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Absolute pitches in Keyboard view?

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aerial7
Posted

As I slowly get acquainted with SynFire, one of the things I'm struggling with is understanding exactly what's being rendered.    I know I can export to MIDI and visualize the resulting music that way, but that's too tedious.     While reading the manual, I got the impression that the Keyboard view is intended for playing along, so I thought it would show me exactly what SynFire is rendering for a given part.  

However, that doesn't seem to be the case;  I have a trivial example involving some descending chords and yet at one point the notes shown on the keyboard actually move up rather than down.   They sound lower as expected, but they're shown higher on the keyboard.   As a newbie, I'm guessing it's something to do with the Inteprertation and/or the Playing Ranges of my instrument;  I'm not willing to assume it's just a bug.   

So my question is this:  What is being shown in the Keyboard View?

To put my question in context, one of the first things I'm trying to do is to develop a workflow which starts with my own musical ideas, whether it's a melody or a progression or whatever. I think the fist step in that workflow is to understand how to get SynFire faithfully to Interpret an idea so that I can then develop it further.   That is, I want to hear my idea as I originally played but with Interpretation.

(By the way, the printed manual is quite good and very helpful -- I just wish it was about 50 pages longer with more coverage on workflow and use cases.....)  

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supertonic
Fri, 2017-07-14 - 21:39 Permalink

the keyboard widget shows the current harmonic context in the progression, as interpreted by the global 'chords' instrument. it is not linked to a specific track of the arrangement. there is currently no piano roll view of the rendered output, but it is on the feature wish list already.

if you want to examine the output of a phrase, you can select the take parameter and do 'Extract From Output' and drag to figure parameter for inspection of pitches using the symbol selection tool. make sure you undo the last drag so your original figure is restored.