Re: how to enter notes quickly (midi keyboard available)

[Vaughan McAlley]

On 26 May 2012 03:28, Klaus Föhl <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I like the lilypond notation using \relative being concise and readable.
> Entering on a computer keyboard is fairly quick, but still it feels
> that playing a melody line would be so much quicker. In particular
> if one does not have a typing c4 d e f g1 style but c4 d4. e8 f8. g16 c,1
>
> What "better" methods exist?
>
> For example I have looked into rosegarden output.
> Minor issue:the output is not in relative notation.
> More cumbersome are slightly non-aligned notes to the beat
> (me being an imperfect human) and in particular varying
> note lengths introducing rests where the music and the audible sound
> both have none.
>
> I have seen techniques where the pitch is via piano keyboard
> and rhythm is via computer keyboard. I am not fully convinced.
>
> I have seen a custom-designed computer keyboard that combines
> pitch and duration. It might work well after a learning curve.
>
> What I am tempted is to take midi file information (i.e. gunzip a.rg),
> or the rosegarden ly output and reverse-engineer it into event lists.
> Whatever the detail: only piano-keyboard input and get both pitch and
> length.
>
> Then to apply some smart quantisation. For one thing notes like c1
> are much more likely than c2... or alignment with bars is probable,
> aspects that require some adaptive rules, possibly some parameter
> training.
> Also the routine should pick up and follow the meter as played,
> as opposed to techniques providing the rigid mentronome frame.
>
> Well, before I reinvent the wheel myself: are such things already out
> there?
>
> Cheers
> Klaus
>
>
>
>
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I have written a script that copies (and improves on) Finale’s Simple
Note Entry. My left hand is on my MIDI keyboard, and almost everything
I want to do is on the numeric keypad. So I hold down a note or chord
on the keyboard, and press 4 (crochet), and something like g4 will be
virtually typed. Because I mostly enter renaissance music, most things
I want to type (in normal circumstances) are available on the numeric
keypad. The other advantage is that I hear the pitches as they are
entered, and the script takes care of note names and octaves.

The downside is that I wrote it for Mac using CoreMIDI and Cocoa, as I
had a little knowledge in this area. I’ve tried to make the main
script platform-agnostic, in that input is a MIDI packet or keystroke,
and output is the same MIDI packet (for MIDI thru), and virtual
keystrokes if appropriate. I still have to ‘manually’ translate ASCII
codes into Mac keyboard strokes as I can’t work out how to do this in
Cocoa.

I briefly investigated making it more portable, but didn’t want to go
through the pain of working out how to process MIDI and keystrokes
again. My script is in Lua, and contains all the logic for converting
MIDI to \relative. If anyone is interested, there is an XCode project
here:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B0YNwfxb13ZcWmY0Uy12T3ctVW8

The script is in /LuaScripts

It runs on my Intel iMac with Snow Leopard, don’t about any other OSs.
If anyone is interested and knows about portable keystrokes and MIDI,
I would be happy to discuss adapting the script for them.

Vaughan