Howdy folks,

Here's a "first pass" recording of Derek's "Tango of the Roses." First, a couple of notes.

Derek wrote this particular piece years ago for his accordion band, using another notation program. He wanted folk here to be able to hear it (his first post of his music), so he saved the file as a .mid from the original software, which is why it looks as it does. The file you see here is not cleaned up, as he would if he were composing in Composer (the original did indeed have multiple staves).

Saving as a .mid file in most other apps results in all the note performances being "quantized", which means that a quarter note that has a staccato mark will only be saved as a quarter note, not with that staccato performance. (Happily for users here, Composer does "interpret" staccato marks, and will alter the performance when you've added them in during your composition, as well as save that performance in your .not or .mid files.)

Also, the other application did not have an "accordion" instrument, so it was saved as "grand piano." All you need to do when listening to the .not is to change the instrument to an accordion instrument, and there you have it!

His Senior's accordion band has been performing his compositions for years, and Derek may not mention it out of modesty, but his compositions have won some competitions

Now, on to what I did here.

1. I opened Derek's .not file,
2. used the Staff "select" button to select the staff,
3. used "Region/Convert region to selection of notes",
4. used "D + left arrow key" once to shorten the note durations just a touch,
5. set my Chaos "tango accordion" as the instrument, then
6. used Audacity to record the performance and save it as an mp3.

oops - I'll have to include the file in the next post.

Enjoy!
Sherry