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New ideas for 1.75.

I was having some ideas on what could improve this version. Before taking them to the wish list I thought I could share them with you.

1. Hide selected bars. -> This way we could save some system sizes when printing and also edit contemporary music and some aleatory music, as John Cage.

2. Diferent size staff. -> Not height size, but cue size staves for use in piano trios, for example. The piano part has the cello and the violin as well, but these are really smaller than the piano one.

3. Improved automatic beam. -> Select how to beam the notes (as in Alla breve, as in 12/8, as in Common time and so on), select the bars to beam them and so on.

4. Bar numbers in diferent positions. -> Select to number them from 5 to 5, 10 to 10, 4 to 4 and so on, more than one bar number (as happens on the last mov. of Beethoven's 31st sonata), number above/below the selected staves and so on.

I had some more ideas but forgot them [:-)Duh], if you have some, please put them here. Also comment mine, so that I could -perhaps- improve them and then take them to the wish list. Thanx!

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #1 –
Oops! remebered one:
5. Adjustable stem sizes, to work also on beamed notes.

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #2 –
I fully support no.2 - it would be my top priority for any future upgrade. (That's not to say the others are not good ideas; I just haven't got my head round them yet...).

See the earlier discussion https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=2076. I've already 'wish-listed' this item - surely the more people who ask for it will increase its' priority, so PLEASE add your request!

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #3 –
Artur, I don't understand your need in 3.: the beaming is perfectly done currently. When using 2/2 (alla breve), x/4, x/8 and so on, the beaming is correctly made by beat.
Or is it that you want to break the rule, for example to group crotchets (8ths) by 3 in 3/8, which should only be done in 6/8, 9/8 or 12/8 ?
As I recently wrote, you can cut/paste the measures you want to beam "specificly" to a "work" staff where you put the time signature you want, Alt, T, A, cut/paste to where it was, which is a 3 seconds operation (approximately the time it would require to do this by selecting the "beaming time sig." in a window that would popup when trying to beam a selected section).
Howver, the prosodie rules are that each syllable must not be beamed to next notes, though it's rarely made on Bach choir pieces, for instance. I usually beam the notes myself, unless when writing for instruments only (exception: multi-voicing guitar)

P.S. I suppose you wanted to write "I was having some ideas on what could improve NEXT version(...)" :)

About 4.: I don't know the rules about bar numbering, but I'm always a bit surprised when using staves which don't use the same |:   :| sections. What could be useful is to choose the number of a bar after a repeat section (or if it should be cumulative or not). But I'm not very used to orchestral stuff in that way, so it may be normal thay flutes play measure 34 while triangle plays measure 6 (if the four first measures were repeated 8 times, for example).

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #4 –
Marsu, I think Artur is right about automatic beams. What you refers to as a "rule" is really just a guideline and is often violated. For example, IIRC it's more usual than not to beam eighths together in 3/8. It's also quite common to beam eighths in groups of 4 in 4/4, contrary to the "rule".

The prosodic rule about not beaming syllables together is, I think, somewhat outmoded and very often violated nowadays (though this is clearly a matter of taste).

Regarding measure numbers in orchestral contexts: I don't think I've ever seen the situation you describe, where the repeats and consequently measure numbers are different from part to part. However, it wouldn't present much of a problem because cumulative measure numbers are often ignored in rehearsal. Instead measures are identified relative to the periodic boldface letters or numbers provided in the score and parts. The conductor simply refers to "three bars before letter B" or "5 after Q". (I'm not sure parts usually even *have* cumulative measure numbers.) In such a context the flutist wouldn't know that the percussionist had a different measure number, so it wouldn't matter.

Some scores I've seen assign multiple numbers to measures within repeats, so that each measure *played* gets its own number. For example, the first (written) measure of a repeated 12-bar section might be numbered both 101 and 113. The conductor could then safely refer to, say, measure 117 regardless of the distribution of repeats in the various parts.

