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| Newsletter #115 - 23 April 2016 - Music Software for Everyone |
| Dear
Musicians,
A corrective update of Pizzicato is available on our site. This is version 3.6.2.2. It corrects several bugs. You can download it (for free) here : You will find the details of the corrections here : We continue to correct the issues noticed by our users and the next corrective upgrade will be in September. We also work on the next major release of Pizzicato. You will find below the next section of our main article on music composition. Have a nice reading and - more important - a good musical practice ! Musically, Dominique Vandenneucker
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Table of
Content
Theory and practice of music composition... Tips and advices on Pizzicato... Which Pizzicato version would fit your needs ... ? Discover in 10 minutes why Pizzicato is so different than other music software:
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| Editorial |
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Read all previous articles on page http://www.arpegemusic.com/editoriaux.htm |
| Theory and practice of music
composition (part 3) Last month, we analyzed music as a composite of six basic elements:Rhythm, Melody, Harmony, Sound, Effects and Form. These are the bricks that build up a piece of music. Each one of them can take many different shapes and aspects, but the important point here is to be able to recognize them and know that they exist. These six elements are very elementary. By thinking about them when you listen to music, you can watch how the composer used these basic blocks of music. Now, what is the next level in building a piece of music? If we can observe the presence of these elements in any music, it does not mean that we are able to create a piece of music just by knowing that these 6 elements exist. Being able to observe the various kinds of bricks that make up a house does not mean you can yourself build a house. Another level of approach must be studied. Other skills must be developed. We will cover here a series of viewpoints on music. They may seem arbitrary. They are! But you will find that each one corresponds to a subjective concept, to something that can be observed and experienced by the attentive listener. The advantage of these viewpoints on music is that you can use them to shape music the way you want. They form an intermediate way to describe how music evolves. They represent an expressed form of music that lays between your global concept of a music and the real notes and sounds of that music. They describe what the listener experiences while listening to a piece of music. But their main interest in music composition is that they give you a path to go from an idea or feeling to a real music composition, with notes and instruments. We will analyze these viewpoints in both ways. The first one is the passive way. Listen to music and "see" the music through these viewpoints, so you become accustomed to your new "musical eyes". By doing so, you can establish links with the six basic elements of music and notice how each one of them may interact with each viewpoint. So this makes a lot of possible combinations. The second way to analyze these viewpoints on music is to apply these observations and combinations to the reverse process, which is when you have a conceptual idea of a music composition and you want to give it a substantial form with notes and instruments. So this is a path that can be used to compose music. At this point, I have located at least nine different viewpoints that can be useful for music analysis and composition. Each viewpoint may be analyzed in combination with the six basic music blocks already mentioned or any combination of them. So we have many combinations and examples to cover for the next few letters. Let us start right away... What do I really mean by the word "viewpoint"? It is simply a specific quality of music that can be observed objectively and/or subjectively. You will find that some viewpoints are more subjective and others are more objective. But you, as a person, will be able to experience and observe the phenomenon I will be talking about. To give you an example, if you look at a row of persons, you can objectively observe their relative sizes, whether they are male or female, the colors of their garments. More subjectively, you can feel their attitudes, whether they seem happy or sad, interested or bored. Well, the music viewpoints we will talk about are similar criteria, but they are applicable to a piece of music. Keep this definition in mind while we inspect and analyze these musical viewpoints. They are "angles" from which we may analyze and view music. Viewpoints and the layers of music construction Before analyzing the first viewpoint, here is a useful description of the general process of music composition, related to the viewpoints. You can roughly divide the process of music composition into three main layers. The starting point of a music composition may be many different things, but it sure must include your first idea of what you want to express with your music composition. Let's take an easy example. You love her very much (if you are a women, you love him very much :-) and you want to express this deep feeling into music. Well this "I love her (or him)" is the first point. It is the highest level of your composition. Your composition is expressed here in its purest form, as a pure idea or feeling or emotion that you want to express. This first step could be practically anything you can think of. The only condition would be that you really mean it and feel it as yours and you really want to express it. This is the top level layer of music composition, high in the sky, you might say. Now if you want to express this into a music composition, you have to go down to earth, into more practical actions then dreaming about your feelings... Now, the lowest layer of a music composition is something that can be played by musicians so that the final music will actually express your original, high level feelings. To go from the ideas and feelings to a score full of precise notes and rhythms written on paper is not so obvious and many persons wanting to compose music will just become quite lost in the process. There is nothing like a 'unique universal method' to go from one pure idea to a nice music composition. There are only paths to go from one point to another. The introduction of musical viewpoints is just another path to go from ideas to finished music composition. It is an intermediate layer, between high level concepts and real notes written on paper, ready to be played. So we have:
