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Topic: recording autorhthm (Read 3155 times) previous topic - next topic

recording autorhthm

I can record all keyboard press tones of my keyboard but I cant record any inbuilt rhythm features. Any suggestions?

Re: recording autorhthm

Reply #1
I didnt make my question clear. I am recording with a cakewalk software and I cant record any rhythm feature of my keyboard. This is for clarification

Re: recording autorhthm

Reply #2
If I understand your question: You are using a keyboard that can play a background rhythm (samba, western swing, polka) while you play the keyboard. But when you try to output the keyboard to your computer via MIDI, you do not get the background.

This is normal. Unless you have a special keyboard that internally creates MIDI to correspond to its own rhythm (do any exist?), the rhythm is a synthesized sound file that is not in MIDI format. Before you ask: The sound file cannot be converted to MIDI by a software or hardware product.

As an alternative, you can try the following: Many music software products, including Noteworthy Composer, have a variety of background rhythms composed in the program's native format, that can also be converted to MIDI. Instead of using your keyboard's sythesized rhythm, try playing along to one of the program rhythms from your computer. Then, you can add your keyboard track to the pre-existing rhythm track(s) on your computer.

Re: recording autorhthm

Reply #3
Well, FWIW my ancient Yamaha PSS-780 outputs its rhythms to the MIDI port.

Robin

Re: recording autorhthm

Reply #4
Joe & Robin,
THanks.

Robin,
Did you assign or import any instrument definition in cakewalk software to record your rhythm part ? Please let me know if you did any process for it. I can record keypress notes with the source as MIDI. I tried to set the channel to 10 to record the rhythm from my keyboard but it doesn't work. I would appreciate any suggestions.

Re: recording autorhthm

Reply #5
I hope I answered this one in my e-mail direct to you, but for the benefit of anyone else who might be interested, I'm afraid I couldn't be of much help. I don't use Cakewalk (this is a Noteworthy forum, after all!), and I've never made any serious effort to record the keyboard rhythms in any other package - I just know they work from a bit of fiddling, and from my keyboard manual. Actually - it might be fun to have a go with this at the weekend. I'll let you know how I get on.

One slight hiccup is that the Yamaha PSS-780 predates General Midi, so the percussion is on channel 16, not 10, although the instrument to note mappings are the same. Another is that the rhythms come across as multiple channels, and I haven't looked at whether you can filter incoming MIDI events by channel on NWC (I know - RYFM!) In fact, I've never done real-time recording on NWC. Being such a bad pianist, I do it all in step time.

So, not much help, really, but I might have some ideas over the weekend.

Robin

Re: recording autorhthm

Reply #6
Well, I tried it, and it worked, sort of, but it's not very easy, mainly because of the limitations of my keyboard, rather than NWC (perish the thought!), so I won't bore you with the details.

The main difficulty is in synchronising staves. You have to have a stave long enough to hold the music you are recording (or to play along with it - please correct me if I'm wrong - this is the first time I've used real time record in NWC). I find it virtually impossible to press the start button on my keyboard at the right time, and if you subsequently remove leading rests, your notes look a mess (due to bar lines in the wrong place).

Which leads me to a new wish - how about an "audit note lengths" option, that tidies up the stave, removing unnecessary tied notes etc, at the same time as, or just after, auditing bar lines? I've encountered this problem with importing MIDI files as well, when the file has some awkward time signature changes that NWC doesn't pick up, so the bar lines are out of sync. You have to wade through the score, correcting all the tied notes manually.

Robin

 

Re: recording autorhthm

Reply #7
Hi Robin,
Thanks for your efforts. I will give it a shot with Noteworthy composer too (I personally feel the whole thing sounds much less complex with Cakewalk though). I am glad to see the kind of assistance one can expect in this forum. Thanks once again.