Posted
I like to see an overview of all instruments and what their doing.. Looking at the density and placement of dots is helpful, although not as much as a real score...
What I've been doing is creating a song, starts with a basic file with say five instruemtents, I break each of them out into another container, and sometimes mute the highest level, an green un mute lower containers whee I have changed parts. Sometimes I leave upper container on, so only the newer parts overwrite the upper container. After you've done this a bit, it is hard to keep track of what instrument is doing what where.
I make the arrangement an acompainment, and then reopen that again as an arrangement. I carefully name and number arrangements so I know what is where.
Now this new arrangement is all in the root container, and you can see exactly where notes come and go, and how busy or dense they get..If I like he arrangement so far, I split out containers and rework some more. Some times I go back to a previous arrangement and only copy one track over.. I've finding visual data very important when working with multiple tracks or instruments, Your eyes are another whole set of tools to work with, which are perfect for the job.
Thu, 2012-02-23 - 17:46 Permalink
What for me is useful is to get oversight in SFP is to reorder the instrument sheet vertical list of instruments ..
-Starting with the rootcontainer instruments ( bold names )
- adding the other container instruments like they show up in the arrangmentview
Reorder instruments is by dragging and dropping instruments in a new position
So the instruments following the container arrangment structure
Sat, 2012-02-25 - 00:48 Permalink
Yes janamdo, yes that is a helpful step, I'm thinking on a larger scope.
I mean like when you look in the root container you see dots. You can see the activity and density of whole piece, not just the number of containers you have.
By looking at root container you can roughly estimate what each instrument is doing by the distance from center line. When I look in the root container, I can see the bass gets busy at measure 32. There are wide differences between notes on another instrument. a third instrument is playing notes chormatically. Although this is not standard music notation it give us a very good reference of what the piece is doing..
What it DOESN"T do is let us see the contents of lower containers which of course are going to override the root container. Thus if you've added several lower containers, the root container is about useless in determining what is going on in piece. I would like to see a switch which would show root container/ or show a composite of all containers so we would get a clear overview of the piece.
I'd also like to see a self SPLIT ROOT CONTAINER COMMAND to break the root container into individual containers for each instrument.. My first process was to split containers, and divide out the blank space, so I could clearly where the strings were coming in an out of piece. Of course I can go to the container and see, but I don't get a good overview of everything , which is critical when using software as complex as SFP.
In addition to the SPLIT ROOT CONTAINER, I'd like to have STRIP SILENCE command for Container command. You could have a variable threshold, 1/2 bar, 1 bar, 4 bars etc. similar to a DAW's strip silence out of audio. This again would make it easier to know what is exactly going on with piece.
Of course this kind of disrupts Andre's original concept of containers. It may not be worth all the work to rewrite the code to accomate this. This would imply that if we wanted PAUSE and STEP commands or other parameters that were looping at a different length than notes, would have to be in a different container assigned to same instrument
Also each container should have a MUTE button, so you could temporarily simplfy things to work out an alternative idea, without destructing the part, or listening to the two guitar parts, while working on a string part.
Sat, 2012-02-25 - 01:13 Permalink
Check out "Reveal Experimental Features" in global preferences and use View >> Global Figure Shadow. This will show a shadow trace of all figures in all containers.
Can't say much about the split container suggestion. Andre will certainly respond. I know a mute container option is on the agenda, though.
Sat, 2012-02-25 - 12:02 Permalink
Hi Mark, It seems that you want go back to the traditional DAW like logic
Why not if ..this gives a clear oversight of the composition.
A idea is to convert all containers to a tradional view in a DAW
So you can switch between 2 arrangement modes..the current one and a new DAW
The screen is than divided in 2 parts for a arrangment
In the lower part arrangment screen you can see exactly the position for a chance and in the upper arrangment you can do the chance practical.
The best is to work in one screen with all information, but working on 2 screens is also possible
Sat, 2012-02-25 - 17:57 Permalink
Thanx Supertonic that's helpful (wasn't aware of it) Yeah.. I know read the manual... Perverse isn't it, one would rather thrash around trying to bend the software to their wants and needs, then stop to read the manual and adjust to what it was designed to do...