Posted
Hi,
Synfire is a wonderful tool in every way. It has helped me many times to get out of a composition rut. I could not praise it enough.
There is, however, a feature I would LOVE to see added. When using a MIDI keyboard to record, it would be very useful for those of us who do not play keyboard much to have some sort of scale lock function so that we would play with the white keys only, and those would translate to notes of the proper vertical scale for the chord in the harmony parameter at that specific time in the song.
It would indeed be a huge time saver!
Thanks,
Biz
Mi., 06.02.2013 - 15:16 Permalink
Nice to see this positive resonance.
This feature is requested quite often. If this wasn't such a challenge to implement, we've had it from the beginning. The scale can change with every chord. Unless a progression is very simple, the scale does change a lot. And many scales have different distances between the notes.
If scales happen to switch in the middle of something, your performance is teared apart, causing jumps and other artifacts. Polyphonic and rhythmic performances are hard to track in real-time, because Synfire can not guess what you will be playing next.
Therefore do not expect scale locking to work well for anything else than monophonic melodies.
Also make sure you turn "Local Off" on your keyboard ;-)
Mi., 06.02.2013 - 16:46 Permalink
Thank you very much Andre and Supertonic.
I can imagine such a feature implies many difficulties. However, I wouldn’t mind at all going in the phrase editor and adjust the wrong notes to taste after the recording. This feature would be more of a helping hand than a bullet-proof tool.
You could possibly implement an option allowing to user to decide what to do with notes caught between chord and scale changes. Those notes could be, for example, pulled to the nearest scale note at the scale change or just be left untouched. I, myself, as many other users I’m sure, would not mind at all editing the offending notes after the recording.
Such a feature would make Synfire complete to me. That is the only thing I feel is lacking for my personal workflow.
Thank for making such a wonderful and unique piece of software!
Eric
Mi., 06.02.2013 - 19:14 Permalink
And how about bypassing the accidentals ? : menu Transform>> off DrawAccidentals
What ever you draw in the phrase editor..there will be no # ( ? ) and B (flats )
I used this workflow already, because when you suppose work in C major and the "Draw accidentals option is on" and draw a figure in the phrase editor.. accidentals will be occur ( = chromatic notes) , even the phrase editor is a Cmajor scale horizontal.
Try this out... with or without accidentals option and look what symboltypes you get
If i am not wrong ( ; ) ) , than with Accidentals off you get the diatonic scales without the black keys.
Note
I like to see a static mode for symbol input ( the symbols values are the same as on my VSti soundmodule keyboard)
It is like the traditional score editor..and after the static input you use the figure recognition to get the Synfire magic