Composing Board.

This screen permits you to assemble fragments of tunes horizontally into a longer piece of music, or vertically to create multi-track scores..  Fragments are accumulated into a special collection in memory, so that they may be used on the Composing Board .  They are represented on the composing board by a series of alphabetic icons in the panels on the bottom of the screen. From the main MENU, you can go to  Create -> Compositions -> Composing Tools Flowchart to see 6 possible ways of creating fragments for use here.. All of these screens have a purple button for saving a fragment into the collection, for use here.

An important restriction when assembling fragments is the time signature, which must be identical for all fragments.  For example, it is not possible to join a fragment in 3/4 time with another in 4/4 time. If you try to do this, an appropriate error message will appear.

If all of your fragments are single track (such as those generated from the Diatonic and chromatic scales/arpeggios generator, or the Tune and Rhythmic Pattern Generator, or a single track extracted from a multi-track tune with the Bulk Changes screen),  then use the default option from the panel at top right of the screen, -  Single Track per fragment. Each row contains only a single track.  You can then drag icons into any of up to 8 rows.  If some fragments contain more bars than others, and you place them vertically in a column, the system will set the bar count of the column to the fragment with the greatest number of bars.  You may type into the track names at left of the grid, to assign meaningful names to your tracks, for example, First Violins, or Second Trombone.

 If your fragments contain multiple tracks, and you wish to simply join the fragments end-to-end, select the 2nd option button at top right, Multiple Tracks per Fragment. Only one row at top of composing board.  There will be only one row across the top of the board, but all tracks in each fragment will be preserved.

If you have a series of multi-track fragments, for example, piano, bass and drums, and you wish to add a 4th track such as violins,  select the 3rd option button Multiple track fragments on top row, then single track rows. There will be 4 rows on the board, the top row is reserved for the multi-track fragments, and the other 3 rows can be used to add fragments into new single tracks.

Once you have collected your fragments together, drag any icon from the bottom panel of available fragments (using the left mouse button), and drop it in any slot on the layout board, in order to arrange fragments into the desired composition. You may drag the same icon as many times as you wish. Right-click on an icon to see information about the fragment.

For the tutorials, a few lists of fragments have been stored onto the database, and these can be invoked by selecting a fragment list from the drop-down box at the top of the screen.  This will automatically populate the bottom panel with icons for use when you are following the  the tutorials.  You may also save your own fragment lists, so that you do not need to repeat all the steps required to collect all you fragments. Click the blue button Save a list of current fragments for future quick loading  to do this. 

When you are ready to test an assembly, click the orange button  Assemble Fragments into a Tune, and then click the Play button on the play bar to hear your assembled composition.  If you have returned to this screen after storing fragments in other screens, you can refresh the list of fragment icons by clicking the pink button Refresh fragment icons at foot of screenYou may save a list of the fragments currently on the Composing Board, so you can juggle them around again at a later time. Click the blue button Save a list of current fragments for future quick loading  to do this. And you may clear the entire grid of the board, if you want to start over again in dragging and assembling fragments, by clicking the yellow button Clear the Composing Board. To remove all the icons from the foot of the screen, deleting the corresponding fragments from memory, click the green button Clear the fragment icons, and all fragments from memory.  

There are two other buttons at bottom right which provide quick access for viewing other screens, namely View the staff notation editing screen, and View the tracks editing screen.

After making your composition, and listening to the result, don't forget to save the tune to disk. This can be done from the menu, File - Save Musical Discovery File to Disk.   If you wish to print out your score, you need to save the tune as an external MIDI file, and then feed that MIDI file into a MIDI music notation printing program..  To save your tune as a MIDI file, go to the main MENU,  File -> Export as MIDI file.


ComposeBoard.htm    Saturday, 25 November 2006 05:40