And more. Slept late today, but some more scoring work. A little more interesting this time as I'm working on automating more complex MIDI sequences. I've modified Prometheus in a few key ways to help with this.
These live piano pieces are far from metronomic timing, and can be difficult to automate, so I've added the option of a 'manual click track', a beat played on the keyboard to the music. In practice, I can create one by merging lots of notes and choosing an average, but it's not an exact science and needs some manual checking. Once this click track is there, I can add sub-notes to split up the timing, then quantise the music to fit, but the actual timing is still irregular and organic, so the next step is to 'regiment' the notes so that each tick is on an actual beat. Today I've programmed that and added the routine to split notes half-way for the click track.
Well, it all works. It takes quite a lot of modification in the end because the duration of the notes is lost when the track is compressed, and overlapping long notes can cause problems in MuseScore when importing a MIDI sequence, so I tend to make the notes shorter and then extend them manually. Overall though, it's now much faster and less painful to score these tunes. The other method was to stare at the MIDI sequence and notate manually, which was hideously slow; one 3 minute piano piece might take 8 hours or more to get right note-by-note. This way, I've notated two tracks in 90 minutes.
This is a vital took because I'm increasingly adding improvised and live sections to my music, but I don't always use MIDI sequences. Some will inevitably have to be done by ear, or other ways. The cadenza in Freud's Lecture is simply advised in the text rather than scored at all!
All of the tunes apart from Golden Water from The Anatomy Of Emotions are now scored, as well as all of Salome, Gunstorm, and The End And The Beginning. I've started on Heart Of Snow, but again, the complex piano solo there (as well as the main string melody in Remembrance Service) needs a tool like this. This is a good reminder that I need to keep track of the lead, guide, melodies in the sequence.
