Disklavier

Good morning, everyone.

In a message dated 10/25/03 4:07:21 PM, Fraser writes:

> 
> I have a great midi recording of a particular song that I'm fond of. It was 
> recorded on a disklavier, and I'd dearly like to convert it to a score on 
> paper.
> 
>  Since it wasn't recorded with this in mind, anyone have any ideas how I can 
> do this? I can open it in Sibelius, Encore or Music Time Deluxe, but it's 
> odd to look at and you can't pass it on to another pianist.
> 
This can definitely be done if you do the right steps in the right order. The 
crucial issue is reclocking the   MIDI file.

Any time a person makes a MIDI recording, they play to a metronome click. 
When the original recording of this particular piece was made, the pianist played 
to a metronome but did not listen to the metronome. Accordingly, any music 
software program that is used to open the MIDI file will look at the metronome 
data, assume that is where the beats are, and will then transcribe the recorded 
notes accordingly. Obviously, the notation will be a mess because the defined 
beats in the MIDI file have no true relationship to the music as it was 
performed.

It is important to note that the "quantization" feature that is available in 
many music programs will not be any help in straightening out this problem. 
When you use quantization, the notes get pushed and pulled to the nearest beats 
or sub-beats. If the beats of the MIDI file don't have any close relationship 
to the notes as they were played, quantization messes things up further.

To understand reclocking, it easiest to think about the process in reverse. 
Suppose you knew what the arrangement should look like in music notation, and 
you used a music notation program to enter the notes manually, clicking them 
onto the staff with the mouse. Of course you would end up with a beautiful 
score, but its playback would be horribly mechanical and boring.

If you wanted to make the playback sound just like your the pianist's 
recording, you would have to do three things: (1) edit the note-on velocity of each 
note to match the way that it was played it, (2) add pedal information, and (3) 
add tempo changes every beat to reflect the human ebb and flow of the 
original recording.

#3 would be challenging and time consuming, but it would be necessary. The 
result would be that your score would look square, boring, and mathematically 
perfect, but it would play with the tempo flexibility used by the original 
artist.

The purpose of reclocking the file is to achieve the same result: a score 
that is square, boring, and mathematically perfect but which plays with the 
original tempo flexibility imparted by the artist.

When you reclock a file, you go through a process of telling a sequencing 
program where the true musical beats and barlines are in the MIDI file. This is 
done in different ways by different programs.

I happen to use Digital Performer for the Macintosh. DP has a feature called 
"Adjust Beats." I set up DP to show me the recorded music in piano roll 
notation. In this view, I see all of the notes laid out on a grid. When I turn on 
the adjust beats feature, I can drag the beat markers on the grid to the notes 
to which they musically apply. DP then moves the notes around to line up 
properly on the rigid grid AND DP creates a tempo map that preserves the tempo 
nuances of the original performance.

When using this feature, I have to drag every beat marker to the correct 
note.

I could do this another way in DP. The other way to do it is similar to the 
way that some of the Cakewalk sequencers do this (using a Cakewalk feature 
called "Fit Improvisation"). What you do is create a new track and set it to 
record. Then during the recording, you listen to the original performance and 
simultaneously tap a key on your MIDI keyboard. The idea is to record one note for 
every beat in the music and to record each note so that it coincides with the 
musical beats of the original performance. This new beat track enables the 
program to reorganize the MIDI data in the file, line things up properly, and 
compute a new tempo map. After this is done, the beat track is discarded.

The second way of doing things is not as accurate, but it can be faster.

Once you have reclocked the file, you can further quantize the notes in any 
program if you wish.

Before importing the notes into a music notation program, I generally view 
the notes in piano roll view in my sequencer and select the notes that I deem to 
be left hand notes and cut-and-paste them into a separate track. Having the 
left- and right-hand notes in separate tracks will result in a cleaner 
transcription by the music notation program.

Regards,
PianoBench