Taking a piano song written in Ableton Live and scribing it in Musescore - my notes

• Mar 12, 2013 - 06:58

Hi,

I originally created this piano song, Remembrance, in Ableton Live. My goal was to scribe this song out in sheet music, using Musescore 1.3.

After some initial reading, I decided to take this strategy with Ableton Live and Musescore:
1. Quantize and clean up the live midi note recording to fit the 6/8 time signature in Ableton
2. Import the midi into Musescore
3. Clean up the notation in Musescore.

This ended up being a lot of work, especially for changing the notation to properly fit 6/8 and fixing the slurs across cords, which still doesn't play right in Musescore's midi out. If I had to do it again, I'm not sure if I would do a midi import, I think I would try just entering the notes by hand. Anyways, for the benefit of others (and hopefully me too with the feedback), I will share my experience. Oh and here's the song: http://musescore.com/user/72835/scores/94505 Note, the auto-generated sound playback does not properly handle the slurs and accidentals across slurs, so it sounds wrong!

1. Quantize and clean up the live midi note recording to fit the 6/8 time signature
After playing around on a piano while waiting in a busy music shop, I went home and recorded ideas in Ableton Live's session view. After some back and forth and tinkering around, I ended up with a full linear song in arrangement view with the midi information recorded.

I knew I couldn't import the midi from my playing directly, because at the very least, the time would be relatively all over the place, because of the live spontaneity of the recording and my poor keyboarding skills :) . So, I quantized the midi information in Ableton to fit 6/8, since I created it with kind a two groups of triplets with some offbeat/syncopation grieving feel to it.

When you hit quantize in Ableton, it snaps the note lengths to "the grid". However, since there is no "space" between the notes, Musescore will treat all the notes as slurs. To get around this, in Ableton, I highlighted all the notes and ever so slightly shorted them all by a hair, so that almost all the single notes would show up as single notes on the midi import in Musescore.

2. Import the midi into Musescore
This was a bit tricky since my first attempt to take the midi file and dragging it into Musescore ended up with a new song and everything in treble clef. What I ended up doing was going back in Ableton, and splitting the bass and treble notes into its separate midi clips.

With the separate midi clips, I then dragged them into Musescore one at a time into my empty piano song. Each midi drag and drop created its own song. I then copied and pasted the treble and bass part back into a single empty piano song.

3. Clean up the notation in Musescore.
So now I had notes written down, but it looked really messy. I had to spend time clean up the note groupings and slurs.

For example, instead of using a dotted half note, it would slur together a half note and a quarter note. Other parts, it looked like it was trying to to keep to two groupings of 3 eights per measure, but sometimes it didn't. At least the timing was correct, since I already quantized and cleaned it up in Ableton before. Cleaning this up along with slurs seemed to break the midi playback though.

Also, the slurs. For slurring across cords, Musescore wanted to slur each note separately, and use separate slurs across each note across measures. I'm not a notation expert, but I looked up a few sources, and they said that one should just use a single slur over a chord. Plus it looked cleaner to my eyes. So I manually forced this. In doing so, it broke the midi out playback of Musescore. The midi out playback ignored the slurs, and even worse, ignored the accidentals that that should have been shared across the slurs. This is a aggravating cause the midi preview on Musescore.com sounds wrong.

In the end, I did end up with my sheet music the way I wanted it (hopefully technically correct) and shared on musescore.com http://musescore.com/user/72835/scores/94505. For the reasons above, the sound preview is totally wrong, I wish I could just disable it. It took a lot of time to do the clean up in steps 1 and 3. The next time I do this, I may just manually enter the notes in Musescore by hand.

Comments

• Mar 12, 2013 - 08:10

Thanks for the write up! Very useful !

For example, instead of using a dotted half note, it would slur together a half note and a quarter note.
Not it wouldn't. It would tie together a half note and a quarter note. See Tie and Slur
I think you don't make the difference between the two and that's why you got problems... Especially with the playback, accidentals etc...
If you want to make a chord lasts during two notes, you need a tie. And you need to tie each note of the chord. You'll probably not find any source with tie only on one note if the author wanted the sound to last. And then MuseScore playback will be ok. Check the playback of measure 76, left hand in your score, Musescore does play the tied notes correctly.

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• Mar 12, 2013 - 18:03

I agree a lot of your specific issues are due to confusion slur and tie - they are entirely unrelated concepts that just happen to share a similar shape. Use slurs when you mean slur, use tie when you mean tie, and I think you'd be much happier with how things come out. This is also why the accidentals don't sound as you intended - because you used a slur where you should have used a tie, the normal rule that an accidental carries over the barline for a tie does not apply. Because you didn't tie the notes, MuseScore correctly cancels the accidental at the bar lone. And while it is true that you are supposed use a single *slur* to connect chords when actually slurring them, you do still have to *tie* each note individually when actually tying them.

However, that said, I suspect your bottom line would still be, it's not necessarily any easier to get good results starting from MIDI import and cleaning up by hand than it is to simply enter the music by hand in the first place. Even after quantizing the input, there will still be any number of note lengths where MuseScore might be accurate to a fault and you'd rather see a whole note in 4/4, for instance, rather than a dotted half tied to an eighth or whatever you might have really played. Plus MuseScore can't know if a given accidental should be spelled F# (as would often be appropriate within a D major chord, or an ascending chromatic line) or Gb (as would often be appropriate within an Eb minor chord, or a descending chromatic line) so you end up needing to correct roughly half the accidentals. Plus the time spent adding double bars, dynamics, articulations, etc doesn't go away.

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• Mar 16, 2013 - 06:14

Ah I meant I first looked into editing the handbook.. which is linked somewhere else on this site as "documentation"...

Strange, i could be really tired (it is getting late here) but I don't see a tutorials link (other than the one you just posted).. but i do see a howto link. kinda confusing.. Anyways, I'll look into this. Thanks.

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• Mar 16, 2013 - 08:55

How I see it.

  • The handbook is more a reference for each feature in MuseScore.
  • A Howto is a short list of actions to carry out a small task that can be sum up in a "How to" question. They can contain a short video. Example: How to delete a measure?
  • Tutorials are longer articles, on a larger task or topic. They contain several images, videos, etc...

Other contributors prefer to create a video and post it on youtube instead of Howto, tutorials, etc... For example ChurchOrganist's tutorials

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• Mar 16, 2013 - 09:19

There's no entry for Tutorials on the right-hand-side menu, I believe it is really missing there.
The pretty new FAQs are missing too.
Maybe these could be joined, "HowTos, FAQs & Tutorials"
Or have Handbook, FAQs, Tutorials, HowTos and possibly Developers' Handbook and Plugin Development too in a submenu under "Documentation". Also the tour might go there.

Also I'm missing the option to have FAQs, howtos and tutorials getting translated

I'll create a new post about this: http://musescore.org/en/node/20487

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