User manual

503
Transcribing MIDI recordings
About this chapter
In this chapter you will learn:
• How to make initial staff settings to make a score as legible as
possible.
• How to use the Display Quantize tool to handle “exceptions”
in the score.
• How to resolve parts that contain mixed notes and triplets.
About transcription
This chapter assumes you have a MIDI recording that you
want to transform into a printable score. However, if the
parts are fairly complicated, you will probably need to per-
form some manual editing of the notes. Hence you will
need to read the next chapter, too!
Getting the parts ready
1. Record the music.
You must definitely play in time with the click.
2. Play back to check that the music was recorded as in-
tended.
If not, you might need to re-record or perform some editing.
3. Decide how much permanent alteration to the record-
ing you can accept to make the score look good.
If the answer is “none”, you should prepare your score from a copy of the
track. See the section below.
4. Select all parts (on all tracks) that you wish to work on.
5. Open the Score Editor (e.g. by pressing [Ctrl]/[Com-
mand]-[R]).
6. Activate Page Mode.
Strategies: Preparing parts for score
printout
Below follow a few tips that you might want to refer to
when preparing a score for printout:
• If a part is complex, you may have to do some “manual” editing
of notes, like moving them or changing their lengths (see the
chapter “Entering and editing notes” on page 512). This
means that the recording will not play back exactly as it origi-
nally did. If this is a problem, we suggest you work on a copy
of the recording. Use the Duplicate Track function on the
Project menu to create a version of the track for scoring. Re-
name the track and mute the original track while you are pre-
paring the score. You could of course also work on a copy of
the entire project file.
• For reasons described in the previous chapter, quantizing the
track might be a good idea. This will reduce the amount of de-
tailed adjustments needed in the Score Editor.
• If you need to quantize, always play back your tracks afterwards
to make sure timing wasn’t disrupted due to inappropriate
quantize settings. You might have to quantize some sections
with one value and others with another.
• If the project contains many repetitions, it might be quicker to
record just one instance of each to start with. If you then finish
the score work on each section, you can assemble the entire
project by working with parts in the Project window. This
might save you some time since the detailed adjustments to
each section have to be performed only once.
• A similar approach can also be used when you create sec-
tions where several instruments play the same rhythm (a horn
section, for example): Record the first instrument and make
adjustments so that it looks like it should in the Score Editor.
Then copy the part to the other tracks, and change the pitches
of the notes using MIDI input. Finally, go through the copied
parts and make fine adjustments, change display transpose
settings, etc. This can be a very fast way to create polyphonic
parts with complicated rhythms.
• There also may be situations when the quickest way to record
a part for several instruments is simply to record it in one go,
by playing the chords on your MIDI instrument. If you later
want to split the recording into separate tracks or polyphonic
voices, you can use the Explode function, see “The Explode
function” on page 510.
!
Before starting, make sure you understand the basic
principles behind the score notes/MIDI notes rela-
tionship and also what display quantize is, as de-
scribed in the chapter “How the Score Editor works”
on page 485.