Posted
The manual says this regarding the Figure parameter:
"Right-click and to insert the current output as a figure with absolute pitch symbols."
OK, straightforward enough. But what is the advantage of turning a Figure with symbols into static pitches? Why would you do this? What advantage does it bring?
Thanks.
Sun, 2023-06-11 - 11:01 Permalink
Static pitches simply means "Don't follow Harmony". So, whenever you don't want a figure to follow harmony anymore, they are useful.
- Imagine you like a certain rendered melody so much that you want to preserve it (e.g. for leads vocals) and continue arranging other instruments around it.
- Imagine you want to preserve something accurately as a note to yourself, and copy it to a library.
- Imagine you want to do extreme polytonality. Make one phrase static pitches and then change Harmony for all others.
There is an (interestingly undocumented) function "Phrase > Freeze / Unfreeze" that seems to do the same, plus saving a backup of the Figure.
Sun, 2023-06-11 - 15:39 Permalink
Janamdo: Yes, and maybe I'd somehow find it useful to change a phrase into drum hits, but I'm thinking probably not.
Andre: Very interesting, and something to think about. But probably mostly a bit beyond my needs at this point.
But I have encountered situations where I change something seemingly unrelated (In Synfire, everything is related.) several bars away, only to find that the nice melody I had going then changed in a way I didn't like. So I could undo my change, covert the melody phrase into static pitches, and then re-do the change. My nice melody would then be unaffected by the change I made, and by subsequent changes. Very handy. Of course, one should do this only after the project has gelled to a certain point. For example, I probably wouldn't want to change the chord progression after this.
Also, suppose there's a phrase I really like, and I want the option to re-use it in other projects, Suppose further that the phrase as I've used it in my project renders radically different than it looks due to interpretation settings I've chosen, or various parameters settings I've made (for example, pause or transpose). Then I could see changing it to static pitches, and from there doing figure recognition on it (or not) and adding it to a library.
Thanks to both of you.