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"How To" Pages

Putting Space Between Notes

Contents:


Selecting Music to Be Spaced

You can edit the music to create space from the main screen that you are already viewing, or you can go to a special track editing screen.

Main Window

From the main window, simply click your mouse in the top-left grid box that you want to edit and drag the mouse to the lower-right box that you want to edit. It will highlight those boxes like this:

Entire Hymn Selected

Track Editor Window

The track editor window gives you more control over events in a single track. To open that window, simply "right-click" your mouse in the grid on the track that you want to edit. It will bring up a window that looks like this:

Track Editor Window

You will notice a piano keyboard on the left. Each note in the track appears next to the corresponding key. Notice that this display shows far more detail than the main window. As a result, you cannot see all of the hymn right now. We can fix that. Click on the toolbar button that looks like a magnifying glass with a minus sign. You can shrink the length of the music display until all of the notes apear on a single screen, like this:

Shortened Track Display

As with the main screen, you can click on a grid box in the upper-left and drag to a point at the lower-right to select notes to be edited. I have selected more area than necessary. This will not hurt your MIDI file. Note that because this screen only affects one track, any other tracks will remain unaffected by your editing here.


Spacing the Music

Now that you have selected music to edit, go to the "Edit" menu and select "Length..." You will see a dialogue box that looks something like this:

Note Length Dialogue

You cannot change the "Ticks per quarter" value, but you need to understand a little bit about it. The number of ticks help determine how much you can subdivide a quarter-note. The simplest subdivision is the eighth-note, which is half as long as a quarter. Since 96 is an even number, it can be divided in half and can be represented with 48 ticks. A sixteenth-note has 24 ticks, a thirty-second note has 12, etc. Triplets are created when you divide the ticks by three.

Why did I say all of that? So that you can pick how much time you want for separating your notes. I like to use six ticks. It is long enough to create a gap, but short enough that the note still has virtually full value. (It is only a sixty-fourth note short of full value!)

Notice that there is a "Mode" list. "Set" will fix the length of every note at the value you choose. We will be creating space between notes of different lengths. Some are quarter-notes, some half-notes, and some eighths. We want the spaces to be equal, but the lengths of the notes will still be different. Instead of "Set," we need to choose "Sub," which will decrease the length of each selected note by the value that we have chosen.

Click on "OK," and your music will now have spaces between each note. Here are examples of the results from the Main Window and the Track Edit Window:

Main Window Spaced

Track Edit Window Spaced

To close the Track Edit Window, simply click on the "x" at the upper-right and you will return to the Main Window.

Now that you have put space between the notes, you can save the file with the spacing. If you want to add an introduction, then you need to go to the next page, Adding an Introduction, or you can return to the Table of Contents.


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