Add Space Between MIDI Notes

Weasel I think you may be right…

Wow. It’s kinda mesmerising. :smiley:

I very much appreciate your taking the time. It’s getting there but would need to be much less constrained for me to actually -use-. I would need it to work on a selection of notes within an event regardless of whether there are other notes or not. But this is a VERY good tip and maybe improved upon… or maybe there are lots of other uses. THANKS.

FWIW: I was hoping to just ‘grab’ a bunch of notes and have them s p r e a d o u t

One application: I do these ‘note clusters’ where say 10 voices need to have their start slightly randomised so they don’t all hit on the beat together. You hear this a lot in 20th century music with voices & winds. You want to keep ‘the cloud’ going, but people need to breathe so you spread out the entrances.

—JC

PS: I just googled ‘reading glasses’ to make fun of my poor eyesight… and Harry Tuttle came up, but I now realise that there’s a lot more layers to this. :smiley:

So should it be readable in sheet music? Any other examples?

Big thanks for doing that.

However the scipt makes the notes shorter. I want them to be further apart, but the same length. Maybe the script got lost in translation?


Here’s what I want. I FIGURED OUT LICECAP! :slight_smile:
spreadout.gif
NB. I always get -sincerely- surprised with stuff like this. I was fully expecting that this was something already possible… and also that what I was after was pretty self-explanatory. It was a pretty common composition technique when I was in school… back in 1375 of course, but still. :smiley: I appreciate all the efforts… had no idea it would be so fiddly.

Steve, if yer not just taking this piss… there are tons of ‘applications’ for this kinda thing. I do this all the time to add a slight amount of realism to all kinds of material. Sometimes it would be good to be able to -decrease- the space between notes. And if possible, this would be great to be able to do with a selection of audio events… changing the space between a group of percussive hits.

—JC

JC, now I’m just curious,
did you look into my suggestion regarding Arpache sx? I tried it here, and it did exactly what you describe.

However the script makes the notes shorter. I want them to be further apart, but the same length.

Well yes. If the notes are moved backwards by some amount, they will bump into the notes behind them…unless the lengths are shortened by the same amount as the time shift. What you suggest (and I could be misinterpreting this) is that this would require slowing the tempo surrounding those notes to open up enough time to keep the note lengths the same but not bump into the notes behind them.

I mean you want to create a gap and not have them overlap…did I get that right? The space has to come from somewhere. There’s only one person on this forum who might be able to figure out what I’ve described above: Vic France. This sorta thing is above my payscale.

As to this:

I do these ‘note clusters’ where say 10 voices need to have their start slightly randomised so they don’t all hit on the beat together

Download this to do this:

You have to create a Macro as shown here to pull this off.

You have an F19? Where do =I= get an F19?

grumble posts crossing in the night.

Suntower: I just looked at your GIF. If you take the first LEpreset I posted and remove the first Action Target, it’ll do exactly that (the ppq value entered) with a KeyCommand to any selected notes. The lengths wont change but the starting position will.

You have an F19? Where do =I= get an F19?

One of the percs of owning a Mac. Use whatever is available/free.

I do these ‘note clusters’ where say 10 voices need to have their start slightly randomised so they don’t all hit on the beat together.

Another MIFDIC approach is the Trim Tool to pull this off. Not random but in a lot of cases it will sound right.

Sorry…I don’t know what the PC equivalent of the Option key is.

Congratulations!

Weasel has the solutions for the note clusters…

As far as the expanding universe, here is a much simpler way that works without limitations.

Select the notes in question
Invoke “Locate Selection”
Invoke this LE preset:

LE:
Filter:
Type-Note
Property=Selected

Action:
Position Multiply by 1.1

then invoke “Move to Cursor”

And heeeeere’s the licecap:


exUni2.xml.zip (927 Bytes)

Hm, when I tried that it moved all events by the given amount, whereas they all need to be moved by increasing amounts relative to where they started. That’s why I used ‘multiply’. But then i needlessly complicated things since I thought the space between notes needed to progressively increase.

Hm, when I tried that it moved all events by the given amount, whereas they all need to be moved by increasing amounts relative to where they started.

I wasn’t sure if the notes needed to maintain their relative positions or not from Suntower’s initial description. Short attention span on my part, I guess.
Both LE’s do the same basic primary function (shift the note starts back) but treat the spacing differently. Two useful tools for two different results, I’d say.

Yes indeed.

You guys are amazing. And clever.

But what is this thang gonna ‘sound’ like? :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

and as Steve posted:

So should it be readable in sheet music?

{‘-’}

Very nice. Thanks to both Steve and Weasel. If I were the king of the forest, I’d want some way to specify the multiplier… similar to the current MIDI functions like ‘Velocity’, but I can certainly use a small value and repeat as needed.

AFA ‘how does it sound’? It sounds like notes. What else would one expect? :smiley: But typical ‘classical’ examples might be found in the soundtracks to “there will be blood” (Jonny Greenwood’s ‘Superhet’) or ‘2001’… bits by Pendercki, Ligeti, etc. Lots of Wagner… TONS of electronic music from the 60’s.

Maybe you have a ‘chord’ that you want to sustain for a long time and people need to breathe so you have them sneak in/out specifically -not- on the beat so it sounds homogeneous. Or maybe you want percussion that sounds random… like Planet Of The Apes. This is an easy way to try different timings. Or maybe you have a rhythm-part that is simply too perfect. You don’t want to move everything in one direction, you want to add some controllable ‘slop’ and hear how certain notes sound if they were moved a skosh ahead/behind the beat all in one go.

BIG CHEERS!

–JC

Nice Thread
{‘-’}

Do you have a keyboard or some external keypad with an F19 or is this a ‘virtual’ deal? Obviously I don’t get out enough… I just never considered there might be F keys beyond 12.

TIA,

—JC

Do you have a keyboard or some external keypad with an F19…

I have 3 Macs, two towers and one iMac. All three came with keyboards that extend the F keys out to 19. 13-15 are over the U/D/L/R arrow keys while 16-19 continue across above the numerical keypad area. Standard Apple issue. They come in handy.

I just realised I have another application for this right now. Related to a F/R another guy made for multiple tempo tracks.

I have a piece right now where I have an ostinato (…er… ‘arp’) going on in the background while the main melody plays. I have teeny several tempo slow downs so that the melody can ‘breathe’. Obviously, this makes the ostinato slow down too which is unacceptable… it has to keep chugging at the same apparent tempo. Since we don’t have multiple tempo tracks, I can either:
a) bounce the ostinato to audio… goodbye notation.
b) manually tweak the MIDI every time it occurs… tedious
c) OR use this fabulous new macro to try out different ‘spreads’ quickly.

:slight_smile:

DOUBLE BONUS: A LOT of the time I want to try out different tempi for a line that has a bunch of breaks. Think: James Brown: ‘Hit me 4 times… Uh… Uh… Uh… Uh…’ I’m not sure how much -space- I want between each hit. This lets me try these very quickly. Like how much space between songs on a CD. It has to feel right. Lots of trial and error.