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jimbee

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  1. Thank you very much, volovicg. That was driving me crazy — I don't know how the Max Dots setting got changed to zero, as I had not touched it (AFAIK). Thus I mistakenly thought it had something to do with importing the midi file from another project. And it does not seem to be a global setting, which explains why I was able to make it work in the same project by creating another track. Somehow that new track must have defaulted to Max Dots 1 when it was created. This setting must be region-based. ( Oh, yes, here it is on Page 677 of the user guide: ) In further testing, Logic seems to default to 1 for Max Dots when a new project is created. And interesting that if the Inspector syncopation box is unchecked, syncopation still works if Max Dots is 1 and you force syncopation in note attributes. But if Syncopation is checked and note attributes is set to force syncopation, it will not work if Dots is zero. Dots overrides two settings.
  2. I downloaded MuseScore and was putting notes on the page in a few minutes, Mike. Thanks for the advice. Through the years I've considered switching to Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico. They were expensive and the learning curve seemed steep. I already had Logic, so I stuck with it. The app that is easiest to use is the one you know how to use, of course. Logic's curve was steep and baffling and frustrating, but it does an amazing amount of things. I'm still learning how to use it, and there's almost always a way to do something, or work around it. I see MuseScore's user guide is 260 pages. Logic's is 1,000. I guess that's a plus. Or not. I'll give MuseScore a try and find out.
  3. I'm new to jazz notation, but my understanding is, slashes mean to play four beats per measure, but notes are not specified. A bass player and pianist might get four measures of a C∆ chord symbol, an Fmin7, an A13, and Dmaj6(b9) with sixteen slashes. And they improvise the part. According to the class I'm in, you give the drummer almost no information, except four slashes per bar and an initial instruction of swing or straight. Occasionally you might provide a rhythmic figure if the drummer should play in unison with a horn phrase. Leave the multi-rests in, take the slashes out . . . I can imagine the drummer saying, Hey, man, am I supposed to lay out for 32 bars? He also plays piano and saxophone, so he's a good reader. My experience: I used 192 bars of slashes for the drum part in our first assignment. At the reading, the drummer said it was a waste of space, created too many pages to fit on the music stand, and it should be condensed, or "you could just give me the lead sheet and I'll be fine." He's a pro drummer; I'm a student; he's right. There was no time for him to tell me how to condense it. In class, we got a transcription (done by the teacher) of a 1966 tune by Horace Silver. It has 83 bars of slash notation for the drum part. Counting repeats and solo sections, it's the equivalent of more than 200 measures. There's an amazing drum solo in the tune that would be impossible to notate, and if you could, nobody could read it. Slash notation seems to be the way drum parts are represented. If Elaine Gould doesn't have a simple, space-saving way to say "improvise for 32 bars," it probably doesn't exist, and I find nothing about this in her book. For now, I'm taking the multi-measure rests out with Photoshop, leaving the slashes in, and awaiting the drummer's reaction. He'll be back for the next reading. I'm thinking of it as a song map with cues, but not being as lazy as giving him a one-page lead sheet. Meanwhile, I'll see if we can get the drummer to bring in a part that he thinks is well done, so the class can see what it looks like.
  4. I notated a melody in a Logic project, exported the midi file, then imported the midi file into a different, larger project. I had tweaked the notation in the original file to create some dotted eighth notes beamed with a sixteenth. But now, in the main project where I want to use this melody, all the dotted eighth notes have become eighths tied to a sixteenth. The syncopation checkbox in the inspector is checked. I've also double-clicked on the notes and forced syncopation. But nothing changes. Is there some problem with exporting a midi region, and then importing it? Could it strip out all previous editing of the notation and just export raw data? And if so, why would it not allow me to fix it in the new project? It seems to be a problem with the region, as syncopation will work on a newly created track. The zipped project is attached. Thanks for any help! Syncopation not working.logicx.zip
  5. I am trying to condense 192 bars of slash notation onto two letter-size pages, kind of a lead sheet roadmap for an improvised jazz drum part. All my experiments have failed, and I see nothing in the manual about “bar consolidation” or anything similiar. My latest attempt uses a multi-measure rest symbol to make a 32-bar / “one-bar" stave, which keeps the bar numbers in order. But that leaves the rest symbol in the stave, though Logic does allow insertion of slashes to indicate the drummer is playing here, not resting. I am thinking Logic has a way to communicate: This one bar is really 32 bars of slash notation. Or maybe there is a simpler, cleaner way to notate this part? Any advice much appreciated.
  6. Thank you a ton, Plowman. Underneath the covid mask, I have a ridiculous grin on my face — it's great when a problem that's driving you crazy can be fixed with the uncheck of a box. My apologies for being a "didn't RTFM" guy . . . well, not exactly, over the past 10 years, I had gotten to page 1,027. The answer is on page 1,062.
