will notation programs be phased out?

[Tricky-Loops]

Try to write an F Major scale on a piano roll.

My piano roll can't go that happy, it only gets to Dm and it's so sad.

MIne goes to D11.

[Tony Ostinato]

ohhh this is wayyy offff.

notation is moot when it comes to composing, you can draw with crayons on the wall or sort apples in piles whatever helps you keep your tune straight in your head.

but when it comes time to have adeles 70 piece orchestra play your tune on the grammys somebody is gonna get paid to do charts for them and theyre gonna be reading em onstage.

i'm pretty sure noone in the world is sight reading piano roll printouts. if they are id sure say "wow", and "get help".

as far as notation programs ive always used finale and i input notes manually because i rarely like what the automatic transcription functions spew out, theyre a little too accurate and overdo it.

the trick in charting is to get the player to play the right thing right away so youre not stuck in rehearsal all day.

[Tricky-Loops]

but when it comes time to have adeles 70 piece orchestra play your tune on the grammys somebody is gonna get paid to do charts for them and theyre gonna be reading em onstage.

i'm pretty sure noone in the world is sight reading piano roll printouts.

This would be a challenge to introduce a new note notation system based on the piano roll...for perfect playing, we also print the velocity and expression values...for our brass players we print the breath values... Remember that "agitato" is indicated by a red note...while a striped note means "staccato" and a pointed note means "pizzicato"

[Rahul_B]

Standard notation will be around as long as people play instruments.

And instrumentalists will be around as long as girls keep getting wet for them.

So basically forever.

[mandolarian]

Try to write an F Major scale on a piano roll.

My piano roll can't go that happy, it only gets to Dm and it's so sad.

MIne goes to D11.

Wow! How can you afford the upkeep on it? All those doubly-augmented tones and compound intervals all clamouring for attention and daily maintenance would drive me to the flat 9s in no time.

[jancivil]

I'm a "composer". I embrace the piano roll. Since I have become comfortable working directly to the sound before me I have not notated things before working. I don't know what other people require unless they told me for some reason. But have a look at VSL forum, the composers that post there, more typically they notate. I've encountered people there that, from the opposite of the typical POV here, believe similarly: that people that are really into teh DAW and suchlike, who do not notate, must be loops-based Producer types. :^8

In my Satie adaptations, I worked from notation as it was clearly more convenient than transcribing off a recording. but for my own composition notation is a middleman that isn't as useful to me. if I was going to write something typical that is supposed to sound like a certain expectation, normal music I can see it. But OTOH I can always scan it in Cubase. I enjoy relying on my ear, I don't see well anyway.

[jancivil]

Notation is the most elegant and universal way to write down music.

sure, why not. However the advocacy for this and the unnecessary dichotomy vis a vis the piano roll/sequencer assumes that writing down music is necessary for composition. If you want to determine what people are going to play beyond a certain complexity, you're going to rely on notation in all likelihood. However if you're working with conventions that everyone understands, and you want some individual contributions to come into the frame, using language and signals in interaction with the players, singing the lick you want to hear from them, a lot of other strategies might be better. I really enjoy the fact that I can completely obviate people in a chart I can realize solo, it means I can be the broke-ass motherf**ker I am and hear my compositions in relatively little time. Last time I got someone else involved, to do something I wasn't going to be able to, I told him, using my words, what I wanted. I did notate the last lick but it was impossible so he did something by ear anyway.

I work more from a jazz attitude then, I suppose. So:

Notation can express any musical idea in a very easy to understand and concise format.

Maybe in your experience of music this is true. However there has been quite some music done for quite some time that the notation for is so esoteric very few, only a true cognoscenti have any grasp of it. There is a lot of music created outside the paradigm. there are textures and gestures out of even the electric guitar, let alone complex patches in electronic music that five staves and dots with flags are hopelessly inadequate for. There are a lot of things I do that it would be pointless to even hope to notate.

How do you read rhythms off of a piano roll?

I don't. Why would I? The reason I use the piano roll is it gives me rhythms, the real and actual rhythms in an absolute expression of the time, where notation gives only signs that approximate. How long is this staccato? How many types of staccato do you use? One? Two? Or do you indicate 'short portato' now.

Estimate how big the rectangles are in comparison to other rectangles?

vs the piano roll where the length of that rectangle resolves to 4000 pulses per quarter note.

I don't think notation is going away any time real soon. I think the advocacy here is pretty obvious.

However the 'writing' of music as necessary for realization of music seems to be unexamined. What if the composer is blind? How deficient was Stevie Wonder out of not being able to pick up that theory book do you feature. as if that cart pulls the horse in the first place...

[jancivil]

Betty Crocker instant cake mixes did not replace baking from scratch. It only allowed more people to get involved in the cake making racket. That's sort of how I view computer music.

this is a really defective analogy. Computer music, what is that anyway? everything any person does with a computer in music? the computer per se provides a recipe book?

how does 'notation of music' = 'by scratch'? I had a free improv group for a few years. Our goal was to create an composition in real time. A lot of this was as purely by scratch as you can get! Often I start in the dark with only a sense of a soundworld. I don't make music except for 'on the computer' anymore. Notation is a means to an end, it cannot possibly amount to a definition of a modus operandi, 'from scratch'.

