Now that I got my « How I spent my summer vacation » paper out of the way, here’s a little progress report following the meltdown of my 20 year old MIDI keyboard…
Being deprived of any way to input notes into my Mac via the MIDI protocol forced me to look for and discover possible alternatives.
There are utilities that allow you to use the computer keyboard to input notes in music programs. These can always be used in a pinch but are not very easy or inspiring to use, to say the least. Besides, these utilities generally don’t take into account the existence of « foreign » (i.e. non-U.S.) keyboard layouts… Bottom line is these could not be reasonably used to input anything more complex than « twinkle twinkle little star »…
I’ve had Band In A Box on my hard disk for ages, but I’ve never used it because it has possibly the worst user-interface in the history of software. Unfortunately, when the software was ported from the PC to the Mac, the UI was not changed to adhere to a bare minimum of Macintosh UI guidelines. The result is a truly impossible mess of options that are never where you expect them to be, are named incoherently and/or abbreviated to death. For instance, the « S » menu stands for « Style ». Preferences are listed in 2 different dialogs helpfully named Preferences and Preferences 2 and don’t group settings according to any decipherable system. Keyboard shortcuts are very strange (like Command-A to start playing a song, but Spacebar to stop playback). And it is just plain ugly. I could write a dozen posts on this program’s UI, but I digress enough already.
The basic purpose of BIAB is to generate music accompaniments in a variety of styles, so that soloists can practice backed by a virtual band. The practical thing in my midi-keyboard-deprived situation is that you can simply type in a series of chords (C, G#7, Am etc.), pick from one of hundreds of styles (Jazz Waltz, Chopin Waltz, Paso-doble, Country etc.) and you’re off. You can do a lot more, but that requires a level of struggle with the UI which I haven’t had the strength to attempt yet.
I’m not sure I would use BIAB as compositional tool, but as you know by now if you read sknoblog, I am learning the guitar, so BIAB is an easy way to generate a simple accompaniment for practicing.
You may also have noticed that I’m not composing much these days. This is because I spend a lot of my (limited) music-making time learning my old songs on the guitar. Being deprived of a working music keyboard to decipher old recordings has forced me to do so on the guitar, which to my great surprise and satisfaction, I’ve managed to do without too much effort. I guess I’m starting to really know the instrument.
However, this chain of events made me re-discover a third category of programs that makes this deciphering process much easier. I already had Amazing Slow Downer, but I just discovered a similar program called Transcribe!. Load an existing audio file of a song (an .mp3 file for instance) into one of these programs and you can then alter the playback speed and/or pitch of the audio, independently of each other. So I can load an old song, alter the pitch to a key that is better suited to the Guitar, and slow down playback to make it easier to follow and learn. Of the two programs, Transcribe! is easier to use, plus it can usually figure out the actual pitch of the audio which Slow Downer can’t.
There is more post-meltdown news to tell, but that’s all the time I have for now so tune in next time…