Tips on Using Ad Lib's VISUAL COMPOSER Copyright 1990 Public (software) Library Compiled by Nelson Ford This file may be copied for others only if no changes are made to it. The music files mentioned in this text are available on many bbs's, including CompuServe's IBMNET. They are also available from Public (software) Library. See the end of the file for more information about getting disks from PsL. - - - - - - - The following ideas are not the ultimate in VC usage, they are just some things that VC users (including myself) have found to make VC work even better. If you have other tips or ways to improve on the following, please let me know. It is assumed that you have read the manuals that come with VC. Just to get one bit of terminology straight, however: the VC supports nine "Voices" if you choose to compose/transcribe "without percussion", or six "Voices" plus five percussion instruments if you choose "with percussion." A "Voice" is not necessarily an instrument, it is a series of notes. A piano chord could easily take six "Voices" by itself, with each Voice playing one note in the chord. It is possible to transcribe music without any prior music knowledge at all, but it would be extremely slow and difficult, so we are going to assume that you know how to read music. If you don't, you can easily get a book on the subject from the library, so this file will stick to the Ad Lib's tricks. Included on this disk are some music files to which the following notes refer. Note that "AINT-TOO" is not completed. (Can't get it to sound the way I really want it to sound.) Buying Sheet Music: ------------------ I am not a composer, and I doubt that I will ever be. But I do love music, and with Ad Lib's Visual Composer, I have been able to add greatly to my enjoyment and appreciation of my favorite classical and rock music pieces. As a result of my personal bias, this file looks at Visual Composer from the point of view of transcribing, rather than composing, but most of the VC tricks are useful either way. Transcribing music is a lot of fun. Most good-size towns & cities have music stores where sheet music is sold. Getting the sheet music to your favorite numbers and transcribing it into Ad Lib format will give you an even greater appreciation for those favorites. Sheet music usually costs under $2, or you can get a whole book of songs (as many as 100) for under $20, although you have to be careful because most books like that have overly-simplified scores that have very little of the feel of the original music. If you just go into a music store and ask for the sheet music for a particular piece, you will probably get an arrangement that has been "reduced" for playing on a piano. This means that instead of giving you the notes for each instrument, the "melody", harmony, etc, have been "simplified" - converted to a smaller number of notes that can be played on the piano. It is possible to get books that contain full orchestral arrangements of classical music. These are relatively expensive and look very challenging. Furthermore, a glance will show you that these have more notes than will fit in the six to nine non-percussion voices of VC. If you really want to have "fun", get one of these books and take a couple of months to work on your favorite classical numbers. (Please send us a copy when you are done.) In between the full orchestral arrangements and the piano scores are books showing all the parts for string quartets and other small groupings. These are almost ideal for a six- to nine-voice synthesizer, although they will be extremely challenging, as the ones that I have seen have been very complex and have a lot of techniques that are difficult to program. When getting piano sheet music, be aware that there may be versions even more simplified for the benefit of beginning pianists. You should get the most complex version that you can. Unlike the pianist, you can take your time and enter one note at a time. The books that contain "101 Great Rock & Roll Hits" generally have very simple arrangements that will not sound great without a lot of embellishments on your part. Numbering Measures ------------------ Visual Composer will tell you what measure you are on. Numbering the measures on the sheet music will save you a lot of time in correlating the sheet music and the VC score. If you don't want to mess up the sheet music, make a xerox. You will be making other marks on it as well. If the music is complex, it is best to just number the measures as you go along. Tempo changes or beat changes can mess up your numbering. The Game Plan ------------- There are many approaches to transcribing music scores. If the notes for the melody, harmony, etc, are clearly differentiated (such as in "Flight of the Bumblebee"), it is easier to enter one "Voice" for the entire piece, then go back and enter the next, etc. If the notes intertwine and are otherwise less clearly separated into Voices in the music score, it is probably better to work on from one measure to a screen full of measures at a time, but no