So let us analyze the first proposed viewpoint. Musical viewpoint number 1 - Orderliness We could call it "order versus disorder" or "order against chaos". Music is obviously sound that has been organized. For sounds that have not been organized, we use the word noise. What is the basis of "being organized"? Of course, it is the introduction of order into a series of elements, so that they are well assembled together, they all fit together well. But what is order? How do you perceive that various elements have been assembled in an orderly fashion? A definition of orderfound in a dictionary says "A condition of regular or proper arrangement". Another interesting definition says "Logical or comprehensible arrangement of separate elements". Let us take an example. Let us take many books and place them at regular intervals on a table, all in vertical position and facing the same direction. Let us say that on another table, the same quantities of books are just thrown there randomly. Any sensible observer will say that the first table represents order and the second table represents the lack of order, which is disorder (the word chaos would be used for an extreme disorder). The books on the first table will obviously look like they have been arranged according to a predefined pattern. They are in similar positions, they are all books, they are the same distance apart from each other. From these observations, we can say that order will be noticed whenever a series of similar elements are present, arranged in time or space according to a regular pattern, a somewhat repeating pattern. For our purposes, let us use the following practical definition:
The elements of a music composition are obviously assembled in an orderly way. A program that would assemble notes, rhythms and sounds on a complete random basis would never get agreements from people as to being a nice music composition. But order is not an absolute quality. There can be many degrees of order. We can compare the two tables and say that the first table has more order in it than the second table. But compared to a fire where all the books are burning, both tables will look much more in order than the burning books. So it is always relative. So we need to study the relative degrees of order inside music and specifically in relationship with the six basic elements of music. Let us start with rhythm. If we listen to a regular beat, we can say that - by the above definition - the order present in that beat is very high. Each note is the same (sameness is the highest level of similarity) and each beat is separated from the previous beat by the same time duration. This is the simplest rhythm that can be and it has a high level of order in it. All its component parts are the same, there is no difference. It is quite easy for the listener to notice this simple form of rhythm. Listen to this simple example for a while and experiment what you feel about that simple rhythm. After a few beats, you can completely understand its pattern. You can easily agree with the rhythm and create it inside your head. There is no mystery left, it is so obvious. And it becomes rapidly boring and uninteresting. If two musicians play a regular rhythm, but with a different tempo and with no attention to each other, what will happen? If you concentrate on one of the beats and try to ignore the other, you will find it regular and ordered. Same with the other beat. But the combination of two different rhythms will create a general atmosphere of disorder. Two things are there, but they are not synchronized, they are not arranged harmoniously with each other and at the same time they are part of the same sound context. So there is a big difference in the component parts of the sound and at the same time there are similarities, as the two beats are each one repeated regularly and use the same sound. According to your tolerance level for order and disorder, you will be able to appreciate it by following the two patterns independently, or you will reject it as incomprehensible and you will not appreciate it at all. The perception of order is then relative to the subject who perceives it. Now take a random pattern, with different instruments and with random beat durations. There are too much differences and almost no similarities in this example. How do you feel while listening to it? Do you understand it? Do you like it? What is lacking in it? It does not contain much order and will probably seem like random noise to you. Almost no aesthetic value as a whole. Now take the following rhythm. What is your experience while listening to it? When you listen to the first few notes, you will notice that there are different durations between each notes. The notes are from the same instrument, so there is a similarity, but the durations will at first look much different and not comprehensible. But after a few moments, you will notice that the same pattern repeats itself. When you hear the pattern for the third time, you feel like you have understood the pattern and the first feeling of disorder will easily change into a feeling of order. Did you experience it that way? If you play it again, your reaction will be different, as you now know that the pattern is regular and you have the pattern in mind. This shows you that by listening to a music many times, you can learn to understand its orderliness and at the same time the feeling of order will increase. Orderliness is then not only relative to the listener, but it can also change as the listener acquires a deeper understanding of the music he listens to. The next newsletter will continue on that subject, as there is more to observe about orderliness and rhythm. As rhythm is a quite simple phenomenon, we will be able to analyze it much deeper and discover some rules that are applicable to music composition. Right now, I suggest you watch the following YouTube videos. They are related to rhythm and percussion instruments. For each one of them, discover the effect they have upon you. Watch them several times and see if your viewpoint changes, specifically, the orderliness viewpoint, your feeling about how much order or disorder you can observe.