  7. The user guide says this is possible, and there was a question about it nine years ago in the forum, but no answer was given. I'm trying to write a lead sheet with a piano part that alternates between traditional notation on a grand staff, and chord symbols above slashes on a single treble staff. The goal is to change from a notated opening to chord comping. I've gotten as far as assigning the two different staff styles successfully, but in the score, the comping staff has two staves, treble and bass, even though the staff style has only a treble stave. For economy and presentation, I'm trying to get rid of the unused bass staff in the comping sections. Logic will do anything for love of notation, but maybe it won't do this? I've attached a screenshot and the zipped test file that is just lacking that one last tweak that gets it there. Thanks much for any suggestions. PIANO DOUBLE TO SINGLE STAFF TEST.logicx.zip
  8. Thanks for chiming in, Frances O. I agree, unticking "no overlap" is an attractive idea, and would work OK sometimes. For me, it feels a little blunt or . . . undiscerning? I didn't give a very good example by just stringing together a bunch of whole notes in the original post. Even though polyphonic staff styles make me want to scream sometimes, I like their control over independent lines — ties up or down, stem direction, rests showing or hidden, etc. And in the places where something is not quite right, control-click on the note and make an adjustment (and if you can remember the key shortcut, you can make the change pretty fast). Where a one-channel piano staff style especially gets me into trouble is treble notes that temporarily go below middle C and bass notes that go above. It's confusing to see that left hand note is now being "played" by the right hand . . . seemingly. Then again, you could manually change that bass note that jumps up into treble clef back into the bass clef. And you could insert a user rest in places where there is a silence in one of the lines but the notation doesn't reflect it. Sometimes I think, maybe Sibelius is better, or Finale, or Dorico, but people complain about those, too. Logic will do just about anything you want with notation, I've found, if you bang your head against the wall long enough. And do I really want to learn another program (when I haven't even learned Logic). Not really, it's too late for me. Anyway, since you took the time to look at that compressed "external midi instrument" Logic file, I offer a different one for your consideration, since I played around a little more, this one is a non-polyphonic vs. polyphonic cage match. With the same midi notes in the piano roll, you get very different scores when there are independent lines happening. I don't know how Beethoven and his pals did what they did with quill pens and no erasers. And how did that stuff survive for 250 years? The paper couldn't have been very good. Cheers! Well-tempered clavier measure.logicx.zip
  9. Simple fix, Atlas007, thank you very much. It worked the first time I tried it. Strangely, when I started experimenting, duplicating existing tracks, creating new external instrument tracks, trying to recreate the problem with the same midi notes and same staff style, I began to get different results with the same midi channels. Very mysterious. Changing the midi channel in the inspector to a different channel and then changing it back, sometimes seemed to make a difference. Sometimes one track would play all the polyphonic notes, but another would not, and they both would be set to channel 1. I even set a track to channel 10 and it played drums, not piano, and my keyboard does not have any midi drum sounds. A track set to channel 12 played all the polyphonic notes, as if it was set to channel 1. And when I would create a new external instrument track with the "keyboard-1" setting, it would come into the arrange window with "all" as the midi channel, not 1. I wonder if that's where I got mixed up originally. I also wonder if the Logic preferences might be corrupt. Part of me wants to test that, part of me wants to notate with pencil and staff paper. In any case, my brain is now locked into "match midi channel of external keyboard to midi channel of the track." Thanks again! Same midi channels, different results.logicx.zip
  10. Yes, if you want the Logic score to have 10 empty bars at the beginning. When you're in the score editor, hit option-control-shift-f to get to the global format preferences window, click on the Numbers & Names tab, and set the bar offset to -10 and the start with to 1.
  11. Yes. I have the choice of 1 through 16 on the keyboard, no "all" or "omni." With six voices in the staff style, when keyboard is set to 1, then only a note that is set to channel 1 sounds. A note set to channel 2 sounds only if the keyboard is transmitting on 2. I'm looking for a way to make the keyboard an "omni" instrument. I don't know enough about the environment to set up virtual midi cabling that could turn that channel 1 transmission into 1 through 6.
  12. I set up a six-voice piano staff style to get a proper-looking score for independent notes, showing their full duration rather than being truncated when a new note is struck. My keyboard transmits on only one of the sixteen channels at a time, in this case it's set to channel 1. But if each of the notes has a different midi channel in the staff style, 1-6, the only note that sounds is channel 1. Testing this staff style with an EXS24 piano, it works fine — for some reason, all channels sound even though I did nothing to set it up that way. Same with a piano loaded into Kontakt, which has an "omni" choice for midi channels. I thought the keyboard might work as an "omni" instrument by setting something up in the environment, maybe a midi channel splitter or a multi-instrument. But everything I tried failed (related question: for people with old eyes, is there a way to make the icons bigger in the environment?). My keyboard does play all the notes if they are set to channel 1, but then the score is a mess. Am I missing something easy to make this work? Advice much appreciated, Jim . . . attaching the Logic file and a screenshot of the project setup. EXTERNAL MIDI INSTRUMENT - ALL CHANNELS.logicx.zip
  13. In tracks window, hit the A key to go into automation mode, choose volume in the track header, use the pencil tool to draw in the volume curve you want. Make sure you're in read mode for playback.
  14. you could also create a piano style in staff styles that has enough voices to give each note a channel number. Most likely those notes that you want in the bass staff have a channel number of 1, which moves them up to the treble staff. Depending on your staff style, give them a channel number that puts them in the bass staff, that is, if your staff style has only two voices, and channel 1 is for treble clef and channel 2 is for bass, just change them to 2 in the events list. If the piece has notes that sustain over other shorter notes in the measure, though, you will need more than two voices to make the notation look correct — give them each their own channel.
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