more. If you get too far ahead with one or two voices in a complex score, you may lose track of some odd notes along the way that never get entered. You should also stop and play each screen full of input as you go along. It is easier to find and correct errors as you go then after you have completed the entire score. If you are certain that the music has no percussion, switch to the "without percussion" option, which increases the number of non-percussion Voices from 6 to 9. Even if you don't think you need 9 Voices, we will later see that you can use them all. Cutting and Pasting ------------------- Before starting to enter notes, go through the sheet music looking for (and marking) phrases or passages that repeat. Marking them in advance will keep you from overlooking them later and doing a lot of unnecessary work. Even if there are some minor differences between two similar passages, copying passages and making the changes is usually much easier than keying in the same notes from scratch. If the same notes are played in a different key, it is easy to highlight them and move them up and down the scale. Even when entering a single Voice, if you see that it repeats the same note for many measures (which happens most often with the bass or drum parts), then enter one measure, mark it, and then hit Ctrl-V to copy it for the appropriate number of measures. If you know there are a lot of volume changes in the passage to be copied, make those changes before copying the passage. Entering Volume changes is a slow and not-particularly-fun process, and you don't want to have to make them twice. If you forget, go ahead and delete the duplicate passage, make the volume changes in the first passage, and then copy it over again. Assigning Notes to Voices: ------------------------- This may seem obvious, but it bears stating: try to stick to the same Voices for the same parts of the music as much as possible. If the music switches between chords in the treble cleff and chords in the bass cleff, the middle Voices will have to move between the two, but the top note should almost always be Voice One and the bottom note of the bass cleff, the last Voice. The reason for this is that after entering all the notes, you will probably be trying out different instruments, pitches, and volumes, so you will want the use of the Voices to be consistent. The exception to the above is that if you have to use a Voice for just a few notes in one particular place, try using a Voice that you have already used, but which is not being used in that particular place. That will keep you from using up one Voice for just a few notes. Assigning Instruments --------------------- After entering all of the notes, I listen to the original artist's recording of the music. (Since I see the purpose of transcribing music as being a way to learn more about and to become more appreciative of my favorite musical pieces, I normally have a recording.) Then I try to assign instruments to match the recording. I add percussion at this time, also to match the recording. The sheet music for piano will not show the percussion or fill-in or "embellishment" instruments like trumpet. Starting about measure 12 in AINT-TOO, you will hear some trumpet "highlights". I got these from listening to the recording, not from the sheet music. It is usually pretty easy to add these things by listening to a little bit of the recording at a time. This is easier to do if it is on tape, so if you have it on compact disc, make a recording of the disc. As I listen to the recording, I focus on one instrument at a time, such as the percussion, and try to follow on the sheet music at the same time, making marks to indicate where drum beats and cymbols (etc) come in. Some kind of short-hand notation will make this easier (eg: just but a "b" for bass drum, "s" for snare, etc). Since the instruments in Ad Lib are not going to sound exactly like the real things, and since Ad Lib is limited in the number of different Voices it allows, it takes a lot of experimentation to find the best combination of instruments. The hardest thing is to find the best instrument to carry the vocal part, assuming there is one. I was pleased with the sound of the Oboe for the vocal part in "Mull of Kintyre", but it did not sound as good in some other pieces. All you can do is keep experimenting. Sheet music normally shows all the words, but does not indicate when words are to be sung by someone other than the lead singer. Make note of these things when listening to the recording and change instruments accordingly. In fact, there may be some backup singing on the recording not shown on the sheet music at all. Some Voices are intended for certain areas of the scale, and will not do well in other areas. For example, I just heard a piece where a banjo was used in the two measures below middle C, and it sounded bad. Changing to CLAVECIN gave a better banjo-like sound in the lower registers. In fact, since the piece was a polka, I changed an even lower-pitched banjo to TUBA1 and it improved the sound. Left-Over