On Oct 6, 2006, at 3:15 PM, Steve Schow wrote:
Trying to interpret a midi file, which is essentially a captured
performance, and turn it into an appropriate notation is interesting,
but how useful? Doing the opposite, taking a notation and rendering a
reasonable performance is much more interesting and needed far more
often. I'd dare say its easier to do also.
Hah! Pardon my sardonic laugh, but you obviously don't get a lot of
orchestration work from commercial composers. More accurate MIDI file
transcription would be a major upgrade, and extraordinarily useful
for working schmoes like me.
MIDI has no notion of key center or any
number of other factors which are captured in notation to make it
easier
for real life musicians to comprehend it and perform it.
Certainly it does. There is absolutely a provision for noting the key
signature in a MIDI file. FInale has an option for inferring it, too,
but if you write like I do, it will be useless.
I doubt there are that many people who work first from
a sequencer and then want to somehow instantly see their score
printed.
I guess you don't move in the same circles I do. Almost every
commercial composer I know works that way. When they want to see it
in print (usually to hire musicians to play it), that is when they
call me, because they don't have any tools to do that easily. Film
composer Danny Elfman is famous for working like that, and he is not
alone – not by a long shot.
That would be a neat parlor trick, but really not useful for very many
real-world scenarios of any significance that I can think of. that
being said, here is one composer who needs to compose for film. I
need
to publish accurate and presentable notation. I need to produce
mock-ups. I need to hear the music as I work. Finale is great for
all
of this by the way. But the one area where it may fall a little short
is if I want to make my mock up just a little bit better and finely
control how it sounds. let's say I've been working with notation,
composing, hearing a reasonable rendition as I go. Then the director
calls and says "I just don't get it, the strings sound lame that way".
I have to meet him in 3 days to convince him. I know the only problem
is that i need to use a better string sample library and I need to
tweak
some of the CC curves and note overlap to make it sound remarakably
better so that the film director will do "ah, that sounds fantastic, I
love it". This is where Finale is not a "full fledged sequencer"
as you
say..and is a bit limited for me. that forces me to have to export it
all to MIDI, take it to Sonar or whatever and tweak it there.
I feel your pain, but I have a completely different solution to the
recalcitrant director who won't sign off on a cheesy-sounding MIDI
mockup.
I play him a MIDI mockup from a previous project, telling him, "This
is similar to what you are going to hear. MIDI only, synths in their
untweaked glory." The cheesier, the better, because the contrast will
be so much sharper.
Then I play him the final version, with live musicians and first-rate
mixdown engineer. He is blown away. Then I say, "Keep in mind that
the cheesy mockup you are about to hear is only a cheesy mockup. The
final version will be this good."
It usually works.
Christopher
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