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Topic: Playing notes an octave above written (Read 5876 times) previous topic - next topic

Playing notes an octave above written

Not sure if this is a new topic but musical notation for an extra octave up is akin to a special ending in that a bar encompasses the affected notes, but with an 8va. I've accomplished this with text - without the bar. Obviously the playback doesn't recognise it. Is there a better solution?

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #1 –
There are a couple of ways, probably the easiest is to place a hidden octave shifted clef at the start of the 8va section and another non-shifted clef at the end.  The other alternative, arguably the better one, is to place a hidden instrument patch with a 12 semitone shift at the start of the 8va section and another with a 0 shift at the end to restore things.

E.G.
Code: (nwc) [Select · Download]
!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.51,Single)
|Clef|Type:Treble
|Instrument|Name:"Acoustic Grand Piano"|Patch:0|Bank:0,0|Trans:0|DynVel:10,30,45,60,75,92,108,127|Pos:11
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-4
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-3
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-2
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-1
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:0
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:1
|Bar
|Clef|Type:Treble|OctaveShift:Octave Up|Visibility:Never
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-7
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-8
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-9
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-10
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-11
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-12
|Clef|Type:Treble|Visibility:Never
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-4
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-3
|Bar
|Instrument|Name:"Acoustic Grand Piano"|Patch:0|Bank:0,0|Trans:12|DynVel:10,30,45,60,75,92,108,127|Pos:11
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-9
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-8
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-7
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-7
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-8
|Instrument|Name:"Acoustic Grand Piano"|Patch:0|Bank:0,0|Trans:0|DynVel:10,30,45,60,75,92,108,127|Pos:11
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-2
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-3
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-4
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5
|Bar
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:-6
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #2 –
I'm going to hijack this topic for a small rant about the current ver. 2.75 betas, which appear to be all about unicode and fine adjustments of symbol placement instead of notational improvement. Adding unicode support, etc., is all well and good - I can certainly see how they can be useful - but NWC is a music notation program, and there are still many things from a notational standpoint that need to be added/improved, 8va notation being prominent among them (as the originator of this topic indicates). I'm not participating in the current beta testing, not out of spite, but because I can see very little need in my own work for what is being worked on in the 2.75 betas, and the time I would use for testing the betas will be much more productively used elsewhere. OTOH, I can see a great deal of need for true 8va notation, improved slurs, ossia/cue notes, and some of the other things we've been asking for forever, and these still aren't happening. I think we have a little priorities problem here.

** end of rant **

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #3 –
Lawrie,
the hidden instrument patch can be inserted without sending any true "instrument patch".
I mean: you can uncheck all the "send patch" and "send bank switch"; the only active part of it being the transposition that's handled implicitly by NWC.

That way it works for the "instrument" in use, no matter what it is, so if you want to change instrument for whatever reason you don't have to change it in all the hidden octave shift too.

This also simplifies the use of this trick in a user tool, since it can work on a snippet for it's not needed to know which "instrument" is currently in use.

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #4 –
Quote from: William Ashworth –
I'm going to hijack this topic for a small rant about the current ver. 2.75 betas, which appear to be all about unicode and fine adjustments of symbol placement instead of notational improvement.
...
 I can see a great deal of need for true 8va notation, improved slurs, ossia/cue notes, and some of the other things we've been asking for forever, and these still aren't happening. I think we have a little priorities problem here.

** end of rant **

Hi William,

Thanks for your comments. You have undoubted seen some of my own comments / requests regarding some of the areas you mentioned in your "rant", including slurs and beaming in two-part staves. I don't want to second-guess the developer(s) and their priorities, but being a developer myself, I understand that it can be challenging to determine the direction to take an application, and to choose which areas to work on for new versions of a product. On the one hand, there are the notation improvements we've mentioned, for which there are generally known workarounds (some of them not pretty), but then there are areas that aren't as easily worked around (i.e. character sets, positioning, etc.) Also, maybe the inclusion of Unicode support will increase sales in other countries, and that revenue could help fund other improvements that we've all been waiting for. (Then again, I have no idea if NoteWorthy Software is a for-profit entity, or if NWC is mainly a "labor of love" by someone who has a separate day job. Perhaps this message will elicit an answer to my question?)

Anyway, I don't want to turn my reply into another rant, but I think that additional discussion on this topic might be a good thing. While I don't mind the occasional workaround to make a score look its best, it is frustrating sometimes when the amount of effort to get the final 5% improvement in appearance ends up being a much larger proportion of the time I put into creating the rest of the score.

Thanks for listening.

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #5 –
Quote from: Lawrie Pardy –
There are a couple of ways, probably the easiest is to place a hidden octave shifted clef at the start of the 8va section and another non-shifted clef at the end.  The other alternative, arguably the better one, is to place a hidden instrument patch with a 12 semitone shift at the start of the 8va section and another with a 0 shift at the end to restore things.

