On 12 Jul 2002, at 4:01, Mark D. Lew wrote: > As for Richard Walker's idea that you ought to be able to have just > one "pizz." to put into any part and have Finale know enough to make > it play back "correctly" whether it's violin, viola or cello, that's > an interesting problem. I'm not convinced that this is really the > best thing -- like many others on this list, I don't care to have > Finale second-guess my intentions too much, and I think that having > separate "pizz.<violin>", "pizz.<viola>", and "pizz.<cello>", each > defined with its own playback values, is quite satisfactory.
I still don't see the objection. When you create a file, you have a default list of expressions that you can type into the score and the program will know what to do with playback. That means that you've have a pizz defined to point to the appropriate synthesizer, bank and patch that you want for pizz. Leave aside for the moment the possibility that you might need different patches in different contexts. I'm no MIDI whiz, and have never worked with an expensive string module, so I've never seen a synthesizer that had distinct violin, viola and cello pizzicato patches. General MIDI doesn't have them, it has only the one orchestral pizzicato patch. Seems to me that as a default behavior for the most common synthesizers that people have (GM), the Sibelius behavior is a really good starting point. It would, in fact, be perfectly adequate to every use of pizzicato I've ever encountered in my own work. Now, for the person creating hand-crafted MIDI performances with expensive sound modules, it would obviously be inadequate if it were the only capability you had available to you. But no one had suggested that the automatic playback of type-in-score expressions should be incorporated into Finale in place of Finale's existing expression definition capabilities. You suggested elsewhere having a popup dropdown list when you typed into score. This would be good for autocompletion, especially if it worked like MS's autocomplete dropdown controls, where each successive keystroke filters the list to the first and successive matches. If you had only one pizz definition and, say, p, pp, ppp as your other other expression definitions, when you typed "p" you'd see the popup list of all expressions beginning with "p" and when you typed the "i", it would automatically complete, because the only possible match would be "pizz." If you wanted to create a new item, say "piacere" (yes, I know, bad example), you would simply type the "a" and then it would be clear that you were typing something new (and, in fact, and example like that would probably be something that wouldn't have a playback definition). In the instance of your expensive string module with individual pizz patches for each instrument, you'd have a list of pizz<violin>, pizz<viola>, etc. and your typing would behave as above until you had the one you wanted (or you could use your mouse on the popup list to select the one you wanted). But it wasn't really the pizzicato that got me excited. It was that the definition of "arco" was "change this patch back to the staff's original patch." That's a *very* useful thing, and would mean that you wouldn't need anything but the one definition for arco. Now, I'm sure the naysayers are preparing to respond "yes, but what if you want to change to a *different* patch?" Well, d'oh, you define other instances of arco that changes to the different patch, and appear as "arco<loud violin>" and "arco<loud cello>" and so forth. The whole point here is that as long as Finale's existing capabilities are cleverly incorporated into the type-in-score feature, you get the benefit of both the Sibelius capability and of Finale's unequalled flexibility. And I have no doubt that Coda could probably come up with all of this without our suggestions, should they choose to implement a type-in- score functionality. -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
