Passport Designs Encore Music Notation Software

Transcription

1 Passport Designs Encore Music Notation Software Introduction There are quite a number of programs on the market now which are intended to allow either music composition, or music notation on screen with playback either via the computer or via Midi, or music page layout and printing. Most programs allow a combination of these functions, but are actually optimized for one or two functions, with the others offerred as a bonus. Encore allows a combination of all these functions, although for serious publishing and printing, programs such as HB Music Engraver, or Finale offer greater flexibility. Encore is a mid- to high-priced program which retails for about 450, and should provide most of the functions you need unless you are primarily involved in publishing and printing. Where Encore scores is in its ease of use when it comes to note entry and page layout, compared with other programs such as Finale which have many layers of dialog boxes which you have to negotiate before you achieve what you want. Printing Encore uses the Sonata music font from Adobe Systems, Inc. The screen fonts are provided with the Encore program, and if you are using the Imagewriter printer these screen fonts are what you use to draw onto paper. If you are using a Laserwriter, you have to buy the Sonata printer fonts separately from Adobe, via your local Apple dealer, or by mail order. If you do not have these fonts you can still print out on a Laserwriter, but the printing will not be as clean as if you used the correct Laserwriter fonts. When you are working in Encore s edit window, you can view a representation of a sheet of 8.5 by 11 inch paper when you choose Preview from the Windows Menu. On my Apple 13 monitor this preview is still quite small and difficult to read, so I would like to see some kind of feature which allows you to use a bigger screen area to display this preview, or a zoom feature, or whatever. Normally, using the default font size 3, you are limited to twelve, 3 to 4 measure staves per page. This is OK for standard piano music, lead sheets and the like, but for larger scores you may need more staves, or, alternatively, bigger note sizes on the page. It is very easy to change the number of bars or measures on a line using the Measures Per System option in the Change Menu. You just click in the margin of a staff to select it, and then go to the this Measures option and enter a new number, say 5. Every staff in every system will now have 5 measures. It is equally easy to insert or delete a system. By the way, in case you were wondering, a system in this context is a group of staves arranged one above the other, joined by a vertical bracket at the left, and containing barlines going across the page to the right margin. If you use more bars per line, or measures per system as Passport s terminology would say, you may need to reduce the font size, which again, is easy to do, using the Staff Sheet dialog box from the Windows Menu. You can set font sizes differently for different staves, which is a useful feature for some types of score. Finally, there is a Reduce option in the Page Setup dialog box which you can access from the File Menu before you do your printing. Using an

2 Imagewriter II, you can print at either 100% or 50% of normal size, but a Laserwriter allows you to print anywhere from 25% to 400% normal size. If you wish to print parts out separately, you just copy a stave to the Mac s clipboard, close your file and open a new one, paste in the stave you want and print it out. These options are reasonably comprehensive, but not really as good as the options provided in Coda software s new Music Prose program, which also allows you to create PostScript files which can offer more advanced printer control, and Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) files which can be imported and exported to and from applications that support EPS. This type of file compatibility is highly desirable if you need to do professional publishing and printing work. MIDIFile Compatibility Most music programs feature MIDI File formats that can be used to exchange data between any other music programs on any computer that support MIDI Files. To transfer between different computers you will either need suitable connecting cables, or a modem connection between the computers. Unfortunately, you lose a lot of the page formatting information if you attempt to transfer an Encore file into, say, Finale to take advantage of its superior page layout facilities for instance. So it is a pity that Encore does not support PostScript and Encapsulated PostScript file formats that would allow you to transfer formatted pages to other programs for further work to be done. When you import a standard MIDI File into Encore, or sequences created in one of Passport s other programs such as Master Tracks Pro, Jr, or Pro 4, Encore has to analyze the file s MIDI data to determine the durations, locations, and beaming of the notes it imports. The data is initially displayed as raw data with dots on the stave to represent the pitches of the incoming notes in their correct bars. You then have to select the bars individually, or in groups, or all at once, and use the Guess Durations command from the Notes Menu. This will automatically get most of the durations correct, and the idea is that you then spot edit the score to get the tricky bits right (eg glissandos!). I quite liked this approach, having had terrible experiences when using MOTU Composer in the past with pages that needed prohibitive amounts of editing before they could be used. Encore will guess most things right first time, leaving you with just a few awkward parts to get right using other methods. You do still need to quantize your sequencer files sensibly, and possibly extend note durations in your sequence files to occupy complete note values in order to get readable music in any notation program. This is really a limitation of conventional music notation, which demands that you make educated decisions as to the best way to notate any music, even hand-written copy. If you wish to notate note lengths extremely accurately, for instance, this can lead to decreased legibility when it comes to reading the music. Also, for many purposes it is not possible to notate the actual sound that comes out of your instrument, such as when the sound of a note stays audible even after you have stopped playing it. This could be due to the nature of the instrument, such as a piano whose notes ring on, or due to reverberation in the room or in the recording that keeps the note sounding after you have

