Composition tools - Instruments |
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Instruments [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] The combination of rhythms, notes and chords will eventually
be played by instruments, so it is useful to be able to manage
and select instruments easily in a score. Up to now, this was
done by using the instruments view, combined with the selection
of a synthesizer driver. This is still in use, but with the
conductor view, a series of functionalities have been added to
ease the process of selecting instruments and creating new
scores. This is called a tree. It starts from the upper item
entitled Libraries which contains here one document
named Instruments and templates and two
folders named Music libraries and My library.
The document is open and contains several sub-folders and one
item named Template 1 measure 4/4. It is a
hierarchical musical object structure. In this lesson, we
will explore the document entitled Instruments and
templates. This dialog defines all the specifications related to this
instrument. Let us see this in details. The upper keyboard is used to specify the original General
MIDI note, i.e. the note that must be sent to the synthesizer
in order to hear that instrument. The second keyboard is used
to specify the note pitch that will be used on the staff when
the note is written in music notation. If the note may be
played using any written note, then no note specification
must be defined in the second keyboard. This is done by
clicking on the keyboard while holding down the SHIFT and
CTRL key. The name is specified as well as the standard note
head that should be used for this instrument. You may
add/delete percussion instrument specifications with the Add
and Delete button. They are added in the left list.
Click on one of them to set its specifications. You should know that this instrument library is not part of
the document you have opened. It is saved in a specific document,
inside the Pizzicato, DataEN, Libraries sub-folder.
If you make any change in this library, it is automatically saved
by Pizzicato. If at any time you want to go back to the original
library, just reinstall the program, without uninstalling it. The
original library will come back. You should now explore the various instruments found in these
folders, to orient yourself where to find what instrument. If you
open instruments to see how they are defined, close the dialog
with Cancel so that you will not modify the original
library. Using the instruments [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] For Pizzicato Notation, which does not contain the
conductor view, the only way to use instruments is to drag them
inside a score. For Pizzicato Professional and Composition,
you can also drag them on the conductor view. Both cases are
treated here. There are several ways to use the instruments in combination
with the conductor view. This section will explain how to do it. If you open this score, you have: The score contains one measure, with the name and correct
clef, the number of staves and lines,... If you explore its
associated instrument view settings, you will see that they
have been initialized with the specifications of the
instrument as seen before. This is an easy way to create a
score with a given instrument and to add it to the musical
desktop. The rectangle is now displaying two colors. In fact a
score rectangle will display horizontal areas with the colors
of the instruments it contains. The score is now: and the conductor view displays: The sub-folders found there contain a set of hierarchical
folders that define instrument sections and ensembles. The
idea is that a folder that contains instruments and/or other
sub-folders may be dragged on the musical desktop to create a
score template with all those instruments. For instance, open
the Synphonic Orchestras and drag and drop the
sub-folder named Bolero (Ravel). Open the score and
you will see the full orchestral score template, ready to be
used. You will notice that the brackets are placed for
instruments that are found in sub-folders of the dragged
folder. This operation (drag and drop of a folder) may be
done on an existing score rectangle on the musical desktop
but not inside an open score view. We suggest you to explore the various sub-folders inside
Sections and ensembles. They contain several templates
that can be used to build your scores and compositions. Managing the musical objects [Professional] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] By musical objects, we mean instruments, folders, documents,
virtual keyboards and other musical objects that will be
explained in the following lessons. These various elements may be
present inside a folder. We have seen that a document may contain a hierarchical
structure of musical objects. This structure is not static: you
may modify it and add new musical objects. This structure is in
fact located inside the Pizzicato, DataEN, Libraries
sub-folder. This folder contains sub-folders and Pizzicato
documents that are automatically added to the tree when you start
Pizzicato. A modification done in this structure is automatically
saved in the appropriate document located inside the Libraries
directory. This is also explained in the document manager. Compared to the previous versions of Pizzicato that did not
contain the document manager, version 3.5 may use several
configurations in the document manager. You can find all the
documents of the library in configuration 3, Libraries.
But generally, configurations 3, 4 and 5 display more specific
areas of the libraries, which makes it easier to navigate through
the library, because you do not need to search through the same
tree for many different interesting locations. Here are the
specifications of configurations 3, 4 and 5: You may add configurations and/or modify the original
configurations. See the document manager on how to do it. By adding a new document in a folder, you may add a new node
in the tree. We will do this in order for you to have the
possibility to organize and modify a structure without touching
to the original library. Here is how to do it. The Tests document may now be used to make some
experiences without disturbing the original library. You will find one score in the Tests document as
there is at least one score in a document. Now, in addition to
one or more scores, a document may contain a structure of musical
objects, the same kind as the structure we have seen so far. So
you may also add musical objects in the documents you open. By
default, a document does not contain any musical object. This tree behaves exactly as explained here above. The musical
objects that you create in it will be saved with the document. It
is an easy way to transfer musical objects to somebody else if
you want to exchange them. The same will hold true for the
musical libraries, as we will explain in a further lesson. This dialog lets you select a synthesizer driver. From
this driver, Pizzicato will extract all instruments and will
create a structure with one folder for each instrument
familly. It will also extract the percussion instruments. If
your synthesizer is included in this list, you may then
import it so you can use its instruments exactly as we have
explained in this lesson. Select for instance the GS
synthesizer, which corresponds to several Roland
synthesizers. Click on Select synthesizer. Open the
new GS - Instruments folder by clicking on its
"+" sign. The tree becomes: The first choice is None which means that all
instruments of the folder will be assigned to no particular
synthesizer. The other choices depend on your MIDI setup. It
is the list of all MIDI output ports. When you call this
menu, Pizzicato will assign this MIDI port to the instrument
you clicked, or to all instruments that can be found inside
the folder you clicked. If you have several synthesizers, you may use this
function to assign its MIDI output port to a folder
containing its instruments. In this way, when you drag the
instruments, they will be assigned the correct synthesizer in
the instruments view of the score. This function will also
try to match the sound of the target synthesizer with the
original sound included in the instrument. For this to work,
the General Midi equivalences must be present in the
synthesizer driver, which is not the case for every driver. The instrument colors [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] The color system used for instruments is that a color has been
assigned to each instrument family. Inside a family, the same
color is used with a scale of brightness from dark (lower pitch)
to very bright (higher pitch). This system is only an
approximation and does not establish an exact matching between a
sound pitch and a color. It is an arbitrary scale and is only
used as a clue to know which instruments are present in a score
when observed in the conductor view. The family colors are :
Strings
Guitar, picked strings and piano
Woodwind and blown instruments
Organ, synthetic sounds and effects
Brass
Percussion
Voices
Bass