large meters meter for free rythm

I've doodled at the keyboard - fortunately caught by midi - a melody line which I would like to make the basis of a larger piece. It extends to some 42 bars of raw midi in 4/4 at about 120 bpm. But the key building blocks(phrases) are all 5/8; and the pauses between phrases are often 3/8 or 6/8; and then there are, late on, a couple of more elaborated runs which (if barred as entities) would probably be 11/8 or 13/8 or something.

It seems to me I've got 3 options:

1. force it all into the straitjacket of a single metre (and maybe expect to exercise some rubato)

2. analyse it by main stresses, and accept the constant shifting of time signature/meter that throws up

3. treat it more like plain-song - i.e. have as few bar lines as possible, and allow the pulse (moving between quarter notes and eight-notes) to reveal itself, maybe slightly differently in different playings.

I'm inclined to the third option; but (and this is the point of this posting) I'm then in the hands of Composer's outer parameters.
I.e. it looks to me as if Composer will not allow more than 20 beats of any denomination per bar - is that right ?
And when I tried 20/2 (as being apparently the largest allowable bar) it registered it in the score - but wouldn't play it.

I would be grateful if anyone could confirm the default limits of what Composer will allow. And also any work-rounds that might apply.

Sincerely

Ian G.

Hello Ian,

There are two issues here: (1) How you want to reveal the metric structure of your music, regardless of the notation tool you're using. How would you do this with pencil and paper? (2) How to accomplish that with Notation Composer.

I assume that you're looking for advice only on #2. There are recommendations I could make for #1 also, but that would just be my opinion as an amateur composer.

Here are the options that Composer offers that will enable you to pull off mostly anything you want, some of which are admittedly work-arounds:

1. Composer supports irregular meter, such as 5/8 or 7/8.
2. You can force the beaming within a meter by editing the meter symbol. An option in the Meter dialog is the "beaming pattern".
3. You can also manually change the beaming anywhere in any measure. You can break beams between notes, and join beams between notes, and also change the secondary beaming (for example, where the second 16th note beam lies).
4. You can work-around Composer's limitation of large meters by breaking up the large measure into smaller meters, where you'd like the beaming breaks to happen.
5. There is an option to hide the display of meters.
6. If you want to display a large meter value like 93/8, then use the Free Text tool to manually place the "93" and "8" text on the staff.

Some of the above is, again, admittedly work-arounds for lack of complete flexibility in large meter numerators. Notation Composer is optimized for everyday musicians who rarely need this. If your scores tend to be exotic, then you might be better off using a more advanced notation program (that is also more difficult to use and more expensive than Composer) such as Finale or Sibelius.

Cheers
-- Mark

Hi Ian,

From a quick read of your post I too would go for option 3. Don't know if it is possible to turn Composers bars off altogether - and somehow insert the bar lines as a "text or graphic".

I have put together several (large) post regarding barring and ended up not posting any because the problem in the real-world-music is very complex (and my descriptions not good enough to post). The problem of getting the barring right is particularly tough when recording in real-time. NC does a great job (better than any s/ware I have used) to cope with this and is very good on midi imports. However, get some bars wrong and well, personally I end up redoing the whole recording rather that trying to fix the bar positions.

I feel intuitively there is somehow a better way than the traditional to help with all this - like maybe a "less intelligent" approach. Like eg turning all bars off: record a session: draw the bars in manually (as a
graphic): Turn “intelligence” back on in a special mode that would allow dragging -some- bars to different position. Very often it is obvious to the composer where the bar line(s) should be, but the slightest change affects all the rest (as it's bound to)! I think it probably needs a two stage solution. Bars off, adjust bar n and bar m, bars on: repeat.

Even though it would be a labour intensive task to do a whole piece like this, I am sure that it would be quicker and less frustrating in the long run.

Sorry can't help directly and have gone off-topic.

regards to all

-John

Howdy,

Just a followup on the "large meter non-playback" problem. I've confirmed that the problem is general, and I've reported the problem and the workaround.

ttfn,
Sherry

Howdy John,

Actually the "drag the barlines around" approach that you've described falls neatly in with what we refer to as "metronomeless transcription". It is on the feature wish-list, but it's hard to say when that will show up in a release. (Tell all your friends to buy Composer and help fund further development ;) )

ttfn,
Sherry

Sherry and John

Thanks for your comments.

1. (Sherry) I have had some larger meters working up to a point - Mark's nominal 93/8, for instance, and a couple of others with beats in excess of 100, trying to make the whole piece one bar to start with - though with the drawbacks I also mentioned to Mark. So do you reckon, pending work on Composer, 28/4 is actually the de facto top limit? Have you any impression whether it's the '28' that's the boundary, or (say) the (4x28 =) 122 ?

2. But I'm more interested in your musical response - that you could imagine playing a 4/4 bass line under this.

Going back from this into what I'm trying to do : this is an improvised line. Some at least of the irregularities are in the pauses between phrases, and yet if I listen to it without looking at it, it does feel right. So in getting a grip on it in order to make a 'proper piece' of it, I'm inclined to try and hold to the timing 'as is'. I.e. what I'm saying is I'm still trying to make sense of it myself, and I don't have a pre-determined idea I want to use Composer to realise.

I think what I hinted at before may be right - I have to step outside simply trying to process this midi file (which is complicated by the fact the pulse and metre settings are NOT specific to the music) within software.
It would help if I had the whole thing by heart, and I can work at that.
And maybe also I could try to re-record it (possibly listening to it at the same time) with more specific settings for both pulse and metre and see how it then transcribes.

Anyway, guys, thanks for your interest.

Sincerely

Ian G.