Voices ---------------- If you are lucky, after entering all the music, you may have a Voice or two left over. This is good because that means you can copy the vocal or other key Voice over to the extra Voice(s) and create a fuller sound. I never leave a Voice blank. The way to create a fuller, richer sound is to copy the notes for one Voice over to a second Voice, and then vary the pitch accuracy. In "Mull of Kintyre", three (or sometimes more) Voices are used for the Bagpipe parts with the pitches at .95, 1, and 1.05. You can also vary the instruments for the extra Voices. Use Piano1 on one, Piano2 on another, etc. Be sure to listen to the Voices individually (Ctrl-Y) as well as together. Some instruments are too soft to hold their own when mixed with others. You may have to adjust the Volume for such instruments too. Volume Changes -------------- Most of the Ad Lib music files I have seen don't have any volume variations in them. VC allows volume changes from 0.1 to 1.0. Volume must be individually set for each "Voice". The way the volume control works in VC is one of its few major design weaknesses. Using it is a lot of work, which is probably why most people skip it, but it is worth the effort. If everything is done at the same volume, the sound is very bland. This is where sheet music comes in handy. It is very difficult to detect all the subtle volume changes by just listening, but with sheet music, you should see symbols telling you how to vary the volume. However, you also have to listen to your final work and note where volume adjustments are needed due to the nature of Ad Lib. For example, different instruments have different inherent volumes, so if the sheet music calls for "pp" and at the same time, it is going from a predominantly loud instrument to a soft one, you will not need to adjust the volume any more than that. Likewise, if you are going from a series of chords to a single Voice being played, there is going to be a natural drop in volume simply because Ad Lib plays chords louder than single notes. As I work on the volume changes for a piece, I try to set a scale for the volume so that I can be consistent. For example, the scale might range from .5 for "ppp" to 1 for "fff", or it might only be .8 for "ppp" to 1 for "fff", depending on the instruments being used and how the music actually sounds when played. For "William Tell Overture", I had to adjust the range of volume many times because the jumps from "pp" to "ff" were just too jarring, in my opinion. Lastly, if the music has a vocal, focus on the Voice(s) in the recording to see which words are stressed and put extra volume on the them, even though this won't show up on the sheet music. For example, in "The Chain", the vocals are "DAMN your love. DAMN your lies.", so I upped the volume on the "damn's", even though this is not shown in the sheet music. The main thing is that no matter what the sheet music shows, you should always do what sounds best to you. Tempo Changes ------------- Tempo changes are how you work magic in Ad Lib. Tempo changes are the only ones that affect all of the Voices at once, so at least you do not have to go through and change the tempo for each instrument. At the simplest level, tempo changes can be used to play trills and grace notes, which are a series of notes meant to be played very quickly. For an example, load the file WILLTELL.ROL into Visual Composer, change the display to Tempo, and go to measure 74. You will see that in the last fourth of that measure, the tempo changes to 5 for 1-1/4 measures and then back to 1. That means that 5 quarter-measures (1-1/4 = 5/4ths) are being compressed into the space of one measure by increasing the playing speed to 5x. These numbers were chosen based on two factors: (1) the number of notes to be played (8 notes could not have been played in less space) and (2) the desire to make the start of the next measure still begin on a measure bar line. Load "The Chain", stay with the Tempo Display, and look at measure 9. In the sheet music, measure 9 starts with four grace notes shown before any other notes are played. To allow the rest of the notes in that measure to start at the beginning of the measure, I added a whole new measure for the grace notes, but I changed the tempo of that measure to 10 (the fastest possible). I adjusted the length of the grace notes in VC so that they sounded right to me. That left a pause in the first part of that measure, but at a speed of 10, it is not noticeable. (Mark that measure and play it to see.) Now load the file "AINT-TOO" and look at measure 1. Because I was ad-libbing a drum intro, I was able to change the tempo to 2 temporarily without having to worry about expanding the measure accordingly, and I was still able to start the main score on the measure bar to match the sheet music. (Note that the first measure on the sheet music would be numbered 2, since I added a measure.) Now look at measure 3. In this case, grace notes are played at the same time other non-grace notes are being played. Again, a