This is the fuddiest, duddiest, man. In one corner, the #2B pencil-wielding representative of purity and goodness, in the other corner Dub Turbo Man.

[herodotus]

There are plenty of old farts that will tell you that "notation will live forever", and "**contemporary** electronic music isn't real music", but their opinions are as antiquated and obsolete as they are...

Why be so dismissive and one-sided?

Some old farts who use(d) notation were pioneers in electronic music. People like Babbitt, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Barraque were early and enthusiastic adopters of electronic media.

There is no natural antagonism between notation based working methods and electronic working methods. They can work together, side by side.

Contemporary = relevant now, which IMHO is better than being "irrelevant now", and lot of things people try to consider as "timeless" really aren't.

I don't know, a certain weight is given to the belief that some classical music is timeless by the fact that we are even talking about it. Beethoven isn't dead. If he were he wouldn't be getting over 51 million results in a Google search (Skrillex, by the way, only gets about 32 million results).

In fact, I've heard better "classical" style music in the past 100 years (and even the past 20) than any of that boring-ass older stuff... It was a great display of the state of music theory for it's time, but the world has moved onto bigger (and dare I say, better) things...

You do realize that you just threw about 300 years worth of music history into the dustbin, right?

That is a whole bunch of music that you are dismissing as 'boring-ass older stuff' there.

Even Rock, etc... genres using notation seem to have lost quite a bit of relevance in the past decade or so, except that which has some heavy electronic influence...

What is this 'relevance' you are talking about here? Do you mean popularity? Do you mean what the cool people think is cool this year?

Personally, I think that there is just so damn much music available these days, from all over the globe, that it would be just about impossible for anyone to really know what music was most 'relevant'. I for one one have never met anyone who really seemed up to the task. For all we know the most historically 'relevant' music being made today is being made by folkloric ensembles permorming afro-cuban religious music:



Or perhaps it can be heard in the humble ensemble virtuosity of a gamelan like this one:



Time alone has the answers.

As for notation, it's a tool. Depending on the kind of music you are making, you are simply going to need it. You can't very well give a choir a bunch of printed out piano rolls with words written below the little rectangles (unless you want to make the rehearsals really difficult and expensive for some reason).

[jancivil]

Even Rock, etc... genres using notation seem to have lost quite a bit of relevance in the past decade or so, except that which has some heavy electronic influence...

relevance to whom? as if music is reinvented by every generation, and novelty is everything? this is like the guy last night making the analogy that 'e-drums' is an upgrade to 'acoustic drums' like Windows 7 was an upgrade from XP.

KVR is getting really bizarre, man. I shouldn't be so surprised at the reactionary tribe repped by Ogg I guess.

[trimph1]

Even Rock, etc... genres using notation seem to have lost quite a bit of relevance in the past decade or so, except that which has some heavy electronic influence...

relevance to whom? as if music is reinvented by every generation, and novelty is everything? this is like the guy last night making the analogy that 'e-drums' is an upgrade to 'acoustic drums' like Windows 7 was an upgrade from XP.

KVR is getting really bizarre, man. I shouldn't be so surprised at the reactionary tribe repped by Ogg I guess.

There does seem to be a bit of a 'new' vs 'old' thing going on here nowadays.

Maybe the whole 'new' vs 'old' scenario could be put to sleep and concentrate on our own music making...the way we see fit.

[KBSoundSmith]

Please don't turn the Hosts sub-forum into the new Music Theory sub-forum. If you all want to debate musical style and what is or isn't "relevant", keep it in the other sub-forum so it's easier to ignore.

[jeffh]

relevance to whom? as if music is reinvented by every generation, and novelty is everything? this is like the guy last night making the analogy that 'e-drums' is an upgrade to 'acoustic drums' like Windows 7 was an upgrade from XP.

OK, you like Rock, I get it... but doing something exactly the same way it's already been done 10/20 years ago has never been the path to musical success for anybody, and the terminal decline of Rock genres since peaking in the 80s and 90s is evident...

Notice how pretty much every decade for at least 100 years now has "reinvented" pretty much all popular music? Notice how radio stations are compartmentalized by whether they play music from the 50s/60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, (nobody plays music from the 2000s) or current music? I think your assertion shows your age, and your defensiveness proves that you know what I'm saying is true...

[jeffh]

@herodotas: I'm not going to attempt to quote your entire post and respond to specific points, but let's just define relevance:


Relevant: Popular today

Popular: Many (most?) people like it

Notation: Not in any way necessary for modern composition in a DAW using plugins

Old music theory: We are living in what is referred to as the "dissonant era" because dissonant melodies from early Jazz took the world by storm and dominate nearly all music. The old stuff is the polar opposite of dissonant, so I will personally choose to throw away all 300 years of it because nobody currently living likes the way it sounds, thanks... but I'm sure that sitting around rubbing elbows with the prince of Austria listening to young Beethoven was quite an experience for it's time...

[Ogg Vorbis]

I actually don't think "old VERSUS new." I just don't agree that new REPLACES old. I believe that things get added to, but really you don't have to consider something like notation and notation programs obsolete.

Why not have notation AND piano rolls? Is that so impossible?