On 17 Sep 2005 at 10:03, Andrew Stiller wrote: > Well if that's the tack we're taking, then the elimination of > percussion maps has to go at the top of the list. Just last week I had > a long back-and-forth w. someone at MakeMusic who had the greatest > difficulty even imagining the idea that someone might want to enter > percussion notes on a plain old ordinary staff and have them play back > properly based on instrument names placed in the score as note > expressions or staff names, without the user having to configure a > balky, rebarbative, and entirely counterintuitive database behind the > scenes.
Well, I think your gripe is with the people who defined the way percussion works in General MIDI. And I absolutely understand why they did it the way they did, because the result is that you can allocate a single channel (out of the meager 16 that were all that were available back then) to percussion and play many, many instruments with it. Otherwise, even simple pieces with bass drum, snare drum, crash cymbals, hi-hat, ride cymbal and woodblock would take up 6 of your MIDI tracks. That's fine as long as you only need 10 or fewer other instruments, but it's a pretty severe limitation. Also, it would mean for these 6 instruments you'd basically have to allocate 2 staves, and put each instrument in a separate layer, or allocate a lot more staves. Now, putting bass, snare and crash cymbals on a single staff is standard practice. You might even add either the hi-hat or ride cymbal, but depending on how extensive a part for the individual instruments are, you very well might want it all on one staff. With just 4 channels per staff available (4 layers), you couldn't do it unless there were only 4 unique instruments playing at a time (you'd have to use patch-switching expressions). > If I create a note expression reading "snare drum" and attach it to a > note, Finale shd. be intelligent enough to automatically give me a > snare drum sound from all recurrences of that "pitch" until further > notice. Also, I should be able to switch from, say, snare drum to > vibraphone and back again without having to invoke staff styles. I don't see any way around percussion maps, except for GM synthesizers, where the map is defined. For non-GM synthesizers, you'd always need to set up a map for Finale. I agree that the existing UI is confusing and I was never truly successful making it work. Thankfully, I don't have to deal with percussion much (I've only done so 3 times in almost 15 years of using Finale). But the basic problem is not a Finale problem, but a challenge of the way the designers of MIDI wisely decided to implement percussion. Criticize the UI all you want, but the basic concept is not (and *should* not) go away. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
