Real-time advance MIDI using Metronome signal

• Nov 19, 2024 - 11:04

The current way to enter music quickly is using the midi pedal as midi-advance button. I would like to use the metronome running e.g. 60 beats as the source to automatically advance. This way you could play midi keyboard quarters without having to press the pedal on every note. Is there a way to use the Metronome as MIDI source for this.

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• Nov 20, 2024 - 09:15

I have read the manual and tried all methods. Of course you can set the metronome. But there is no way to input notes smaller than the metronome. You always have to choose the smallest note you are going to use. If you choose Tempo 60 and enter 4ths using the metronome, then the pulse will be quarter notes, nothing smaller. What I am trying to achieve, and other users as well, is that the Metronome runs its own speed, you set the smallest note value to 8ths or 16ths, and then it listens and captures whatever you are playing. So the Metronome pulse should in fact be the Advance action, not the way it is now.

I was thinking of creating a Virtual MIDI instrument. All this would have to do is to generate 4 Advance actions per beat (ergo 16ths). Musescore should then listen if I play during each of these pulses. The Metronome now is pulsing based on the speed that I play, but it should loop through the part waiting for my input instead. Maybe somebody has already thought of a solution this way.

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• Nov 20, 2024 - 15:06

Ah, I see. I did not use this myself, and did not read the chapter very carefully. I agree that it does not seem unreasonable to have a real-time input method where you, for instance, can set the metronome to tick in quarter notes, but set the smallest note value to be eighth notes. And then you play along with the metronome

  • if you play two notes within the same tick they will be eighth notes
  • if you play one long note within the one tick it will be a quarter note
  • if you play one long note over two ticks it will be a half note
  • if you play more than two notes within the same tick the last one will be skipped
    • ... or possibly handled as a tuplet. Probably not
  • if you play a short note (shorter than half the duration between ticks), it will be an eight note and an eighth reset.
  • etc. It will essentially behave like a quantize function in a midi editor/DAW.

This does not exist in MuseScore at the moment. My best proposal would be to record this as a MIDI file in a DAW (like Ardour) which support recording to a tick/metronome, and then export the MIDI file and import it into MuseScore. You can probably do the quantizing in the DAW, but if you as a middle step, first import the MIDI file using MuseScore 3.6 you can also do the quantizing there, (and many other things such as handling tuplets and set a split point for right and left hand etc)

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