Hi Michael
It's the age old problem of needing to drag the bars/beats to the
note - not the other way round
I have to do this quite often (for different reasons) with one
particular band that i work with - the studio jams are not to a click
and sometimes an unrepeatable keyboard part needs to be imported to
the 'real' session which is at a fixed tempo (I've learnt from
experience to record the midi as well as the audio with this
bunch...). Like you, i need to put some bars and beats where the
notes already are before moving on.
Surprisingly, given its reputation for lame midi, the best tool for
this job is Protools or ProtoolsLE. Using 'tab to note' and 'identify
beat' you can tempo-map improvisations like yours really quickly -
i'm making the assumption that your improvisations are pattern-based,
like the scores on your site. Unlike the bar-based sequencers, you
can just drag a beat marker if you've accidently put it on the wrong
note and PT will adjust. That kind of beat-editing to the midinote,
whilst possible, is really painful in bar-based sequencers like
logic, cubase, performer, rosegarden and (i'd guess) metro.
Once the beats and notes line up, you can flatten the tempos and
export the midifile to (in my case) the real session or (in yours) to
a notation program where you can do some tidying up before moving on
to lilypond.
PTLE is not free obviously, but a second-hand mbox2 might be an
option...
other thoughts...
••• too expensive
I would not recommend cubase, logic, or performer just for this job
unless you want or need the extra features - for the money, you can
buy sibelius, which will do a pretty decent job of following your
improvisations.
••• cheap
i wouldn't recommend metro LE as it does not have 'tap tempo' or
'time scale' functions (the full metro does, but again, it's
expensive and isn't ideal for this particular problem)
••• free
luna does not support tempo maps as far as i can tell so it won't do
the job for you.
as you have an intel mac i'd try rosegarden under 'parallels' - it's
free, has a 'match tempo to segment' function, decent notation and
lilypond export .
whatever you decide, as far as midi2ly goes...
make life easy for yourself and lily by doing any quantization in
a.n.other sequencer. keep your untweaked improvisation safe, and
start hacking away at a copy. Remove all the sustain pedals (control
60) from the improvisation, then, once you've got the bars lined up
with the correct note, hard-quantize the attacks. don't rely on
playback-quantizing, as it won't necessarily make its way to the
midifile. Then, most important, hard-quantize the note lengths too.
The midi-file will of course sound rubbish, but midi2ly will at least
have a chance.
you say on your site that you don't read music. i've got to be honest
that even though you're a programmer you'll find lilypond hard to
edit, the problem being that a lilypond file is a representation of
real or imagined notation rather than an algorithm for generating
printed music from data. in other words if you don't already know
what the printed music should look like, you won't know what/why to
input or tweak in lilypond.
anyway, that was rather a ramble... basically i'd recommend
expensive but will do the job well - sibelius
cheaper but will do the job - protools LE -> rosegarden
free but will do the job eventually - rosegarden
hope this helps
Damian
On 15 Apr 2007, at 11:25, Michael David Crawford wrote:
So I was finally able to find a free (as in beer) MIDI recorder for
Mac OS X. LUNA Free works on Windows too:
http://www.mutools.com/downloads.html
I has, IMHO, a bizarre user interfacce, but it seems reliable and
produced MIDI files that sounded good when I played them back by
streaming the MIDI back to my keyboard.
But (as I was warned), my first shot at using midi2ly looked kinda
like this:
\tempo 4 = 120
s4*2396/1920 g''4 s4*353/1920 c,4 s4*265/1920 e4 s4*309/1920 g4
s4*175/1920 c,4 s4*176/1920 e4 s4*309/1920 g4 s4*220/1920 c,4
D'oh!
Is there some automated way I can clean this up? midi2ly offers
some support for quantization, but I wasn't able to make it work.
One problem I have is that I sometimes vary my tempo as I play.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to buy Sagan Technology's Metro SE. It
offers more featureful MIDI recording than LUNA Free does, and has
some support for non-destructive quantization:
http://www.sagantech.biz/
My problem is that I like to compose by improvising, and would like
to just play without the interruption of scoring the good stuff,
but to record it and score it later. I'm actually planning to
spend much of the spring and summer recording my improvisations to
MIDI files, in hopes that by fall I'll have enough new material to
record a new CD.
I'm also considering buying Cubase Se. It's a little more
expensive than Metro Se, but all the audio people I talk to rave
about Cubase - but it's the entry-level version, not what the pros
use. I just want something for MIDI recording for now.
What I might try doing is to manually transcribe from the "piano
roll" views provided by most MIDI sequencers, by looking at the
notes on the piano roll then just typing in what I think the
Lilypond code should be.
Any advice for me?
Best,
Mike Crawford
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.geometricvisions.com/ <-- Free Creative Commons Sheet Music
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