure number is 1 too low. Example: measure 3, the first bar of the second line on the page, is marked as measure 2 because it starts with an Open Local Repeat control.

Let me close by saying that Noteworthy is already a great tool. I've been a registered user for years, and I have no intentions to shift to another notation program. I post these suggestions in the hopes that I might help make a good program better still.

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #1 –
Kevin, just a comment on your grace note request. Exactly how a grace note is rendered depends on a number of factors, and I doubt there's really a single "correct" way to render them that would satisfy everyone.

In the music of the Classical period, for example, grace notes are almost invariably sounded on the beat, not before it. However, they're usually not as short as NWC makes them. Often they take up as much time as the note they precede, and sometimes they actually take *more* time. (In cases like this there are better terms to use than "grace note", but the notation is indistinguishable from NWC's grace notes.)

In my opinion the current implementation of grace notes is appropriate only for a small minority of cases. In most pre-Romantic music you'd want the grace note to sound on the beat but have a longer duration. In most modern music you'd want the grace note to sound before the beat.

In the past I have also requested a change to the handling of grace notes, but one that would take into account the various uses this notation has been put to over the centuries. I'd be opposed to any change that merely substitutes one fixed interpretation for another. Rather, I'd like more user control over the placement and duration of the grace note.

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #2 –
It would be nice to distinguish between appogiaturas (grace notes with a distinct duration)and acciacaturas (very short and written with a slash). And also to be able to slur them to their associated note within the ambit of a larger group of slurred notes.

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #3 –
To follow up.. I've discovered the NWC scriptorium and have begun fiddling around with some of the items found there. Nonetheless, I think NWC should be able to natively support some of these features, and use them appropriately in MIDI playback.

Grant, I agree that the user should have control of grace note timing.

I begin to realize, upon writing this, that I know absolutely nothing about NoteWorthy Software and the people behind it. So I can't say anything about their software development team. Regardless, NWC remains a fine piece of work, which with some minor updates, could become much better.

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #4 –
Your list is nice, but has some things to reconsider:
> 2)Already does.
> 4)there's the pedal down and the pedal up signatures, so that what you said has no fundament.

On the other stuff, I support ya!

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #5 –
Just to clarify Artur's comment about toolbars -

Go to "View" menu, choose "Toolbars", click "Customize"
on the "Toolbar List" dialog, select toolbar "Insert" and
change it any way you want, or create your own toolbars!

Thanks to Artur for pointing this out, I'd never noticed
it before. I'm sure it will be more than Kevin M was
expecting.

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #6 –
Re: cumbersome - my take is that it's only cumbersome at first; after awhile, "it's just the way it's done." It really helps to be conversant with the standard windows actions (cut, copy, paste, undo) as well as effectively combining mouse and keyboard techniques.

Re: pedal marks. For Yamaha DB50XG users (and probably other XG synths), the proposed "auto-pedal-up" would not be of any use, since these synths don't recognise a pedal-up until the next note is sounded. So you'd have to add an invisible pedal-up object anyway. FWIW...

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #7 –
When we think about it, folks, traditional music notation is very strange. The letters run A-G, but most of us learn scales beginning with C. We (in Western music) have a combination of whole steps and half steps, learned before we realize its compromised connection to small-integer fractions of a base tone. We use arbitrary staffs with accidentals, rather than just numbering the notes 1-12. And so on, and so forth.

Any difficulties with music notation are just a reflection of the difficulties inherent in creating a printed page that contains information not expressed in the technology of whatever musical device (instrument or MIDI) is actually playing the music.

To this, add the illusion that a human musician is necessarily performing whatever was originally written, and the illusion that the original composer created a work in which every symbol was a precise expression of authorship intent. Hah! Remember "Switched-On Bach"?

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #8 –
> Hah! Remember "Switched-On Bach"?

Yup. In fact I have it on CD and still listen to it occasionally. Also have SOB 2K, I find I actually like the original analog Moog version better!

Fred N

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #9 –
Artur, about pedal marks: it is certainly true that sometimes "pedal down" markings are used in printed music without intervening "pedal ups", and that this implies that the pedal should be released (as physically it must) before being reapplied. Kevin would just like NWC to behave in the same way, inserting the implied "pedal ups" into the MIDI stream as necessary. There's certainly some sense to this, though it would be merely a timesaver rather than a necessity (if you want the effect of "pedal ups" in your music without visible markings, you need only insert invisible ones).

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #10 –
Regarding editable toolbars- you're right, you can edit the existing toolbars and add new ones- but only with the tools currently provided. For example (unless I'm using an outdated version and don't know it) I can only set up a toolbar with a handful of time signatures- 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, common, and cut time. I would like to be able to add buttons for odd times- 7/8, 9/16, 5/4, and so forth. (As a percussionist, much of the repertoire I deal with was written in the last 50 years, and complex time shifts are very common.)

Create a new toolbar, then look at the list of "Fast Insert" tools available. Surely you would agree that there are a million more such tools that could be useful.

Regarding the pedal controls.. Maybe I'm out of line to ask.. Does anyone else consider the use of invisible notation symbols and even invisible playing staves to be a cumbersome solution to relatively simple problems?

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #11 –
Cumbersome yes - simple no!

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #12 –
Kevin M wrote:

Does anyone else consider the use of invisible notation symbols and even invisible playing staves to be a cumbersome solution to relatively simple problems?

I think that in many cases the problem is not so simple. Problems that invisibility solves often arise from a divergence between what is written and what should be performed - i.e.where a human performer would apply "interpretation" to the written score. Examples include trills, turns and other ornaments, subtle volume and tempo changes, swing rythms. Midi needs to be told EXACTLY what to do. A human performer "just knows" and would probably find it difficult to follow EXACT instructions anyway. Hence the two versions - visible for us humans, invisible for MIDI.

Admittedly, standard music notation is probably not the easiest medium to use to specify a midi performance; that is why some of the workarounds to get the midi version to sound right are so clunky.

The only Place I can think of where invisibility solves a problem with the "human version" is the n-tuplet workaround - and who knows, perhaps this will become redundant with version 1.80 or whatever?

Stephen

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #13 –
"When we think about it, folks, traditional music notation is very strange. The letters run A-G, but most of us learn scales beginning with C."

These are things that have puzzled me for a long time.

Why does the "natural" major scale start on C and not A? Was the first "natural" scale a minor one? If so, why isn't G pitched at G#? Have our tastes in scales changed? Did a non sharpened leading note sound OK when the letter names were decided? Or were downward scales the source of lettering? If so, why do the letters go backwards?

Who decided that pitches should be named by letters? And when was it agreed? It must have been before Bach's time because he very often used the letter/pitch relationship to add another level of interpretation to his music.

Our concept of scales also implies a concept of "sameness" for pitches separated by whole octaves. Is this "sameness" just a western thing or is it universally recognised in all musical cultures?

Stephen

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #14 –
First:
The notes start at A becuase A is the most fundamental note in frequency (A1= 440Hz, not to beconfounded as the third lowest A on the piano, for this is the A3 I'm talking about).
Everything is related to C because it is Do, from Medieval times.
Do-C, Re-D, Mi-E, Fa-F, Sol-G, La-A, Si-B.
This notes were taken from a himm, the melody was that every new line started at a new note in the C Major Sacle.
The natural scale is the minor becuase....
Wich is the minor scale from the first major one (C)?
A, and A is the natural note....

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #15 –
That reminds me...

When the choir director says "Sing A,"
I sing "Eh?"
 

Re: Another NWC wishlist

Reply #16 –
And when he says in a thick German accent "Sing H" (pron. Hahh) you sing "huh"?