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Topic: Held notes question (Read 1744 times) |
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jazmaan
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Bebop Spoken Here! (Virtual Singer!)
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Held notes question
« on: Oct 11th, 2003, 3:18am » |
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When Virtual Singer comes to a note at the end of a bar and the next bar contains rests, VS holds the note right through the rests until another note is written. Sometimes this sounds okay, but more often it sounds corny. How do I make VS sing it as written without the long held notes?
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COMALite J
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Re: Held notes question
« Reply #1 on: Oct 11th, 2003, 3:46am » |
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First you need to get to the Edit Voice dialog. There are two ways to do this. Both require that you have the Virtual Singer "Stage" Palette displayed. To do this, either display the Master Palette (if it isn't already) and click and drag on the Virtual Singer icon (looks like a songbird [nightengale?] silhouetted against a sunset), or select "Virtual Singer" from the "Windows" menu.
From the Virtual Singer "Stage" Palette, either double-click on a singer icon to call up the main Virtual Singer voice-assignment palette, or right-click on the singer and select "Edit Human Voice" from the resulting pop-up menu.
Either way you get the `Edit the singer related to staff "My Staff"' dialog, with the appropriate Staff name replacing "My Staff". Midway down on the right side, you will see an "Edit voice" button. Click it.
A multi-tabbed "Edit voice" dialog will appear. Click on the "Interpretation" tab.
You will see two knobs there. The bottom one is the one you want: "Min. rest duration." The reason this exists is because many MIDI files, which many people use as starting points for Myriad songs, have notes that don't extend to their full duration (to avoid legatto effects on playback, usually). For instance, what looks like a half note may only sound as long as a dotted quarter note, and be followed by an eighth note's worth of silence (or instrument decay for instruments that have a substantial release time). Having Virtual Singer ignore short "rests" keeps such songs from sounding choppy when sung.
If you know that you won't be having any such shortened notes with invisible rests, you can reduce this value to 1.
Check out the other parameters in this dialog. The other one in the "Interpretation" Tab, namely, "Time shift," may also be of interest to you. This makes the singer's timing more human. The higher the value, the less slavishly the Virtual Singer follows the written timing of the notes. Set it to zero if you want an inhumanly perfect (at least at note timing) singer (useful for training real singers to sing a given song).
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Robert_A.
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Re: Held notes question
« Reply #2 on: Oct 11th, 2003, 5:52pm » |
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COMAlite J's advice is probably the solution to the question.
But there is one other thing: If your music is imported MIDI (or Karaoke), then the visual appearance of the notes may not be the same as their played duration.
The import quantization seems to preserve the original MIDI duration nicely. But suppose that each beat lasts 1/2 second. Also suppose that a MIDI note is held for 0.6 second, followed by 0.4 second rest. The note and rest combine for 2 beats. When imported, the display may show a beat note (usually what Americans call the 1/4 note) followed by a 1/4 rest. But the quarter note may be held for longer. If you double-click the note, its properties appear. Then, you can tell whether the note is actually played at its nominal duration, or longer or shorter.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 11th, 2003, 5:52pm by Robert_A. » |
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COMALite J
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Re: Held notes question
« Reply #3 on: Oct 11th, 2003, 6:47pm » |
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The specific note property Robert was referring to is called "Pressure Time." A note held for its full specified duration would have a Pressure Time of 100%. A note held for 3/4 of its full duration followed by 1/4th of that as release time would have a Pressure Time of 75%. A note that extends past its apparent duration into a following rest or even overlapping a subsequent note would have a Pressure Time greater than 100%.
You can select a group of notes with the Note Lasso tool (or even Select All), then click on the icon in the Action Tools Palette (a really thin toolbar) that looks like an iron weight with a loop on top (it's between the Note Duration icon which looks like a quarter note and a red arrow and an eighth note to show the quarter note changing into an eighth note, and the Vertical Mirror icon which looks like two blue right-angle triangles side-by-side with a very thin vertical line separating them) to change all of the selected notes' Pressure Times at once. You can also do this (and many other parameter and effects changes to notes) with "Apply Changes" (there's an icon for it in Action Tools that looks like three quarter notes: one navy blue, one pale cyan, and one white).
Both commands also exist in the Edit Menu. Apply Changes is in the Edit Menu itself, while Change Pressure Time (and other individual parameters) is in the Actions heirarchical fly-out sub-menu of the Edit Menu.
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