Thread: How to render this without adding additional instruments

So, I was gearing up for Christmas and typing in Handel's Messiah No. 12 Chorus "For unto us a Child is born" and the 5th and 6th measure of the introduction kind of have me stymied because Handel got really creative there. All the rest of the song is fairly normal, as far as notes and things go, but those two measure are being a bit of a pain. Here's the best that I can render them:

See, he has some notes in a chord (but not all) being extended across a measure. That part is easy, I just didn't put measure bars in although I might need to add an additional dummy measure bar somewhere so that the piano parts line up properly with the voice parts later on, we'll see how that goes.

He also has a dotted eighth note being played at the same time (by the same hand) as a regular eighth note and a quarter note and then another eighth note is played just before the 16th note that follows the first dotted eighth note. The first chord is "Adf". In normal ABC, that would be:
L:1/8
f>g&A2&dc

So, my original thought was that I would have 6 instruments, a lute/theorbo for the piano parts, bagpipe for the bass, horn for the tenor, clarinet for the alto, flute for the soprano.

But how can I get those extra notes in there without suddenly requiring two additional string instruments? I could have the bottom piano part play the "dc" -- since it's already playing eighth notes, I can just change them into chords, from "D,D,," to "[D,d][D,,c]" but when I go to transpose the lower notes into the LotRO format I'm going to have to lower the "dc" and I might not get those notes into the right octave, which wouldn't sound right.

LotRO can't handle ampersands, &'s, so I can't use "f>g&A2&dc".

Maybe if I triple up on the theorbo. It's already a quiet instrument, it might need three of them to equal the sound of the rest of the instruments (especially the bagpipe, although I might change that one to a horn as well).

I am not sure if this will help you,
But what I do is use several programs, Melody Assistant, Notepad ++ and LOTRO Midi player ( Digero's )

My first step is using Melody Assistant, to create or edit my midi.
I create blank treble staves, and name them Lute Theorbo Harp Flute Clarinet Horn Bagpipes Drums Cowbell ( as needed )
I adjust, move notes, combine staves that work together, and transpose by 12 up or down the staves to keep them in range. c' to C,
I put these in the blank staves making sure they are all within the c' to C, range.

I save my midi ( mid1)
I open it in LOTRO Midi.

Here in Lotro Midi, I can combine staves even easier, and the program Digero made adjusts the staves to sound well together, matching timing and trills and so on very well.

So say you have 3 lute parts, you can combine those into one with LOtro midi.

What I usually do is make a solo part with lotro midi, and then a string part combining all string parts, and a winds part combining all wind pieces.
This allows solo and duo and every additional part to play together and sound great, without needing 6 + players.

make sure to keep the song in a -36 -24 -12 0 12 24 36 range in LOTRO Midi in each part, and it will sound great.

I think I'm going to use maybe two harps and two lutes. I forgot that the lute doesn't "match" the treble cleff, but it does go down to the C just below the bass cleff (and nothing in the song goes below a D below the bass cleff), so I'll put the bottom piano parts as lutes and the top two piano parts as harps.

I'll also have to put flute as soprano, clarinet as alto, bagpipe as tenor, horn as bass to get the range of notes I want. I might have to soften the bagpipe, or use a second clarinet instead of a bagpipe.

Here is how I would transcribe the piece:

Code:

X:1
T:Messiah No. 12 [lute]
L:1/8
Q:100
K:G

| [d/b/] a/ b/ c'/ [d/b/] c'/ a/ b/ [Bg] [e2z] G [A3c3z] a 
 [f2z] [Bd] [Bg3] A [B2d2z] a [A2df3/2] [cz/] g/ |
| [GBd]

X:2
T:Messiah No. 12 [theorbo]
L:1/8
Q:100
K:G

| [B2f2] z2 e2 c A d B e c d c d D |
| [Gd]

As you discovered, LOTRO does not implement the voice overlay (&) function of ABC. The trick to writing multiple voices on one staff is to use chords with notes of different values, and chords containing rests. This is not in the ABC standard, but LOTRO appears to play the note following such a chord after the shortest duration note has concluded. If you feed some sample cases through LOTRO MIDI Player, you will see this is how it merges multiple voices.

Why does LOTRO interpret ABCs this way? I don't know, perhaps it was easier for the developers to code. But I hope one day LOTRO will support the published ABC method of writing multiple voices, because this is not very easy to read or understand.

ps. I can't see the key signature so I made a guess that its in G. Also I put a resolving G chord on the next bar to check that everything sounds right and the two staves didn't get "out of sync".

