Trombone Bends

[rrayner]

I've asked questions before about portamentos and gotten quite a bit of help from Sherry and DJ (David, are you still out there?) a few years ago for my "White Christmas". I've attached an portion of my "Hello, Dolly!", which includes only the Dixie Combo parts.

I have tried to simulate the Dixie trombone effects in measures 2, 3, 5, 10 and 11 by using a separate staff for trombone bends. In the places where I'm using GraphOverNotes to simulate this effect, I've set the Note Velocity of the subject notes in the Dixie Trombone staff to 0, after copying the notes to the Trombone Bends staff, and incorporated the bends in the Trombone Bends staff. The end result sounds close to what a human trombone player would do, so I'm satisfied that this is the best I can do sound-wise within Composer.

I know I can hide a staff via Staff > Setup, but this is temporary. Is there a way to do what I've done and make the Trombone Bends staff invisible?

Also, any suggestions/tips on the bends that I've used -- perhaps a better way -- would be appreciated. Thanks.

Ralph

[rrayner]

I should have added that I could have done all of the bends without adding an extra staff, except measure 5, where I had to make the Trombone Bends staff start on a D5, instead of an A4, to get the right sound.

Ralph

[rrayner]

I have found at least some of the answers to my questions. I created the bends in a separate staff, as mentioned before, but I cut and pasted the Control information from the Trombone Bends staff into the original Dixie Trombone staff, and then was able to get rid of the Trombone Bends staff. Surprisingly, this applied to measure 5 as well, where I had to create the bend starting at D5 instead of A4 in the Trombone Bends staff.

Ralph

[Sherry C]

Hi Ralph,

Cool snippet!

It seems that you've found most of what you needed to know, but I'll throw in a few Power User tips :)

1. It's sometimes helpful to use View/Show Piano Roll if you're drawing pitch bends. The Piano Roll view (not editing) will show you exactly where the note begins and ends, letting you be more accurate in your pitch bend drawing placement.

2. You can also use the "Zoom in" for the view to get the notes bigger, and thus make it easier when using the mouse to draw in pitch bends. This is helpful for getting the shape just like you want it.

3. You can use the Pitch Bend Wheel of a MIDI instrument to record a pitch bend on top of already entered or recorded notes. See Help/Users Guide, and use the Index to look up "pitch bend" for a nicely illustrated explanation of that process.

4. You can "scoot" or "stretch" pitch bends. To scoot it, (1) select it using Region Select and (2) hold the Shift key while pressing either the Left or Right Arrow key. To "stretch" it, don't hold the Shift key, just use the arrow keys. To stretch it vertically (increase or decrease the bend), use the Up/Down arrow keys.

As Ralph mentions, you can also copy just the Pitch Bend (or any other MIDI controller) from one location to another. With this in mind, you can keep a "reference" file of Pitch Bends that you've either created yourself or found in other files. Then when you need a pitch bend in a song, you can have your own library to choose from, or as the basis for a custom one for that song (that tip from Fred Winterling, who had such a file.)

Enjoy!
Sherry "lookingforwardtoRalph'snewsong" Crann ;)

[rrayner]

Thanks for the additional tips and tricks, Sherry. I'd stumbled on some, but not all. I really appreciate the guidance.

Speaking of stumbling -- my Forum debut for this Medley is somewhat delayed -- I hate to admit it, but yesterday, I committed one of the major PC cardinal sins -- I mistakenly back-leveled my master copy, so I'm having to do quite a bit of manual recovery work. I hate it when I do that! :mad:

Anyway, the second time through on my "bends" is going much more smoothly. Thanks, again.

Ralph

[Sherry C]

Howdy Ralph,


Speaking of stumbling -- my Forum debut for this Medley is somewhat delayed -- I hate to admit it, but yesterday, I committed one of the major PC cardinal sins -- I mistakenly back-leveled my master copy, so I'm having to do quite a bit of manual recovery work. I hate it when I do that! :mad:


Actually you should be (or have been...) able to use the File/Auto-save file recovery command to retrieve a backup copy of the original master copy, and it would have only been missing a few minutes (5 by default) of work.

Maybe this is in time to help.... or not :o

ttfn,
Sherry

[rrayner]

Bless you, Sherry! Bless you, bless you, bless you. As you know, I'm an impatient user -- I dig into what I need for the moment, and have little time for other research. I had never stumbled on the Auto Recovery feature, and therefore was trying to rebuild from a 5-day old file, comparing it to a good midi file I had created before my catastrophe -- not fun.

As fate would have it, I was so distressed over my faux-pas that I got paranoid and put yesterday's date in the filename, so my original file's backups were not being pushed out of the bottom of the stack -- a stroke of good fortune. So, of the 5 backups for the original file, number 3 was the final before my disaster. I've lost all of the time yesterday and this morning to my now-unnecessary rebuild, but that pales compared to what I still had left to do (and changes that might not get made again, if the thought didn't strike me again). So, if my opening sentence seems a bit overboard, indeed it is not.

Now, I just need to get back to the final tweaking that I was in the midst of yesterday, before it got dark. :(

Ralph

[Sherry C]

Hi Ralph,

Glad that the Auto-recover feature helped :)

For anyone else reading the thread, you can set the frequency (minutes between saves) and number of backup iterations to save in File/Auto-save Options.

If you have a crash for any reason (any other software that crashes your machine, memory failure, etc.) then you'll still only lose the last few minutes of your work (ie. only what you did since the last auto-save). Auto-save works in the background so you don't even see it working usually (and may not even realize it's there :) ).

All you'll need to do to get your last working file is to use File/Auto-save file recovery, and find the filename you were working on. The latest saved file has a "1" on it, the next-to-last is "2" and so forth back down the line.

It's saved my hide more than once, too :)

ttfn,
Sherry