Stuck notes

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Stuck notes

2005-05-31 09:14 pm

I've noticed, at least in NWC 2, that, sometimes, when I tie two notes together across a bar line, (more especially when the instrument is one of the ensemble group), that the notes get "stuck" on, continuing for the rest of the song. Is this a bug? Has anyone else run into this?

Bruce R. Kyte

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #1 – 2005-05-31 09:18 pm

the reason the notes get "stuck on" is due to the fact that the first note has an accidental (sharp or flat) and the 2nd note on the right side of the bar line does not .it is necessary to show the accidental on both notes but it will only show on the first note when printed.

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #2 – 2005-05-31 11:26 pm

You get a stuck note if it is tied and the piece ends.

When the piece has complicated flow instructions the fix can be less than obvious.
Clef and key changes can also be a problem. Here's a particularly egregious example:

Code: [Select · Download]

!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.0,Single)
|Clef|Type:Bass
|Key|Signature:C
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:5^|Opts:Stem=Down
|Clef|Type:Treble
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:b-6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:#-1^
|Bar
|Key|Signature:Bb
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-1
|Rest|Dur:4th
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:0
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End

Solution: Play each staff solo until you find the offending track. Then, one of the following should fix the problem:

1) Edit->Find...->By Category->Hanging Note Tie
(aka control+F)

2) Play from various endings until you isolate the problem.

3) Put a note at the very end of the track. Select it. Move it up and down with control+shift+up|down. If a tie into this note appears, you found the pitch! Now look for tied notes with this pitch.

In "midi speak'" a note causes a "note on" followed by a "note off" (or a "note on" with velocity=0) when the note's duration is reached. A tied note causes a note on. The note is not turned off until an untied note of the same pitch is reached.

The example above produces these events:

time event note velocity
000 On n=75 v=110
192 On n=75 v=110
352 On n=75 v=0
384 On n=70 v=110
736 On n=69 v=0
768 On n=70 v=110
928 On n=70 v=0

Hope this helps.

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #3 – 2005-06-01 01:18 am

Hi Rick

"Play each staff solo until you find the offending track. "

With 17 staffs and 120 bars, this could take a very long time. Wouldn't it be better just to do the search?

I would have thought just the Find Hanging Note feature would do the trick, but you offered 2 more (good) ideas.

Does this mean Ctrl-F won't find all the possible hangs?

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #4 – 2005-06-01 01:45 am

You are correct. For a BIG score:

Finding stuck notes.

1) Edit->Find...->By Category->Hanging Note Tie
Repeat at beginning of each staff until found.

If not play each staff solo until you find the offending track. Then, one of the following should fix the problem:

2) Play from various endings until you isolate the problem.

3) Put a note at the very end of the track. Select it. Move it up and down with control+shift+up|down. If a tie into this note appears, you found the pitch! Now look for tied notes with this pitch.

<end Finding stuck notes>

Edit->Find...->By Category->Hanging Note Tie (aka Ctrl-F)
won't always work. Example:

Code: [Select · Download]

!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.0,Single)
|Instrument|Name:"Flute"|Patch:73|Trans:0|DynVel:10,30,45,60,75,92,108,127|Pos:8
|Bar|Style:MasterRepeatOpen|SysBreak:Y
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:0^
|Bar
|Ending|Endings:1
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:0
|Bar|Style:MasterRepeatClose
|Ending|Endings:2
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:1
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End

This seems trivial but flow on some pieces are non-trivial.
I have seen some pieces where there is a tie into some endings but a slur into others. A quick way to simulate this is:

Code: [Select · Download]

!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.0,Single)
|Instrument|Name:"Flute"|Patch:73|Trans:0|DynVel:10,30,45,60,75,92,108,127|Pos:8
|Bar|Style:MasterRepeatOpen|SysBreak:Y
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:0^
|Bar
|Ending|Endings:1
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:0
|Bar|Style:MasterRepeatClose
|Ending|Endings:2
|Chord|Dur:4th,Grace|Pos:0,1^|Visibility:Never
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:1
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #5 – 2005-06-01 04:33 am

no offense bruche, but if I had a nickel for everytime i saw this question asked, HA. well id be rich. Boy, i cant wait til the next one. But indeed its a matter thats very interesting about NWC, that the ties hang like that after a bar line(unless u pass on the accidental).

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #6 – 2005-06-01 07:20 am

(bruche? Sounds French)

Wow, egregious! What a word. Not as beautiful as callipigous, neither in sound nor meaning, but what a vast expanse of vocabulary you can select from. (I'm all for callipigous examples, as you can understand. Alas, none are to be found in this forum. <hg> )

I was thinking along the same lines: this question keeps coming back. Would it make a good number one?

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #7 – 2005-06-01 07:21 am

Thanks, Rick. Learn something every day.

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #8 – 2005-06-01 10:04 pm

Rick G: "Play each staff solo until you find the offending track. "

David Palmquist: With 17 staffs and 120 bars, this could take a very long time. Wouldn't it be better just to do the search?