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #5 –
What I said about the cumulative bar numbers, for wich I used the 31st Beethoven piano sonata as an example, is this:
In the last movement of the described sonata, there are no repeats, but variations, so that the theme has it's bars numbered plain, the first variation have the plain number and new ones in boxes, the second has the plain and the boxed ones and newer box-within-box ones, and so on.
The other idea for the bar number was the number to show on measure 5, 10, 15, ...; measure 4, 8, 12, ...; and so on, not only in the begging of new systems.

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #6 –
About having more control over beaming - what would be useful here and for other tools that apply to the whole staff (such as "audit accidentals") would be to apply the rule just to the current selection (if any).
Also, it would be nice to have a "beam as you enter" option, so that quavers etc. are beamed as they are entered, rather than having to go back later and beam them.

Robin

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #7 –
***1. Hide selected bars. ***
EXCELLENT idea!
I've composed a quartet for harp and three other
instruments, and as the harp is the feature instrument,
there is an extended passage where the other instruments
don't play at all. To avoid having all of that wasted
space, I had to break the piece into three separate files.
Your idea is WONDERFUL!
***2. Diferent size staff. ***
We’ve been asking for this for some time...
***3. Improved automatic beam. ***
I also would like to beam eighths together in 3/8.
What I usually do is enter all of the notes in 6/8, do an
automatic beam, and then audit bar lines. Yeah, it’s a
solution, but I’d rather not have to take the time to do it.
Also, NoteWorthy doesn’t seem to know what to do with 5/8
and 7/8, and a few other meters.
***4. Bar numbers in diferent positions. ***
This is one of those cases where numbers need to be entered
manually, as text items...
***5. Adjustable stem sizes, to work also on beamed notes.***
Sometimes when I have four notes beamed together, the beam
follows the contour of the notes (as it should), sometimes
it is parallel to the staff (not always the right thing
to do). Your suggestion may help solve my problem, too.
***Reply 3 offered by: marsu***
***choose the number of a bar after a repeat section***
This would be great, too! The first movement of Schubert’s
Unfinished symphony has the first ending as m.110a, and the
second ending as m.110b. This is historically correct, but
NoteWorthy Composer (among others) doesn’t do that. Much
of the music I see published today doesn’t do that either
(obsolete practice?). But when I’m working with older
music, I need to be able to do this. And I have a few jazz
charts that do this as well. This then becomes another one
of those cases where numbers need to be entered manually,
as text items.
***Reply 4 offered by: Grant ***
When a conductor refers to “thirty-three bars before
letter B” or “45 after Q” (and yes I’ve been in those
situations, on both sides of the baton), a lot of time can
be wasted. Our parts often don’t even *have* cumulative
measure numbers, but we often find ourselves writing them in anyway.

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #8 –
Hi, all. I've been a registered user since 1.55b, but this is essentially my first forray into the forums. Anyway, I thought I'd add some of my thoughts on wish-list items (I think I sent them as actual wish-list items a loooong time ago).

1. n-tuplets of any kind. Currently, we can only do triplets. I'd like to be able to see quintuplets, septuplets--preferrably any user-definable number greater than 5. With or without the number displayed.

2. Ornament symbols. Trills, mordents, turns, turns with termination, etc., etc. Even if these don't play properly during playback, just being able to print them would be nice.

3. Arpeggiation symbol. You know, that squiggly vertical thingie beside a chord.

4. Crescendo, descrendo symbols. Not "cresc." and "decresc.", but those elongated < and > symbols.

5. Automatic intelligent instrument transposition. I can mentally challenge myself in trying think of which direction and how many steps I need to transpose when trying to write music for non-C instruments (e.g. brass and woodwinds), but it would be nice if I could just select the instrument, and NoteWorthy Composer would automatically transpose for me, including accidental/enharmonics auditing, proper adjusted key, etc.

6. Better grace notes detail/control. Some of those "smaller size" notes (appogiaturas? etc.) steal time from the following note, but some don't (or rather, steal time from the previous note/rest). And we should have control over just how much time is stolen (it could be as much as half of a whole note). Some have a slash through them, some don't. Sometimes we want to print notes in that "smaller" version, but wan't them to retain their time value. Sometimes we want them to have no time value at all.

7. Stacattissimo symbol.

I guess that's enough for now. :) Hope to hear some feedback, or what the NoteWorthy team has planned for any of these...