E.G.
Code: [Select · Download]
!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.51,Single)
|Clef|Type:Treble
|Instrument|Name:"Acoustic Grand Piano"|Patch:0|Bank:0,0|Trans:0|DynVel:10,30,45,60,75,92,108,127|Pos:11
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-4
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-3
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-2
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-1
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:0
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:1
|Bar
|Clef|Type:Treble|OctaveShift:Octave Up|Visibility:Never
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-7
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-8
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-9
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-10
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-11
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-12
|Clef|Type:Treble|Visibility:Never
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-4
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-3
|Bar
|Instrument|Name:"Acoustic Grand Piano"|Patch:0|Bank:0,0|Trans:12|DynVel:10,30,45,60,75,92,108,127|Pos:11
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-9
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-8
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-7
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-6
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-7
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-8
|Instrument|Name:"Acoustic Grand Piano"|Patch:0|Bank:0,0|Trans:0|DynVel:10,30,45,60,75,92,108,127|Pos:11
|Bar
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-2
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-3
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-4
|Note|Dur:4th|Pos:-5
|Bar
|Note|Dur:Whole|Pos:-6
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End
This looks like it might work in reverse for the guitar notations I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #6 –
I tried to download that script, and it will only open with notepad.  What am I doing wrong?  I can't even open it with noteworthy in the download.  I've done these things before, so I don't know what went wrong.

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #7 –
Quote from: Susanna –
I tried to download that script, and it will only open with notepad.  What am I doing wrong? 
Nothing. Lawrie used the wrong tag. It is easy to use the wrong tag. Perhaps he will correct it.

If the code block opens into NotePad, just copy everything from NotePad and then 'Paste as New File' into NWC.
Registered user since 1996

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Rick G. –
Nothing. Lawrie used the wrong tag. It is easy to use the wrong tag. Perhaps he will correct it.
I appear to have fixed it - didn't realise there was a specific tag - thanks for the heads up.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #9 –
Quote from: Rick G. –
Nothing. Lawrie used the wrong tag. It is easy to use the wrong tag. Perhaps he will correct it.

If the code block opens into NotePad, just copy everything from NotePad and then 'Paste as New File' into NWC.
OK, thanks.  Worked just fine.

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #10 –
It will probably take me a while to figure out how to incorporate that, but I'll get it some time.  I guess I just put the change (with "octave down") at the beginning of the staff.  Since there are two parts, the top one with stem up and the bottom with stem down, I created the file on individual staves and layered them.  I presume I have to put the change on both staves?

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #11 –
Quote from: Susanna –
I presume I have to put the change on both staves?
You presume correctly. 'Patch' and 'Bank Select' affect the entire MIDI channel. 'Default Dynamic Velocities' and 'Transposition' affect the staff. Clef affects the staff.
Registered user since 1996

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Mike Shawaluk –
.....I don't want to second-guess the developer(s) and their priorities, but being a developer myself, I understand that it can be challenging to determine the direction to take an application, and to choose which areas to work on for new versions of a product.....

Thanks for the response, Mike. I'm not unfamiliar with this problem - I went through it with a piece of shareware I put together back in the DOS days. (It never really went anyplace, it's been abandonedware for years, and I haven't done any programming for a couple of decades. But I do remember wrestling with the order of development.) However, it doesn't change my point: this is a notation program, and the first emphasis should be on getting the notation right. I can praise NWC to the skies to my musician friends - and I do - but when they try it out, and they try to write an 8va section (extremely common, for God's sake!) and they come to me and complain, all I can say is ...uh...

I like to think of NWC as a better, cheaper version of Finale or Sibelius. But it's not going to really compete well with those two notational icons - or even with MuseScore - until and unless it gets things like 8va and cue notes and slurs right. Let's not worry too much about new customers in countries whose languages require unicode until we've got it right for the ones who don't.

Re: Playing notes an octave above written

Reply #13 –
Quote from: William Ashworth –
Thanks for the response, Mike. I'm not unfamiliar with this problem - I went through it with a piece of shareware I put together back in the DOS days. (It never really went anyplace, it's been abandonedware for years, and I haven't done any programming for a couple of decades. But I do remember wrestling with the order of development.) However, it doesn't change my point: this is a notation program, and the first emphasis should be on getting the notation right. I can praise NWC to the skies to my musician friends - and I do - but when they try it out, and they try to write an 8va section (extremely common, for God's sake!) and they come to me and complain, all I can say is ...uh...

I like to think of NWC as a better, cheaper version of Finale or Sibelius. But it's not going to really compete well with those two notational icons - or even with MuseScore - until and unless it gets things like 8va and cue notes and slurs right. Let's not worry too much about new customers in countries whose languages require unicode until we've got it right for the ones who don't.
I'm inclined to agree with you.  Another problem - I haven't seen any evidence of its being addressed yet - if you put in an accidental, the "same" note at another octave on the same staff will be affected.  You have to do some messy-looking stuff to make it come out right.  In a specific case, you have a d# just above middle C.  This carries throughout the entire measure. But the d an octave up should not be affected by that accidental, but it is. To fix it, I had to rebuild the chord with a natural on the higher octave, only to discover I had to "reinstate" the # on the lower octave on the next cgird.  Looks kind-of messy.  I suppose I could hide the second & third accidentals, but I had no idea that you could do that when I did the fix.  Anyway, it shouldn't have to have been done.