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terry2011
02-04-2011, 02:31 AM
Hello,
I am not exactly sure what is meant by a "midi instrument".
Right now, I am simply an acoustic guitar musician in flamenco style.

Is it possible to play my acoustic guitar close to a microphone hooked up to my computer, and have the Notation Composer software convert what I am playing into sheet music notation?

Could someone please answer this question? and if not, are there other software tools out there that can do this?

Thank you,
Terry

dj
02-04-2011, 02:28 PM
Hi, Terry:

Midi, or more properly, MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It's a set of computer protocols first developed in the early 1980s to allow electronic instruments from various manufacturers to communicate with each other. Since then, it has developed into an industry-wide standard that connects synthesizers, samplers, computers, mixers, effect units and even lighting systems. An entire show, with lights, instruments and special effects, could be controlled by one MIDI equipped computer system.

Unfortunately, the one thing it can't do is connect your flamenco guitar to a computer. It is strictly an electronic language.

However, don't despair. There are two ways that you can connect:

1) There are midi guitars which can connect directly to a midi system (computer, synthesizer, whatever). These days, they are pretty impressive and I wish I could afford one. There are ones with built-in midi interface and there are add-on interfaces you can put on your own guitar. I don't know of any acoustic guitars that have a midi interface built into them, but many electric guitars do.

2) There is software that can (as you suggest, through a microphone or through a recording) listen to your performance and try to transcribe it into "midi-ese". This software is still in its infancy, for the most part, and results vary. It's one of the most difficult tasks in the electronic music industry. The difficulty with guitar is the harmonic content, which can fool the software into thinking there are more notes than are actually present, and ghost notes and sympathetic resonance on adjacent strings, which guitarists do strike more often than we think.

Notation Software doesn't do that midi-ese transcription. Its purpose is to take a prepared standard midi file (any file with a .mid suffix) and convert that to notation, which task it performs very well. Or you can play (using a MIDI equipped instrument) directly into it and it will transcribe the result.

If you search for "Audio to midi" or "vocal to midi" or similar online, you should get quite a few hits.

Good luck.

David