Is there a musicologist in the house?
I could use some help (no, not money, though if you’re so inclined I will thank you sincerely). It’s clear that I’m not going to teach myself music theory over the Web in any reasonable time, and I have a music project I would dearly like to see done.
What I want is to re-score the old Mack Davis tune “Oh Lord It’s Hard To Be Humble” for brass band, J. P. Sousa version, then feed it to a synthesizer program like MuseScore and get a playable file. Possible? Reasonable? Pointers? If you think you might be able to do it, comment and I’ll contact you by email to tell you why I want it.
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21 March 2011 at 7:32 am
B. Moe
I could have done this for you about 30 years ago, when my music theory class was still relatively fresh in my head. I could probably do it now if you aren’t in a hurry, like give me about six months or a year to do some research and relearn it all.
My suggestion would be to talk to some folks or stick a note on a bulletin board and your local high school or college if you have one, people in music theory class do a lot of that kind of stuff and are usually looking for cool shit to break the monotony. That song Souza style definitely fits that bill.
Drop me a line if you want to discuss it further.
27 March 2011 at 10:43 pm
Old Grouch
I started playing around with this recently. (I my case, I bought a Casio WK-500, and have been attempting to get my feet wet without spending large amounts of cash up front. The Casio has 670 voices plus a USB MIDI interface that links nicely with Windows computers.) Here’s what I’ve run into so far:
The process you face is:
(1) getting the music onto your computer,
(2) dividing the parts up (this requires the most musical knowledge),
(3) assigning synth voices,
and (4) tweaking the MIDI events to adjust things like relative volumes, instrument placement (pan left-to-right), instrument changes, and articulation.
There are bunch of expensive programs for doing these: Finale or Sibelius (for scoring), Cakewalk (for MIDI sequencing). Some will let you use exotic stuff like real-instrument sound libraries, but that’s far beyond my knowledge and what I’m trying to do right now. So…
Next, some questions:
1. Is synthesizer output (MIDI) all you want, or do you want printable parts too? (If “both,” there can be some interesting “gotchas,” as a freely-interpreted performance doesn’t match well with score production.)
2. What’s your input: Scan from a piano reduction? Scan from orchestra parts? Playing it in from a keyboard? Writing it out by hand?
3. What’s your preference for doing the re-scoring: Would you rather work with standard staves, or are you comfortable with a “piano roll” view? Can you deal with instrument transposition yourself, or would you rather score everything in “C” and have the program fix it? (Not a problem if the only output is synth, unless you’re inputting from orchestra parts.)
4. How knowledgeable are you about the various instruments, their properties, and their limitations? (Important for making them sound “natural” in the final playback; especially important if you’re trying to produce parts that will be played by real musicians.)
5. How conversant are you with the MIDI protocol? Does the prospect of editing the MIDI event list scare you?
If you still want to proceed, here are some suggestions:
Musitek’s SmartScoreX (www.musitek.com) will get you an 80+% correct input from scanned printed music. The full version (which can work from just about anything) is pricey, but they have a “MIDI” version (upgradable) that will convert a piano score to a MIDI file that sells for $50 (downloadable). It can also record (from a MIDI keyboard), and has three editors: Stave, piano roll, and event list. It will handle (IIRC) up to 16 voices on up to 4 staves… if you prefer more staves, or if you’re scanning orchestral parts, you’ll need the full version. On-stave editing is done with the mouse and hotkeys, and is mostly intuitive, but I ran into some quirks that required reading the documentation, then reading it again 😉 (Cut and Paste, in particular, don’t work as they do with word processors.)
SmartScore’s MIDI editor a bit clunky. I had particular trouble inputting “bank change” commands cleanly, and the user-defined-voice function doesn’t seem to work (either that, or it’s not well documented). Particularly, I couldn’t get user-defined voices to propagate into the Event Editor’s selection list, which, while not being an absloute killer, IS a real pain. (User-voices and Bank Change are required if you want to be able to access any of your synth’s voices beyond the usual 128 “general midi” ones.) I found a free/open-source MIDI editor that’s more to my liking at http://openmidiproject.sourceforge.jp/Sekaiju_en.html. This one also has recording capability (which I haven’t tried) and a stave editor (more limited that SmartScore’s), but no scanning. Did I mention it’s free? IMO, this one’s worthwhile downloading, just to play with it.
Editing the MIDI file has a somewhat steep learning curve.
At mininum, you should acquire a MIDI command list for your particular synth. Most of them will be industry standard, but it’s handy to have them all available.
I have yet to find a good MIDI tutorial online, but one of Cakewalk’s users has a good set of articles at http://www.bikexprt.com/cakewalk/index.htm that explain a lot of the quirks of MIDI editing.
Any more questions? I’m not that far ahead of you, but drop me an email and I’ll try to help.