Piano Music from MIDI

[konradh]

I painstakingly created a piano part in my sequencer (Sonar) and saved it as a MIDI file. When I load it into Print Music, the durations of lots of notes are messed up. For example, I might play three notes in a row in the left hand as a broken chord: one whole note, one dotted half, and one half so the notes are sustained throughout the measure. Finale doesn't like this: it tries to force everything in the left hand to total four counts, so it writes a quarter, a quarter, and a half. It won't let me change these.

If I try to erase the first quarter, it moves everything to the left. If I try to insert a whole, it won't let me because it thinks I am adding too many beats to the bar.

Piano music doesn't work like that. You may have five notes on the first beat, three on the second, two on the third, etc. You can't expect all the notes to add up to four beats and you can't expect there to be a consistent number of parts like there would be in a string quartet.

How the heck can I create piano accompaniments with these restrictions? Or, how can I load MIDI notes just as I created them without the unhelpful corrections?

I'd hate to have to re-enter all the music note by note, but, even if I wanted to do that, I'm not sure Finale would let me since it is trying too hard to "help" me keep all the note values within bounds.

I have a dozen pieces that will need vocal+piano and I fear this is going to be an ongoing nightmare.

Of course, the ideal thing would be to import the melody line on a vocal staff and the piano parts beneath it: I have the MIDI. I fear that would be an even bigger mess.

Thanks.

[miker]

My suggestion would be to learn one of the other entry methods: Simple, or Speedy.

You need to learn about layers. They are basic to any kind of note entry in Finale, and are how you deal with notes of different durations in a measure.

[konradh]

Thank you for replying.

Do I understand, then, that I will not be able to import the piano MIDI correctly?

What I want is to import it as is. If I cannot do that, I will have to redo many ours of work for a dozen pieces.

[HaraldS]

Do I understand, then, that I will not be able to import the piano MIDI correctly?

There is no single correct way of importing it. Your situation can be put to music notation in several ways, e.g. these five:

Importing a MIDI file is like translating some text from one language to another: the result may be very close to the original, but due to a changed frame of communication, differences are most likely to happen. The MIDI file specification describes notes as events which can happen any time in any length. Music notation, on the other hand, visualizes music in an abstract way: as notes which have a relation to beats (and further, measures) and - more important for your example - as notes which are put to voices. In piano music, it's usually desireable to have no more than two voices for each hand. Your example contains three voices and there's no general rule how this situation must be written in music notation.

What I want is to import it as is. If I cannot do that, I will have to redo many ours of work for a dozen pieces.

Indeed, when I would write piano music in Finale from a MIDI file, I would import it, but go through each measure to decide the best way how the desired sounding result should be written down. There are a lot of rules written piano music usually sticks to, the more you know, the better your result will be (voice distribution, stem direction, cross-staff notation, e.g.). Finale doesn't handle these rules for you, but lets you decide which way to take.

[konradh]

Harald, this is excellent and your examples are perfect. Thanks!

I will try to use ties instead of note values. That should help.

I do have another case where a harmony not is being changed to a quarter triplet because of the melody bove it. I will look at all this in light of your examples.

Thank you again.

Konrad