quarter of a measure is being expanded to fill 5/4 measures, so the tempo is set to 5x. The notes in that quarter measure that are not grace notes had to be lengthened proportionally. A note that spanned the 1/4 measure would be lengthened to span 5/4 measures at the 5x tempo. "Triplets" consists of a set of (usually) three 8th notes that must be played in the space of two 8th notes. Here is how to do it: enter the first two notes as 16th notes and the third as an 8th note. Change the Tempo from 1 to .7 for the first two notes, then to 1.3 for the third, and then back to 1. Here are the mathematics: the average Tempo is still 1 for that section, and the 8th note, which is twice as long as a 16th note, is played at roughly twice the tempo at which the two 16th notes are played, so everything balances out. This will only work if either no other notes are being played at that time or if the other notes are being sustained across that stretch (in which case they will not be affected because the average tempo for that stretch is still 1). If other regular 8th or 16th notes ARE being played at the same time, you'll have to fake a triplet like this: enter the first note as an 8th note, skip a 16th space, and then enter the third voice as a 16th note. Then change to another Voice and go back to enter the middle note as an 8th note that starts in the middle of the first 8th note. It looks a little like this: __ -- - As a last resort, you can do triplets by expanding the number of ticks per beat by a factor of 3x, but that makes the measures so long that you may not even get one measure on a screen. This makes it more difficult and time consuming to enter and edit music. As a VERY last resort, you can simply enter three 8th notes and change the tempo from 1 to 1.5 and then back to 1 when you are done. Do this only if you do not care about the measure markers being thrown completely off, which is generally not a good idea. More Uses of Tempo Changes -------------------------- Load the file "TOGETHER", set Display to Tempo, and scroll through the first part of the score to see how many Tempo changes are used. The "incoming mortar" sound at the start uses tempo changes, pitch changes, instrument selection, overlapping notes, and pitch placement. Beat Changes ------------ In some pieces, the beat may change from, say, 3/4 time to 4/4 time. VC can handle it - all you have to do when transcribing music is change the beat via the Display menu when you are ready to enter notes at a different beat. When you have entered notes at one beat, numbering the measures on your sheet music as you go, and then change the beat, the measure markers will change for the whole score, throwing off your numbering. This will NOT affect the timing of the notes you have already entered. The measure markers are for reference only. All this means is that the numbering on your sheet music will look funny at the point where the beat changes. Pitch Changes ------------- We've already discussed some uses of Pitch changes, so this is just a recap: 1. In real life, instruments are not all in perfect pitch, so vary the pitch of your instruments by a percentage point or two for more realism. 2. If you are using two instruments to play the same notes, varying their pitch is even more important to keep them from washing each other out. Slurs & Bends: Pitch changes can be used to create note slurs and pitch "bends" (moving from one note to another without "hitting another key"). Pitch can be varied from 0 to 2. The testing that I have done seems to indicate that going from 0 to 1 does not increase a full tone, but going from 1 to 1.5 does increase by a full tone. As always, experimenting is called for. Like Volume changes, Pitch changes are a bit of a pain, since you usually have to make at least four changes just to get a decent sounding bend. Again, refer to the start of the piece TOGETHER for a use of pitch bends. Also scroll through the song and look for a more traditional use of a pitch bend. Trills ------ For the non-musicians (I had to ask one): trills are primarily seen in classical music as a "Tr" over a note. This means that the note should be played quickly in alternation with the note one tone above it. For example, to trill an E-flat, you would quickly alternate between the E-flat and an F. It was previously mentioned that tempo changes can be used to squeeze in trills. That may not be necessary. In transcribing a Mozart string quartet that was played at a lively tempo (200), the beat was 6/8 time. I set Number of Beats per measure to 6 (8th notes per measure) and number of ticks per beat (8th note) to 4 (ie: four 32nd notes per 8th note). Only 8th notes were trilled in the piece, which gave me room to enter a trill using four 32nd notes. For example, to play a "C" 8th note with a "Tr" over it, I would play four 32nd notes in place of the 8th note: C-D-C-D. ---------- Public (software) Library P.O.Box 35705 Houston, TX 77235-5705 Orders Only: 1-800-2424-PSL Information: 1-713-524-6394 FAX Number: 1-713-524-6398 CIS ID#: 71355,470