On Thursday 02 August 2007, Chris Cannam wrote: > On Thursday 02 August 2007 00:13, M. Donalies wrote: > > To do tablature correctly requires at least 2 MIDI channels per staff
> Ugh. I wasn't aware of that. I suppose it's inevitable, given that > MIDI pitch bend is a channel message. > guitar idiom, especially given all the other existing notational idioms > that we can't play directly either. I definitely agree with you that being able to reproduce pitch bends in MIDI is not something over which we should consider turning the world upside down. There are really quite a few things in Rosegarden that only exist as symbols when I think about it. Bow marks, fermatas, phrasing slurs, all of the LilyPond directives, legato, staccato, and probably even more. It's annoying, but I feel like they more or less represent the upper boundary of what we can realistically accomplish. Pitch bends could definitely and easily fall into this category, and I don't think we'll be interpreting strum directives, or playing the right sort of sound for this note played on the low E string vs. this same note played on the A string, for that matter. That last one is an interesting theoretical possibility. We know what fret on what string, and coupled with a good set of samples, we *could* do that, but let's not go there. IMHO there's limited traction to be gained trying to make MIDI sound like a real guitar anyway. In my early days, I spent a lot of time and effort doing just that. I used to painstakingly diddle the start times and durations of every chord by hand to make the part sound more realistic, but that was before I had the capability just to go record the damn guitar. Be all of that as it may, if there were a special guitar track type that could play on two channels, it might be possible to represent this in the GUI without it becoming too mind bending. Limit both channels to occurring on the same physical playback device, the same program, and offer to send to channel A and channel B. It *could* be done, though it breaks the idea of one instrument, one channel, and potentially opens the door to add even more confusion to something that's already confusing as hell for new people to grasp. Look at those nightmare diagrams in my book trying to explain how all this crap fits together. Look at how many times I had to rewrite all of that because I had previously COMPLETELY missed the point, and I had just written a heap of total nonsense as though it were the gospel truth. Remember all our old arguments about what from what, and not putting "instrument" in quotes, etc. It's a BIG can of worms to re-open, and I'd be really reluctant to do so. Though I can conceive of doing so if the guitar notation writing Rosegarden users come to some huge concensus that being able to reproduce pitch bends is critically important. (Me, as a guitarist, I don't really do much with bends anyway, so I have no vested interest either way.) -- D. Michael McIntyre ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