Then you can do the same with any music you like and focus on noticing the rhythmic orderliness generated by the music. In the next letter, we will analyze more about rhythmic orderliness. Dominique Vandenneucker |
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| Tips and Advises on Pizzicato |
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See also the frequently asked questions on page http://www.arpegemusic.com/clients4.php |
| Freely aligning
staves and systems on a page By default, Pizzicato automatically aligns the right and left borders of every staff on the internal margins of the pages. To disable this function, go in the "File" menu. Select the "Page layout" item and disable the "Justify systems on page, horizontally" check box, then click OK. You can the freely move the systems on the page, Pizzicato will not systematically align them right or left. Volume control : limits imposed by MIDI channels The MIDI communication system between the computer and an external synthesizer or a sound card may transmit messages called "Controllers". There are 128 controllers and the most known one is controller 7 which determines the volume. On a MIDI cable, there can be 16 independent channels, so that 16 sound generators may have different volumes. For a given channel, Pizzicato can send a volume value that you select (between 0 and 127). If 2 staves use the same MIDI channel, the volume message sent on one will affect the other one in the same way because the staves notes are played with the same MIDI channel. With the automatic management of the MIDI channels by Pizzicato, this situation can happen only in 2 cases, because Pizzicato always tries to use a different channel for each staff. The first case is for the percussion instruments. The percussions are associated to channel 10 in a lot of synthesizers. If you create 4 percussion staves, they will all be assigned to channel 10 and even if the instrument view shows 4 volume sliders, only the last one will have the desired effect, because its message is sent the last and its volume is thus considered (the first messages are also sent, but immediately modified by the following ones). If you want to assign different amplitudes to the different percussions, you can use another parameter named "Velocity". You can also find it in the instrument view ("Miscellaneous effects" item). The nuances (P, FF, MF,...) placed in the score affect the velocity and are thus independent. You must know that the velocity value is sent for every note played and not globally for all the notes. So, several notes sent on the same MIDI channel may have various velocities. The second case is when there is more staves in the scores than MIDI channels on your sound card or synthesizer. In this case, Pizzicato is forced to reassign the same MIDI channels to different staves. To avoid that, you can disable the automatic management of the channels and assign them yourself (for example, you can assign staves with an equal volume/instrument to the same MIDI channel and thus keep other channels for the staves needing a specific volume). The ultimate solution is of course to add a new synthesizer or sound card, which adds 16 MIDI channels. Pizzicato Professional 3 may work up to 16 MIDI ports (thus 16 x 16 MIDI channels). Aligning lyrics When lyrics are written under the notes, you can align their positions. Using the tool that moves the lyrics, you must know how the SHIFT and CTRL keys modify it: When you move only one text line, everything moves (all measures and staves of the instrument) When you move a text line while holding down the SHIFT key (above the CTRL key), only the lyrics of the current measure move When you move a text line while holding down the CTRL key, only the lyrics of the current system move When you move a text line while holding down the SHIFT and CTRL keys, only the current syllable moves In this way you can adapt the position of the lyrics, for example when a note goes too low. It is better to move the lyrics when they have all been encoded, otherwise you will desynchronize the positions and it will be more difficult to align them after. Do not forget that you can use 8 independent text lines,that you can align independently. Every move of a line implies that all the lines below it will also move in the same way. In Pizzicato 3, you also have a specific function. Select the measures and go in the Edit menu, Adjust lyrics... A dialog lets you readjust all the lyrics positions. |
Order
Pizzicato