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #9 –
Just some comments on your reply.

Boxmarks is indeed a useful tool (which I use a lot) but I would dearly like to see it and other such fonts made redundant by native NWC fonts.

Crescendo hairpins are a pain restricted as they are to fixed lengths in user fonts. We need a proper drawing mechanism.

Acciaccaturas are not available as such (i.e grace notes with a slash through the stem/tail). They really ought to be. I'm not too fussed by the playback limitations but it would be nice to have different durations for different gracenote lengths.

Peter

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #10 –
Marsu,

By "staccatissimo" I believe Alex means the narrow vertical wedge that shows up, for example, in the Toccata font mapped to the character &. (At least, this is what I would mean by "staccatissimo".)

There should be two versions of this symbol, one pointing downwards for use above the staff and one pointing upwards for use below the staff.

HTH

Grant

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #11 –
It's good to know that there at least some workarounds for what I was asking for. A couple other things I forgot to mention:

8. To be able to work with selections across more than one staff.

9. Copy rhythm, copy pitch, apply/paste. These would be useful for those times when you have SATB singers (or orchestral parts) following very much the same rhythm, but only different pitches (parts of the chord). I know I can already copy and paste a part, then shift each note up or down, but what if you make a change to the original rhythm? Or what if you want to copy a rhythm onto already existing notes, whose pitch are set up already?

Anyway, in reply to the replies to my message:

Yes, in hindsight, I think I really meant "greater than or equal to 5", but I guess "greater than 1" would not hurt. :)

I'll check out that boxmarks font. Thanks for letting me know. I've been NWC'ing for years without it... :(

That's fine if there are workarounds to some of these things, but I think it would be better to have the program have these features built-in.

The stacattissimo symbol is just as Grant describes. A thin wedge, either pointing down towards a note, or up towards it. Sort of like a stalactite/stalagmite. I just now found a PDF that shows some other symbols/graphics which I didn't mention--I'd like to see NWC do some of them.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D100.pdf

The staccatissimo is character 1D17E. There should also be one pointing in the other direction.

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #12 –
Alex,
it seems to me that some things of what you ask can already be done with NWC. Let's have a look together:
1. For that one, I would not limit this wish to "greater than 5" only. I'd prefer "greater than 1". For instance, duplets would be a good thing too ;) However, it can be artifically done, playing with hidden notes, text item (for number) and changing tempo locally. Not the easiest thing to do! Some thread or hint has been already done on this.

2. Ornament symbols: Some of them are already present in boxmarks font (chars h,i,j,r,s). I confess that some of them are not yet in boxmark2, and this is *my* fault, since I did not finalized boxmark2 beta 3. I'll try to do it asap, but I cannot do it this month. Really sorry for this :(

3. Arp. symbol: it is already present in boxmarks too (char c).

4. (de)crescendo signs are available via cresc font of Pierre Schmidt. I had added a longer one than the one already present in boxmarks to boxmark2. Or if you have a postscript printer, wrote a program for this some years ago (somewhere in this forum)

5. Nothing to say. It's your opinion, but *I* wouldn't like a program that does everything for me. I prefer to choose that my clarinet is in A for instance, and think of the transposition needed just a few seconds. At least I'll learn something in the process :)

6. Much of what you ask here can be done with hidden staff or hidden notes, and IMHO in a manner that suits exactly one's wishes. Maybe it is extra work sometimes, but I find it simpler than having to enter many parameters to each note I would want to make special.

7. Could you send me a graphism of this symbol?? I don't know what this is, and I think I should add it to boxmark2.

Oops! Almost forgot: all the fonts I've talked about can be found on the world-famous Scriptorium, at the Fonts section of the "helpful files" page.
P.S. Welcome to the forum if this is your first post :)(well, second, but the first was on 29Dec1998)

Best regards,
Marsu, NWC user

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #13 –
One should be able to customize the global strength of accents in a piece. Very useful, as an orchestral piece's accents would have more of a nuance role, but in such a situation as a drumline cadence, accents would be noticeably powerful.