Before the Find by Category, I used to do this:

1. Reduce playback time:
Add a temporary tempo marking of "very fast". This would work better on a temporary staff, so you can add it again immediately after a true tempo change, the delete the whole temporary staff at the end. If the timing is always changing, it might be better to make a copy of the whole piece, and delete the complex timing.

The choose either step 2 or step 3, or a mix of both.

2. Eliminate good areas of the score.
First, make sure bars have bar numbers.
Start near the end (say 10 bars back, and play to the end. There probably won't be a problem, which means your starting point is safe.
Go back another ten bars. Play from there to your last known safe point. Repeat until you find the problem area. Then within the problem area, do this reverse play for smaller and smaller sections.

3. Eliminate staves.
Mute the whole score, then un-mute a small group of staves (say, the Woodwinds). Play. If there is no problem, move on to the next group of staves (say, Brass). Once you have found the problem, mute the section and un-mute a couple of staves. This will get you the the specific staff quite quickly.

I do like Rick G.'s suggestion 3 about putting a note at the end and moving it up and down.

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #9 – 2005-06-02 02:31 am

Another great way of doing it. What a crew we are, eh?

I like Rick's idea too, but I imagine you'd want to 3 notes and move them up and down together. The 3 notes would be natural, flat and sharp of the same nominal pitch.

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #10 – 2005-06-02 06:38 am

Ewan,
You are right about the time it takes to listen to each individual staff. Playing back staves in groups is a very good method. The most efficient way would be a binary search: mute half of the staves, if the problem is audible, mute half of the rest, and so on. That is the binary search method, applied vertically. Horizontally, you could do the same.
But finding possible candidates could not be very difficult... find any b or # with an ^, followed by a bar! I would do that in my editor (TSE), using regular expressions.
This method is not very helpful if ties across bars occur often, though.

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #11 – 2005-06-02 08:03 am

For that matter, if you don't intend to keep any courtesy accidentals you've entered, you can simply force accidentals and visually scan for any tied pairs with an accidental on the first note and a natural on the second. After you've fixed the hanging note problem, audit accidentals to remove the forced ones.

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #12 – 2005-06-02 10:51 pm

Yep, Rob, you're right that binary is the most efficient, but I find that if I try half, then half again that for the first few runs I still have lots of instruments, and all I get is "yes it's here" or "no it's not".

With smaller groups, I get "yes it's here, and it sounds like it might be one of the oboes or clarinets, but definitely not the flutes". It's a gamble that I can jump a few steps, I guess!

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #13 – 2005-06-02 10:53 pm

You are right, too. The mathematical approach is not necessarily the best one. It would be if you, just to find the stuck notes, change all instruments to flute, for example.

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #14 – 2005-06-21 07:22 am

Hope you found the cause of your stuck notes!!

I wrote this 2 weeks ago, but my ISP collapsed at that time. Here it is:

I know problem of hanging notes since a long time.
However, I do not understand why this one is a problem :

Code: [Select · Download]

!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.0,Single)
|Note|Dur:16th,Dotted|Pos:-11^
|Bar
|Note|Dur:64th|Pos:-11|Opts:Stem=Up,Beam=First
|Note|Dur:8th,Dotted|Pos:#-6^|Opts:Stem=Up,Beam
|Note|Dur:32nd,Dotted|Pos:-6^|Opts:Stem=Up,Beam=End
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6^
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:#-6^
|Note|Dur:64th|Pos:-6|Opts:Stem=Up,Beam=First
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End

since the note after the bar is altered too? The last one is not, and if I do alter(sharpen?) it, then the note is not hanging anymore.
Seems a bug to me, though. Only the last note needs to be altered, whereas standard notation would recommend/authorize the first one (after the bar).
(This comes from an imported midi file, but one can do it by hand too).
What is wrong?

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #15 – 2005-06-21 02:46 pm

Hi Marsu,
believe it or not, not quite a bug but a change in NWC2 - Eric is still working to refine it - see the nwc2beta NG - thread dated 4th June and called "NWC2 Preview 1j Tied Note Accidentals"

Lawrie

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #16 – 2005-06-25 02:25 pm

Accidentals spanning across tied notes will now be handled automatically by NWC2. Preview 1n, due to be released shortly, should have this effectively handled.

Re: Stuck notes

Reply #17 – 2005-07-25 12:30 am

Please ignore my workaround from https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=5014.msg31387#msg31387 (second clip)

You might try this instead:

Code: [Select · Download]

!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.0,Single)
|Instrument|Name:"Flute"|Patch:73|Trans:0|DynVel:10,30,45,60,75,92,108,127|Pos:8
|Bar|Style:MasterRepeatOpen|SysBreak:Y
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:0^
|Bar
|Ending|Endings:1
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:0
|Bar|Style:MasterRepeatClose
|Ending|Endings:2
|Note|Dur:Whole,Grace|Pos:1z^|Opts:Tie=Upward
|Text|Text:"  "|Font:StaffBold|Pos:8|Wide:Y|Justify:Center|Placement:AtNextNote
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:1
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End