To avoid the short-note confusion, I reduce all notes in a chord to the shortest note and tie the others over to the next "tick". I see it as mimicking a "play bar" that many "piano-role" type of sequencers use where each sustain is continued through the next position of the play bar.

I would render top staff (assuming it is a standard "G" treble clef) the image as:
(I try to always go top-down with all chords, but sometimes, I forget.)
For L:1/16 (adjust as necessary)

Code:

[bd]abc' [bd]c'ab [g2B2] [e2-G2] [e2c2-A2-] [a2c2-A2-] [f2-c2A2] [f2d2B2] [g2-B2] [g2-A2] [g2d2-B2-] [a2d2B2] [f2-d2A2-] [fc-A-] [gcA] |

This way, I can visually "scrub" the code and see what notes are currently playing at any one time. (Scrubbing is moving the play bar back and forth to find out what sounds are active at any specific time.)

Originally Posted by Northman

To avoid the short-note confusion, I reduce all notes in a chord to the shortest note and tie the others over to the next "tick".

Northman you are a genius! This method is so much better.

Originally Posted by Northman

To avoid the short-note confusion, I reduce all notes in a chord to the shortest note and tie the others over to the next "tick".

This is what ABC converters do automatically, is it not?

Originally Posted by Fionnuala

This is what ABC converters do automatically, is it not?

I wouldn't know. I don't use them.

Notepad all the way! (Until some tie and rest errors for fast runs are fixed in the LotRO ABC player, I have to Alt-Enter in and out of LotRO to edit and test. It's a labor of love, I suppose.)

Originally Posted by Fionnuala

This is what ABC converters do automatically, is it not?

I think it varies. Which ABC converter do you use?

LOTRO MIDI Player uses the technique I described with the short notes and rests in the middle of chords. From what I've seen the resulting ABCs don't play correctly in all programs. ABC Explorer had problems with it.

I never used midi2abc but digging through the documentation turned up this:

Keyboard and guitar music has a lot of chords which frequently
poses a problem to midi2abc. If the notes in the chord do
not share a common onset or end time, midi2abc uses ties to join
the longer notes to other chords. This produces a mess looking
somewhat like
[AG-G-G-D-G,,,-][B/2-B/2-B/2-G/2G/2-G/2-D/2-G,,,/2-]...
which does not convert into something easy to read when
display in common music notation.

So, those converters do require MIDI files. That's what I figured. I have no sequencer, so I must arrange stuff on-the-fly. Since that's the case, I go straight to the source. (Pun for you IT people.)

I have no desire to use someone else's MIDI. Where's the fun in that?

For those of us who aren't proficient in musical arrangement in real life, a midi allows a starting point. And, I think that's the key--a starting point. Taking a midi and forcing it through a converter by brute force may occasionally give you a good result. But not usually. There's a great deal of work that needs to be done before you end up with a quality product.

{I'd originally typed a VERY long response explaining my process, but that's now in this post.}

I just realized (I knew it before, but it just didn't register) that the harp and lute are the in the same "octave". Neither one is high enough to play the high piano notes and really have it sound different from the low piano part -- if I transpose the high piano part down to fit the lute, then it's basically going to be playing all the same octave as the low piano parts. I'm going to have to use clarinet/horn for the piano part and then you're not going to easily be able to tell a difference between the piano and voice parts.

No matter how I look at it, each instrument only has three octaves, the string instruments are all in the bottom half of the instruments register, and a piece that uses four octaves just won't fit.

That's the trouble with many pieces with piano as a major player. You may have to just compress the octave range for that accompaniment.
Or, lower it--use theorbo for the lower register maybe? Harp tends to sound pretty awful for low notes as it is.

I've found different uses for the LotRO stringed instruments in different situations. In one case, I found using the harp for a low rythmic loop better than the lute, which ended up trading places with my original guess and is set at the top instead.

I have another piece where I think the Theorbo sounds better and more appropriate than the harp or lute in their overlapping octave.

I've also found that switching instruments during a run can give some really neat impressions of stylizing.

What it comes down to for me: Listening. That's the point of "scrubbing" in audio, to listen to a specific troubling section. That's why I mimic it as I can in ABC since LotRO can't scrub.

As for MIDI-to-ABC, I guess I should have been less broad in the implied statement. I don't find it fun to try to fix someone else's stuff.

I prefer no starting point than my own, as I know where that is. Any problems are caused by me alone. It's less frustrating than dealing with problems due to the efforts of others.