Order one of the Pizzicato versions today on our secured site by clicking here. Free upgrades Buying one version of Pizzicato gives you the right to about 3 years of free upgrades. If your license number is superior to 19000, you can download the lastest upgrade 3.6.2.2 for Mac and Windows by clicking here. Advanced upgrades At any time, you can upgrade to a more advanced version of Pizzicato, for a special upgrade price. See the upgrade order page by clicking here. Pizzicato in the US and Canada
You can always contact Blair Ashby, at Broadlands Media, Inc. for any information you need on Pizzicato and the way to use it. Located in Denver, Colorado, Blair is the official representative of Pizzicato for the United States and English speaking Canada. You can visit the site and buy Pizzicato directly at www.writing-music.com email: info@writing-music.com |
| Music course for Beginners |
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Read the full Pizzicato music course on page http://www.arpegemusic.com/manual36/EN090.htm |
| Music
Notation Examples We will examine and listen to some examples of the notation of sound characteristics, so as to illustrate the theory learned in a previous lesson. Note pitch - example
What is a clef?
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With Pizzicato Composition Light:
With EarMaster Pro 6, improve your music abilities:
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| The Pizzicato Music Software range of products |
| What version of
Pizzicato would fit your needs?
1. Pizzicato Light is an introductory version to learn music, make exercises, write small scores (1 or 2 pages) and use basic MIDI and audio recording features. You can start practicing the music keyboard and make your first steps into music composition. [20 euros as a package, 15 euros as a download]
2. Pizzicato Beginner is a general purpose score editor, that contains most of the tools you need to write, print and listen to music scores for the choir, solo instrument or small orchestras up to 16 instruments playing together. [99 euros as a package, 67 euros as a download] 3. Pizzicato Notation is a full score editor that offers you all the notation features found in any other Pizzicato versions. It contains all the tools you need to write, print and listen to music scores, from the soloist to the full orchestra. [199 euros as a package, 129 euros as a download] 4. Pizzicato Guitar contains all the tools you need to write sheet music for the guitar or other fretted instruments like the banjo, the bass, etc. You can use a tablature or TAB, or a standard staff. A guitar fret board window helps you entering the notes and you can create chord diagrams. [39 euros as a package, 29 euros as a download] 5. Pizzicato Choir helps you write and print nice sheet music for the choir. Learn to sing your voice while Pizzicato plays the other voices. Increase your knowledge of music theory with the full music course included. [39 euros as a package, 29 euros as a download] 6. Pizzicato Soloist contains all the tools you need to write music for a solo instrument. You can print nice solo sheet music, whether for the brass, woodwind, string instruments or any solo instrument written on one staff. [39 euros as a package, 29 euros as a download] 7. Pizzicato Drums and Percussion is specifically designed for music notation of drums and percussion instruments. You can use up to 8 staves, each one with 1 up to 16 lines to which you can assign a percussion or drum instrument. [39 euros as a package, 29 euros as a download] 8. Pizzicato Keyboard contains all the tools you need to write music for keyboard instruments like the piano, the organ or the synthesizer, with up to 4 staves. [39 euros as a package, 29 euros as a download] 9. Pizzicato Composition Light introduces the concept of intuitive music composition for a small budget. This is where you can start exploring music composition like never before, up to 8 instruments. [49 euros as a package, 39 euros as a download] 10. Pizzicato Composition Pro offers you the most advanced tools for intuitive music composition, with no limits to the number of instruments. [149 euros as a package, 99 euros as a download] Finally, Pizzicato Professional contains every function available in the 10 versions already described. You can use all the features for music notation as well as all the tools for intuitive music composition and combine them in the same software. [299 euros as a package, 195 euros as a download]
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Godelieve
Cuylits,
clarinetist
(Belgium) -
"I
transpose, reduce scores and help our conductor to write his
own arrangements on paper"
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