[David H. Bailey:] >But I can offer possible suggestion as to why the problem in this >message happens -- if you have multiple notes all sounding on the same >midi channel, when a note-off command is sent for some of the notes on >that channel, it affects the whole channel, so other notes you think >should continue to sound stop sounding at the same time. > >The only way around that that I'm aware of would be to make a copy of >the finale file, and then in the copy, add extra staves and explode >those chords onto the extra staves and assign each staff to its own >midi channel. That way the notes which are supposed to keep sounding >won't be affected by the note-off commands since they won't be on the >same channels.
Thanks for your suggestions, David. This goes way beyond my current knowledge of Finale, so I will probably just have to ignore it, and pretty well not use playback as a useful rendering of a piece. (My music tends frequently to include slightly strange situations like this.) I can only say that, once I do know those midi matters generally, I will refer to what you said and use that to help me solve it; but for now it goes way over my head. I suppose I naively thought there might a simple fix I just didn't know about. As I said before, I used two layers in each manual staff, to distinguish the notes which stop earlier, and the few that continue sounding: the layers that contain the notes which stop earlier contain the complete chord (four notes in each hand), whereas I used extra layers to duplicate, and give a longer note value to, the few which continue; that is, the low G in the right hand, and the F and B in the left hand. Also, the B/Cb duplicated in the layers uses two different enharmonic spellings: the one which is in the big chord is written as Cb to reflect the spacing of the total chord all in thirds, but the copy in the notes which continue longer is written as B, because those three notes act like the penultimate G7 harmony in a C major close. Is it possible that putting the same note in two layers but using different enharmonic spellings could somehow be causing this, or at least complicating it? I don't really want to change the notation, because I think there are good reasons for doing it this way. It doesn't seem likely to me, though. Much the same thing happened in a piano piece which is totally diatonic for dozens of bars, so there are no accidentals whatever. I had a situation where the bass notes change bar by bar, going down one step for each new bar, but the sustaining pedal is meant to merge them all together for three or four bars (the upper harmonies were compatible with this), accumulating them one by one into a mini-cluster - and I used layers and the v1/v2 device to tie these notes and gradually let them pile up until there was a cluster of about 4 adjacent notes tied over - and the same thing happens when I try to play that back. So it doesn't sound like enharmonic anomalies such as in the organ piece are the problem, but just too many notes, tied for differing numbers of beats. (I fear this may come up again and again and again, as I do tend to write very intricately voiced music to highlight the structure.) I didn't fully understand your suggestions, David, about the extra staff, midi channels, and so on - but would this alter the actual appearance of the score on the page? I've got that looking the way I want it (except that I still have dozens and dozens of minor tweaks about note positioning and so on), and it does reflect exactly what I want - so I wouldn't really be keen on changing the visual appearance of the score in order to solve playback problems. This piece uses the normal three staves for organ music, but it sounds like your suggestion would involve using one or more extra staves, which I don't think are necessary at least for visually reading the score. Anyway, I think I will have to put this in the "deal with later on" category. But thanks all the same for your suggestions. Michael Edwards. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: finale-unsubscr...@shsu.edu