![]() The aQWERTYon shows notes both on a pitch wheel of my own design and on the staff: The Groove Pizza has both a radial grid and a linear grid: I have been involved in the design of some multiple simultaneous music visualization schemes. Who will be the first to make a browser-based embeddable Dorico-style score and piano roll editor? Noteflight? Dorico? Someone else? I would do it myself if I had the JavaScript chops, but sadly, I don’t. Noteflight has many limitations and shortcomings, but I still use it for everything, because the fact that you can make and listen to interactive scores from any device is such an enormous practical advantage. If you want to reach music educators and students at massive scale, though, then you need to make tools that live in the browser. Much as I love Dorico, it is desktop and iPad software only. Here’s a more complex example–image via David MacDonald: Dorico is the first piece of software I know of to allow you to do that. In a perfect world, you could have both notation and the piano roll visible on the screen at the same time, set up so that any change you made in one view would be instantly reflected in the other. Still, the piano roll is an extremely valuable interactive learning tool, because it’s so discoverable through trial and error. There is no good way to show notes fading in or out, and if you want blue notes or other microtones, you have to start with piano-key pitches and then modify them with the Pitch Bend parameter. Like notation, MIDI presumes that pitches and rhythms are always going to be discrete. That said, the piano roll also has its own limitations. The standard was designed with 12-TET in mind, and chromatic music is actually easier to represent in MIDI than diatonicism. ![]() There’s no need to calculate rests to fill silences, and no need to worry about accidentals. You simply draw the notes where you want them. The MIDI piano roll is less human-readable than notation, but vastly more flexible. Showing complex syncopation and polyrhythm is a headache in notation, and you can’t represent swing at all. ![]() The idea of starting with a diatonic scale and then modifying it with accidentals works fine for Mozart, but it is horribly awkward for chromaticism. Notation became standardized before twelve-tone equal temperament did. Standard Western music notation evolved over a long period of time to be human-readable, but it also evolved in a particular cultural context, one where harmony was mostly diatonic and rhythms were mostly simple. However, any visualization scheme will work better for some concepts than for others. The beauty of interactive interfaces is that your ears support your eyes and vice versa. ![]() Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this: These are just as advertised.It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so:īut for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. User interface and experience upgrades The big picture rhythm slashes, bar repeats, handwritten font, repeats now play back) Music for vernacular styles (rock, pop, jazz) (egs. Increased resemblance to a DAW (digital audio workstation) (eg. Update from Dorico (original edition): $99.99Įducation version, crossgrade from Finale or Sibelius: $159.99 Big selling points as advertised You can find the list of features side-by-side here: Pricing ElementsĬrossgrade from Finale or Sibelius: $279.99 There are now two editions: Elements and Pro. Hit me up at !įor now, here is what you need to know: Dorico 2 This is a wide set of improvements and additional features, which maybe one day I will try out if I run into some extra cash, but for now I will ask the musical community for their feedback on it. Even though I’m not ready or able to invest in another software upgrade, I wanted to spread the word that Steinberg’s Dorico music notation software has had its version 2 released.
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