Tutorial: Correcting the Notes and Accidentals

Musician usually does an excellent job of transcribing a MIDI performance into notation note rhythms and spellings of accidentals. The MIDI-to-notation transcription technology in Notation Musician was first developed in 1994 and 1995, and has been improving ever since. Notation Musician and Notation Composer offer the highest quality of transcription available in any music software program.

However, the transcription of note rhythms and spellings of accidentals by Musician is not perfect. After you open a MIDI file in Musician, you may need to correct some notation errors. Musician offers notation editing tools to make this task easy, and even fun.

The following are some of the common types of corrections you might want to make after Musician has transcribed a MIDI File:

Shift a note between the left and right hands of a piano or keyboard part.

Undo one or more editing changes. Musician offers many convenient tools for editing the notation of files you find. However, the underlying performance of the file (the MIDI data) will remain unchanged.

Suppose you want to change the notated duration of the last quarter note in the second measure of the melodyTwinkle Twinkle Little Star to be a half note instead, thus replacing the quarter note rest after it:

Method 1: Change the duration of a note by explicitly giving it a new duration value

1.	If you are not already in Select Mode, click the Select Mode button in the main toolbar.

Musician highlights the selected note. The detail palette indicates the duration of the currently selected note. The illustration below shows the palette in a horizontal orientation. By default, Musician displays the palette horizontally across the top of the window, but you can drag the palette wherever you want.

3.	Click the half note button in the Note Palette to change the duration of the note.

Examples of other shortcuts are "4", "8", "16", and "32" for quarter, eighth, sixteenth, and thirty-second notes. The shortcuts for one or two dots are "1d" and "2d". The reason that the shortcut for half note is "22" instead of "2" is so that it is not confused with "2d" for "two dots".

To find out what the keyboard shortcut for a palette button is, hold the mouse cursor briefly over the button:

Method 2: Change the duration of a note by extending it in increments with D+

or D+

If you have already tried Method 1, then undo the most recent command by choosing Undo Set Note Duration command in the Edit menu, or by typing CTRL+Z.

3.	While holding down the "D" key (for "duration"), type the or key one or more times.

TIP: If you do not know or recall the keyboard shortcut such as D+

for the Increase Duration command, you can look it up in the menu for the type of object you have selected. In this case, you can look up the shortcut in the Note menu.

In the last measure of the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star , the first note was performed so late that Musician perhaps too literally interpreted the rhythm of that note to be intended as a 16th note after the start of the measure. If you play this part of the song, you will indeed hear the delayed note, and may or may not agree that Musician should have notated the rhythm the way it did:

In this example, the starting location ("attack") of the note should be moved to the beginning of the measure.

2.	While holding down the "A" key (for "attack"), type the or key one or more times.

Notice that in moving the attack to the left by a 16th duration, the total duration of the note increases by a 16th duration. If you had typed A+

, instead of A+

, the result would be as shown here:

Musician's automatic splitting of the keyboard staff into right- and left-hand (treble and bass clef) staves generally does an excellent job determining which notes are most likely to be played by the right or left hand. Sometimes, however, Musician might make mistakes. You can quickly correct a mistake by shifting a note between the right- and left-hand staves of a piano or keyboard part.

For the fairly simple piano accompaniment for theTwinkle Twinkle Little Star , Musician made no mistakes in assigning notes to the right and left hands. For purposes of illustration, we will intentionally create such a mistake and then correct it.

1.	Select the note that you intend to shift to another staff.

In this example, select the 'A' note in the left-hand staff in the third measure.

2.	Type SHIFT+ to shift a note to the staff above, and SHIFT+ to shift a note to the staff below.

In this example, first type SHIFT+

to shift the 'A' note in the left-hand staff to the right-hand staff. The result will look like the first of the two above examples. This is a fairly realistic example of the kind of mistake that Musician might make, because the two hands are playing very closely together. In fact, the right hand has just played the same 'A' note one quarter note beat earlier. Yet, Musician was smart enough to determine that the left hand should be playing the note.

3.	While the 'A' note is still selected, now type SHIFT+ to shift it back to the correct left-hand staff.

In the third measure of the right-hand piano staff, Musician's transcription correctly identified a grace note and displayed it so. Before you import a MIDI file, you can set up transcription options, including an option regarding whether grace notes should be displayed as grace notes or written out as short notes, such as 32nd notes. By default, the grace note transcription option is turned on.

Sometimes Musician might not correctly identify a grace note, or it might display a note as a grace note, but you would prefer to have it written out as a short note.

We will use the example of the grace note in the third measure to show how you can change a note back and forth between being displayed as a grace note and being written out as a short note.

1.	Select the grace note which you wish to convert to a written-out note.

When you select a grace note, Musician automatically displays the Grace Note Palette, as illustrated above.

2.	Click the Convert Grace Note to Written-Out Note button in the Grace Note Palette.

3.	Select the short note which you wish to convert to a grace note.

Click the Grace Note Left

button if this grace note borrows its time from the note on the left. Click the Grace Note Right

button if this grace note borrows its time from the note on the right. For an explanation of Grace Note Left versus Grace Note Right, see Understanding the Two Types of Grace Notes.

In this simpleTwinkle Twinkle Little Star song in the key of F-major, there was only one note that required an accidental, namely Eb in measure 9 for the left-hand piano part. Musician correctly determined that the spelling of the note was Eb rather than D#.

When a song has complex harmonies, Musician might sometimes incorrectly spell a note. In such cases, you will find it easy to correct the mistake.

For purposes of illustration, we will intentionally make a spelling mistake and then correct it.

1.	Select the note for which you wish to change its spelling.

A good way to think about "lowering" versus "raising" the enharmonic spelling is to think about which direction the notehead moves. When you lower the enharmonic spelling, the notehead always moves down a step lower on the staff. When you raise the enharmonic spelling, the notehead always moves up a step higher on the staff.

In this example, the D# will be changed back to the originally correct spelling Eb.

Earlier in this step of the tutorial, you probably already had a little practice using the Undo command, to try out the different ways to change a note duration.

Musician supports multiple level undo. You can go back as many steps in your editing as there is memory on your system to keep the history of changes. Musician is efficient about storing the history of changes; so it supports a large number of undo requests.

1.	Click the Edit menu to view all your editing activities, the most recent one listed at the top of the Undo list.

2.	Click any item in the Undo list to undo all of the commands from the most recent, at the top of the list, down to and including the item you select.

Type CTRL+Z to undo the most recent command. This is the standard Windows shortcut for the Undo command.

3.	If you have undone some commands, they will be listed as Redo commands in an additional section of the Edit menu. You can redo commands you previously requested to be undone by selecting them in the Edit menu.