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #14 –
The cresc font of Pierre Schmidt has only 8(?) sizes of crescendo and diminuendo signs, and they are not evenly graduated. I have created my own font with 31 sizes that are evenly graduated. (I would have made more, but apparently, there is a limit as to just how large a glyph can be made.)

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #15 –
As long as the subject is out here, I'll throw in mine (I'm planning on submitting them "officially" at some point, but if I mention them here, maybe someone can point my Magoo eyes at where they are already available...)

1) Bow marks. These are the "down" and "up" bow symbols used in youth strings music, and occasionally marked in adult music for special purposes. I've looked through "boxmarks" and can't seem to find these.

1A) It would be really cool if they had an actual playing effect, as it does make a slight difference in playing volume which direction is being bowed (which is why string players strive to get their downbeats on down bows.)

2) Related to the playing effect above: the ability to set a second voice to temporarily patch over the voice setting. In MIDI, this would get translated into a patch to the new voice followed (at the end of the setting) by a patch back to the original (I just described what I currently have to do if I want this.) The main use for this would be "open" strings, which do not vibe and have a different tone quality, short pizzicato sections, tremolos, and unusual sounding notes on other instruments (such as the "open" sound of A and G on a clarinet, or B and C on an oboe, or the "bell" accent on a brass instrument.) Obviously, this would mostly be useful to those who play around with Sound Fonts or their own sampling (most of these items aren't GM) but it would be very useful.

3) Along this same vein, a way to get "ringing" notes (the "reverb" effect you get when lifting the bow without stopping the vibration. When combined with an open string, this is an extremely distinctive tone.) There must be some way to pull this off.

As long as I'm asking for the moon:
4) Why NOT give us real trills, turns and mordents (and don't forget reverse mordents)? Ornamentation is as much a part of music notation as pitch and time.

5) The ability to set an actual time variation or dynamic variation as an aspect of the text markings brought in from "boxmarks" or elsewhere (i.e, setting a "crescendo" mark to have an actual crescendo effect, rather than putting an invisible "cresc." next to the mark.

6) Legitimate stacking of text. (It is hell trying to do guitar fingerings or string fingerings. I usually end up doing silly things like creating additional staffs to layer on my display staff, which carry only the extra text.)

Not that I'm expecting immediate action on any of these. Again, I'm just hoping I've missed how you can really do these, and someone is going to point me to how to do it.

Eric Fretheim

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #16 –
Eric, I just checked and the upbow and downbow symbols are indeed included in Boxmarks, mapped to 't' and 'u' respectively. If your version of Boxmarks doesn't have these, then you should probably consider reinstalling the font using the version available on the Scriptorium's Helpful Files page.

Probably the main reason for NWC *not* to implement ornaments such as trills, mordents etc. is that they're so variable. To satisfy every user's taste in ornaments NWC would have to gather a large number of parameters (trill speed, duration, starting note, ending turn y/n, accidentals on auxiliary notes, etc.) for each one. This might (almost) be as burdensome as writing out the trill by hand - although I concede that the ability to dispense with hidden staves might be worth it.

I also wonder about the idea of tying dynamics (or any other musical parameter) to particular text values in a particular font. The Crescendo font (an obvious candidate) is not an official part of the NWC product. What if it changes? Also, the utility of Crescendo is limited because of the small number of available sizes. Far better for NWC to learn to draw wedges itself.

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #17 –
Thanks for the heads-up on boxmarks. My version's probably pretty old. I will check it when I get back to my music "workstation" at home.

What if the trill, mordent, reverse-mordent, etc. were handles for figures that you could configure? In other words, the trill symbol either comes in defaulting to a particular series of notes (based on key signature and the nominal value) that, upon "editing" or upon playing, expanded into the literal figure? That way, you could build play the printable line as written, rather than having to write out the notes each time. (You might also be able to edit the default at the beginning if you would like it to come in a particular way.)

Again, I had that under "asking for the moon," but as long as I was posting, I thought I would mention it.

Eric Fretheim

Re: New ideas for 1.75.

Reply #18 –
Artur,

I completely agree with you on all accounts. Especially automatic beaming can be improved by defining the beat grouping as a time sig. property. For instance: <2 + 2 + 2 + 3> = <9/8>.

Go wish!