Re: [Rosegarden-devel] Grace notes...

[D. M. M. <mic...@ro...>]

On Tuesday 04 September 2007, D. Michael McIntyre wrote:

Bump.  (I spend too much time on web forums these days.)

> How the hell are you supposed to enter grace notes in any useful way with
> Rosegarden?  I'm trying to enter (in 3/8) a quarter note, two 16th grace
> notes, then two 16th notes.  If I enter all four 16th notes, then "make
> grace" on the first two, the remaining two stay in the next bar.  I can't
> cut/paste them back into the right bar, because there's no hole.  This
> might be an ancient bug William reported 12 years ago.
>
> I'm staring at a sheet of music I need help figuring out how to play, and
> it has an ass pot of grace notes.  I should make this my mission.  So
> first, Chris, somebody, what do we know is broken, and why is it broken,
> and why is it impossible to fix?
>
> My first thought is that it should be possible to enter a grace note
> straight up, instead of having to enter it as something else, and convert
> it.  We have another enter as something and convert in the "make chord"
> function, and that seems to have problems too.  Rosegarden has always been
> bitchy about placement issues, requiring you to manually pad out the rests
> to create the right kind of gap, etc., and anything Rosegarden does to turn
> something into something else seems to be fraught with peril.
>
> So how would it work entering something as a grace note straight up? 
> What's the math on this anyway?  I guess it's hard to know in advance, and
> that's the problem.  If you're supposed to have four grace notes of
> duration Q followed by a normal note of duration Q, then the total duration
> of the five notes should be Q, with some fraction evenly distributed among
> the four grace notes, and the remainder given over to the full value note. 
> But you couldn't know how to calculate that until it was all in place. 
> That suggests having to do it after the fact, as we do, but we get it so
> horribly wrong that it appears to be just short of useless.
>
> It appears the only way to do this is to:
>
> 1) Create four notes of duration Q which will become grace notes
> 2) Create a fifth note of duration Q which will be the full value
> "remainder" note
> 3) Do "make grace notes" on the first four notes, in order to get them
> flagged as grace notes, and display as tiny notes in the editor (they don't
> sound correctly;  I was doing this with the speakers off, but memory says
> their durations are all out of whack)
> 4) Go into the Matrix, and dick everything around for half an hour until
> you arrive at something that looks approximately right
> 5) Observe in the notation editor that the grace notes of duration Q now
> seem to be 1/4 Q (eg. they were 16th note grace notes, and now they're
> showing as 64th notes, although they seem to come out as 16th notes in
> LilyPond)
>
> Anyway, out of time for now.  Discuss!

Anybody?  That music is still sitting here unentered.  I'm close to being in 
the mood for a little crusade, but I could use some real thoughts about 
what's supposed to work how, and why it's broken.

I have no idea if my ambition will peter out well short of a solution, but at 
this time I seem to have my mind around the edge of totally redoing all of 
this.

Maybe a "Prepend Grace Notes" tool you can click on an existing note...

Four grace notes Q followed by full Q.

Draw note Q, the big note at the end of the sequence.

Click "Prepend Grace Notes" tool on this note, call it the host note.

Up pops a dialog with a little mini notation view (this sounds horribly, 
horribly complicated to implement, and seems like a deal breaker for getting 
me to do this) where I can enter as many notes as I want, of whatever 
duration, but four notes of duration Q for this running example.

I hit OK, and get four grace notes of duration Q at the pitches I specified, 
and they're inserted immediately ahead of the host note. The first grace note 
comes in at the start time of the host note.  The next three follow.  The 
grace note durations are calculated using some math I don't really grasp at 
this time, and the start time and duration of the host note are parasitized 
by the grace note(s) entered via this dialog.

We would abolish the useless "make grace notes" tool to the Island of Useless 
Concepts that Didn't Work Worth a Damn, and live happily ever after, and then 
Michael could finally punch in this damn piece of sheet music, and get the 
computer to help him figure out how the grace notes are supposed to sound.

Thoughts?  Especially about the "Prepend Grace Notes" dialog.  This sounds 
like a real bastard to implement.  I also have absolutely no clue how to do 
the magical mystery math on calculating how much to parasitize the host note 
by in proportion to the written duration of the grace note(s).

This last problem seems a bit like the difficulty using ornaments with a 
little up and down thing at the beginning of a long note, like in my Bach 
example file.  It should go da-da-da-daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa 
as originally sequenced and intended, but the ornament interpreter stuff 
mangles everything in proportion to the length of the ornament note somehow 
or other, yielding 
daaaaaaaaaa-daaaaaaaaaa-daaaaaaaaaaa-daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, which wrecks everything.  (If 
this example leaves you with no idea what the hell I'm talking about, I'll 
have to come up with Rosegarden example files showing what the bit in 
question actually sounds like, and what it was supposed to have sounded like, 
if the ornament thingie hadn't wrecked it.  I chose to leave it wrecked, 
since the only way to get a correct performance would have been to notate 
something ugly with 64th notes or whatever.)

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre