This screen displays musical notation staffs for the tune currently loaded into memory. It can show up to 6 bars across the screen, and 4 or 5 tracks going down the screen.
It also permits changing note properties by clicking the right mouse button over a note, to bring up a dialog box. New notes can be added by clicking the left mouse button on the exact staff line for the desired note, and at the approximate horizontal position. Notes may be deleted by CTRL Right-click. You can start a completely new tune, and add notes as desired.
Viewing Changing Notes Adding Notes Deleting Notes Start New Tune
Viewing music on the
staff screen.
You can scroll through the bars by dragging the slider control on the PlayBar
at the bottom of the screen forwards or
backwards. Alternatively, the Back and Forward arrow keys will move forwards or backwards
one bar at a time. The bar numbers are displayed in red above each bar on the
staff.
You can see how many bars there are in the tune by looking at the blue 'Total
Bars' count on the PlayBar.
To change the tune displayed, use the main menu - File / Load Musical Discovery File. Or you may click the 'Load New' button on the PlayBar. This will bring up a list of all tunes in the database, in alphabetical order, inside a drop-down box. Then, use this to select the desired piece of music.
To hear the music, click the Play button on the PlayBar. The screen will scroll to a new group of bars when it is playing the bar on the right. To stop the music, click the Stop button on the PlayBar.
When the music has finished or stopped, a quick way to go back to the beginning is to click the Rewind button. This could also be done by dragging the slider all the way to the left.
To change the track or tracks displayed, use the Track Selector. This is a drop-down box, which shows the name of each track with a check-box beside it.. Tick the check-boxes for each track you wish to view. Click the check box again to remove the tick and hide that track.
At first this screen does not show musical rest symbols. To display rests, click the Show Rests button. The caption on the button will then change to Hide Rests, so clicking this again will suppress the display of rests.
If a piece of music has been recorded live from a Midi keyboard using a MIDI sequencer program, and imported from the MIDI file into Musical Discovery, there may at first, appear to be some oddities in the notation. The total of the durations of all notes and rests shown in a bar may not always equal the beats per bar. This is because the pianist's fingers might dwell on one note after the next note has been played, causing some adjacent notes to overlap each other. The music may sound fine, but it might make it confusing to read. In this system, the horizontal position of every note on the staff is directly related to the starting time. For example, if there are 4 beats per bar, a note staring on the 3rd beat will always be displayed exactly half way across the screen.
If you want to eliminate this anomaly, you need to shorten the duration of overlapping notes so that each note stops sounding before the next one starts. If repeating the live performance more carefully is not possible, then there are two screens for editing the durations of notes, as below:-
This staff notation feature in Musical Discovery is not intended to be used for printing music. There are several Midi Music Printing programs on the market which all do an excellent job.
Another characteristic of live performance is that notes are not usually started at the exact mathematical instant that is written on the score, nor are they held for their exact mathematical duration. So long as the timing is not too far out, this makes the performance sound natural and "human". When such performances are recorded into Musical Discovery, these minor inaccuracies are faithfully captured.
However, this can cause problems when this system attempts to display the music as notation. If every semi-quaver or demi-semi-quaver of "inaccuracy" were shown on the staff, the music would be very confusing and difficult to read. So a mechanism has been created to round the durations to the nearest semi-quaver, and to align the starting times likewise. To activate this, click the Perform Alignment and Rounding button. (On some midi systems this process is called "quantization").
There are two check-boxes labelled Save Durations and Align Starting Times respectively. If Save Durations is ticked when the the Perform Alignment and Rounding button is clicked, the rounded durations are stored in the tune memory, and will be played as amended. If the File is saved to disk, the duration changes will be saved as well. The same applies when aligning starting times.
Adding
new Notes.
Notes
can be added by left-clicking on the staff at the horizontal and vertical
position of the desired new note. A crotchet (or quarter note) will be drawn
instantly at this position. You can alter the duration by holding the shift key
while clicking the mouse. Shift Left click will reduce the duration to a
quaver (or eighth note), another click will reduce it again to a semi-quaver (or
sixteenth note). Shift-right click will increase it successively, to a minim or
half note, then to a semi-breve, or whole note.
If you mistakenly placed the note in the wrong spot, you can drag it up, down, or sideways by holding down the CTRL key and then dragging with the left mouse button.
Changing
note properties.
The properties of existing notes can be changed by using the Edit Note
Properties dialog box, as illustrated here. To bring this up, move the mouse
pointer over the note to be edited, and right-click. . More information on how to use this dialog box is
available at Editing Notes in the Musical Staff
Screen In summary, when adding notes, you change the parameters
in the dialog box as required, for example the pitch can be increased by a
semitone to make a C into a C#, or the exact duration of a note can be
adjusted in 0.25 of a crotchet beat increments. Also the starting time may be
adjusted in terms of bar, beat, and tick, where a tick is 1/120th of a
crotchet beat. The volume can be set to any value between 0 = silent, to 127
which is the loudest. The instrument can be set to any of the 128 General Midi
instruments, by selecting the desired instrument name from the drop-down
box. Words may also be added if required, by clicking the Add Word button. When all changes are ready, clicking
on the Save button will add the note to the
tune and to the staff screen, and the dialog box will disappear. If you need
more bars into which to add notes, just click the Add a
Bar button. This will open a new bar at the end of the piece, and
move the staff screen to display this, ready for note additions.
Deleting
a note.
To delete a note, move the mouse pointer over the note to be deleted, hold down
CTRL, and right-click. Notes may also be deleted from the Edit Note
Properties dialog box, described above.
Start
new tune.
To create
a completely new tune from scratch, simply click the Start
a New Tune button. This creates an empty tune ready for note
additions, and an empty staff screen positioned at bar number 1. From here on,
simply left-click on the staff where you want each new note, then adjust the
duration and position as described above. It would also be advisable to then select Edit/ Melody Data from the menu, in order to
supply a title, the tempo, the beats per bar, and other important parameters for
the new tune. When complete, use File / Save Musical
Discovery File To disk, to ensure your new
composition is saved on the disk drive. To place an icon for this tune onto the
composing board, click the purple
button in the top right corner Store as fragment for use in composing board
Viewing Changing Notes Adding Notes Deleting Notes Start New Tune