User manual

487
How the Score Editor works
Display quantize
Let’s say you used the Project window to record a figure
with some staccato eighth notes. When you open the
Score Editor, these notes are displayed like this:
This doesn’t look anything like what you intended. Let’s
start with the timing – obviously, you were off at a couple
of places (the third, fourth and last note all seem to be a
32nd note late). You can solve this by quantizing the fig-
ure, but this would make the passage sound too “stiff”, and
not fit in the musical context. To resolve this problem the
Score Editor employs something called “display quantize”.
Display quantize is a setting which is used to tell the pro-
gram two things:
• How precise the Score Editor should be when display-
ing the note positions.
• The smallest note values (lengths) you want displayed in
the score.
In the example above, the display quantize value seems to
be set to 32nd notes (or a smaller note value).
Let’s say we change the display quantize value to six-
teenth notes in the example:
With display quantize set to sixteenth notes.
OK, now the timing looks right, but the notes still don’t
look like what you intended. Maybe you can understand
that from a computer’s point of view, you did play sixteenth
notes, which is why there are a lot of pauses. But that’s
not how you meant it. You still want the track to play back
short notes, because it is a staccato part, but you want
something else “displayed”. Try setting the display quan-
tize value to eighth notes instead:
With display quantize set to eighth notes.
Now we have eighth notes, as we wanted. All we have to
do now is to add staccato articulation which can be done
with one simple mouse click using the Pencil tool (see the
chapter “Working with symbols” on page 556).
How did this work? By setting the display quantize value
to eighth notes, you give the program two instructions,
that would sound something like this in English: “Display
all notes as if they were on exact eighth note positions, re-
gardless of their actual positions” and “Don’t display any
notes smaller than eighth notes, regardless of how short
they are”. Please note that we used the word “display”,
which leads us to one of the most important messages of
this chapter:
Choose your display quantize values with care
As explained above, the display quantize value for notes
puts a restriction on the “smallest” note value that can be
displayed. Let’s see what happens if we set it to quarter
notes:
With display quantize set to quarter notes.
Oops, this doesn’t look too good. Well of course it
doesn’t! We have now instructed the program that the
“smallest” note that occurs in the piece is a quarter note.
We have explicitly told it that there are no eighth notes, no
sixteenths, etc. So when the program draws the score on
screen (and on paper) it quantizes the display of all our
eighth notes to quarter note positions, which makes it look
!
Setting a display quantize value does not alter the
MIDI notes of your recording in any way, as regular
quantizing does. It only affects how the notes are
displayed in the Score Editor (and nowhere else)!