Sequencer

Score View

  This is the essential window or view, in my opinion. It's the staff. Here it shows just one track (and it's a small window here, it can be expanded to full screen, of course). But you can select a number of tracks in the track view and they'll be shown on different staves in this view or window, one above the other (it can get a little crowded beyond two or three staves, though). Or one could always merge a couple of tracks together in order to get them to show up on the same staff. Here we see one track identified as, Lead, with the key signature of G, and in the upper right it shows this is measure #30. Here I've selected three of the notes (the sequencer picks out (guesses at) the triplets, automatically).

  Here I clicked on the middle note. The sequencer shows the values for that note,

• that it's volume/velocity is 122 (out of 127, which means it's loud),
• that it's E, of course, on the 5 octave,
• that it's playing out channel #2, whatever instrument is selected for channel 2, here an electric guitar,
• and that its length is 1 quarter note, 1 beat, and then some.

  All three notes will be moved, by moving just this one. This middle note started out right on the second beat of the 30th measure, at a 'time' of 30.2:000. I'm sliding it just slightly right with the mouse, to 010. The timebase for this song is 120. What that means is that there are 120 divisions for each quarter note. Each of these 120 divisions is called a, tick; as I suppose like the ticking of a clock or metronome. So the shorthand is - bar.beat:tick. Above, the bar is 30, the beat is 2, with just 10 ticks. And that 1:047 length for the E means it's 1 beat (=120), plus another 47 ticks. An eighth note is half a quarter, so an eighth note, here, is 60 ticks. The sixteenth, half of that, would be 30. So 47 is about a sixteenth and a 32nd note. And this sequencer can display down to 64th notes, if necessary (here, I've restricted it only to 32nd notes).

  The timebase is set once at the beginning of each MIDI file, and can be anything from 72 ticks/quarter note, to 384, to 888, to whatever. The more ticks, of course, the more accurately and precisely one can position the notes; but would the ear really discern the difference beyond a point? 120 then is more coarse than say, 384 (which is a common timebase that some people prefer). So 10 ticks out of 120 is going to be something you can hear, where 10 in 384 might not be enough to really hear a difference. So the second two notes will sound a little after the beat. When someone plays an instrument, live, he or she rarely is right on the beat. And sometimes it's handy to get a syncopated sort of rhythm by consistently moving notes ahead of or behind the beat. This staff or Score view, in this sequencer, makes it very easy to just slide notes right or left a bit, listen to how it sounds, and fine tune it from there. Of course, the option is provided to 'snap' notes right to the beat, so you can't slide them around like this. But I tend to leave that 'snap to' option, off.

  There are little buttons, on a little floating button bar, for a whole note through a 64th. But you can almost just place any note on the staff, and just double click to get a little menu where you can change its velocity, start time, and length. Or you could select a whole bunch of notes and click the half note button, say, to make them all half notes. On you can select a bunch of notes, and double click to change their velocity and length, as a percentage, or move the start time forward or backward a bit for all the notes at once. It's very easy. Sometimes it's even easier to change velocities for a bunch of notes by using the Controller View, instead. There's often a lot of options in how to do something.

  And you can type in lyrics in this window, as well, just by moving that vertical bar next to the note you want, press the little lyric button on the bar, and then just type in the word or syllable, which will appear just under the note. This sequencer doesn't have a feature for the guitar-chord callouts you see in the fake books, least not with the little dots on the fretboard. But other sequencers can do this, I'm told, like Cakewalk.

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