3 finished playing it. When you create your Midi sequences, you will probably take these factors into account subconsciously, by playing the note durations that sound best on the instrument you are using for the part, as you will normally strive to do. You do have to be aware that these may not represent the wisest choice of durations as far as the notation is concerned. It certainly helps if you have previously had a lot of experience in notating music by conventional methods before you try using a computer program like Encore. Beginners will be able to use the program, and will probably find that they start to learn a lot about notation by using the program. But it is unlikely that anyone with no experience of using conventional music notation will ever get the best out of notation programs like Encore. This is not a criticism of this program, just a general comment about computer-based notation software. Note Entry Apart from importing sequences or MIDI Files, there are 3 main ways to enter music into Encore: Step Time entry using the mouse, Step Time entry using a MIDI Controller (such as a synthesizer keyboard), and Real Time entry using a MIDI Controller. You can mix all these methods freely. There is just one palette of notation tools available, which may be switched between a Clefs palette, Notes Palette, Graphics Palette, Dynamics Palette, or two separate Marks Palettes. To use the palettes is a breeze, you just click on any icon within a palette and the cursor will turn into that icon. Clicking on the staff with this cursor places that object where you click. It is very easy to shift barlines to make more or less space available between individual bars by clicking on a barline and dragging. Used in conjunction with the Measures Per System command this allows plenty of flexibility while laying out your score. There are also rulers available to help you line things up. You can also change the vertical and horizontal size of a staff by changing the size of the font in which the staff is displayed. For instance, you could change your staff sizes temporarily while you are working on your score, or just for the final printout. Once you have your notes entered you can change the distance between the note heads and beams, or change the angle of the beams simply by clicking and dragging, and you can change the distance between staves in a similar way. No need to enter complex dialogue boxes as with some other programs. You can move notes or even whole chords in the same way, but I did find it difficult to place sharps, flats, and naturals properly because there didn t seem to be any very effective individual control over the positioning of these on the stave. I found step time editing to be fairly speedy and relatively painless, either using the mouse or a Midi keyboard. Using Midi, you first click on the spot in the score where you want to enter a note, then choose the note or rest duration you want using the palette, or from the Mac keyboard, and then play your notes in one at a time. Chord entry is also easy, you just press and hold the first note you want, then play the rest of the notes, releasing them as you please, and then when you release the first key you hit, they will all be entered as a chord. This system allows you to enter chords that you would normally find difficult to play.

4 Real Time Entry This is one of Encore s more advanced features, the one which may persuade you to fork out 450 for this program instead of 250 or less for other programs such as Music Prose or DeLuxe Music Construction set. Again, it is very simple to set up and use this feature. You choose either an internal Mac click (which wouldn t work on my review software however) or an external Midi click, and set your keyboard to transmit on Midi channel 1. Then you press the Record button at the top of the edit window and start playing. The notes appear on the screen as you play, without stems or beams. There is an option to split notes into different staves, such as right hand and left hand piano parts, which is very useful. You can also record Program Changes, Pitch Bends, Channel Pressure, Controllers, and Modulation data, but this will not appear in the score, although these will play back via Midi. The display scrolls as the music plays, and a marker appears at the start of each new bar to help indicate where you are. This is useful when you are playing back to check where to make your edits. You then have to guess the durations and beam the beats as with other forms of entry. Voicing and Channelizing There are two reasons to voice notes in Encore. You may wish to have a staff with more than one independent line of music, say for four-part choral music, or whatever. Another reason would be to allow you to assign separate voices to a staff so that you can use a different sound for each voice or part. Each staff can be assigned to one of 32 MIDI channels (using both Modem and Printer ports) and you can also divide the music on each staff into as many as 4 voices each assigned to a different Midi channel. You can then highlight these parts separately if you want to edit them, such that everything but the selected part on the stave is greyed out. This is very useful when composing your music and making alterations. The Notes Menu contains a Flip Stems command to allow you to have stems on different parts going in different directions on the same stave - very useful! Using the Staff Sheet window you can enter a Midi program change number for any staff or voice you want. Unlike some of the better sequencer programs which offer fancy customization options for program changes, you are limited to using the numbers 1 to 128, which may not be the way your synthesizer numbers its patches, although it is not too difficult to make the translation - just tedious! The Staff Sheet dialog box also allows you to enable or disable a staff from playback, or to solo one or more tracks. Other Features There are reasonably flexible text entry and lyric entry options, X in the time of Y tuplet options, various clef types, and a useful selection of the most common notation markings such as trills and accents. These markings do not affect the MIDI data that Encore uses to play the music however, which seems a shame. The dynamics palette contains eleven markings from ppp to fp, which should suffice for most applications. Staves may be quickly transposed using the Key function in the Staff Sheet dialog box, and intervals are identified both by name and by interval number. You can also mix (merge) the data from staves by copying one staff into the clipboard and then using the Mix Data command from the Edit Menu. There are also Nudge

5 commands to move notes up, down, left, or right, although rests can only be moved either left or right. You can also set measure numbers to appear either above or below the staves. Conclusions There are several areas in which I think this program could be improved: I would like to be able to click on a note and hear it play over Midi while I am editing the score, and I would like to see EPS files available, and more flexible printing options. It would be good if some of the Midi data such as Modulations or Pitch Bends could be notated in some way, although I realize that there are practical problems with this, such as what exactly is the modulation modulating, and how much is the pitch bending. I would like to see something like a standard Notation File format, like the MIDI File format, so that you could swap files between various notation programs, like you can swap files between sequencer programs, without losing all the formatting information. The manual is OK, but only just OK - certainly not as good as Music Prose s excellent manual. So what do I like? Well the Number 1 feature has to be the Real Time Midi note entry. And the program is pretty intuitive to use, and consequently easy to learn - both important points for people who may not use this program every day of the week. I think that the program is optimized for music composition more than for publishing and printing, which is not a bad thing, just something you should be aware of when deciding if Encore is the program for you. And finally, Encore is not copy-protected, which is a brave move on the part of Passport, for which they should earn the praises of all serious users of their music software. I look forward to the day when software copy protection is completely discarded, as it causes more problems for the users than it prevents piracy. Nice one Passport! Mike Collins December 1989