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| Instruction manual - Pizzicato 3.3 | EN130 - Revision of 2008/04/30 |
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Working with a document (2)
Subjects covered:
Watch also the following video:
We continue to explore the handling of a document and its various views.
The sequencer view [Light] [Beginner] [Professional]
The word sequencer usually means a program or a device used to record sequences of notes (played directly on a musical keyboard), to work on them in various forms and to play them back. Most sequencers you find on the market let you see the musical recorded measures as an array of small blocks.
Pizzicato has a view which lets you display the measures in the same way, hence the name given to this view, the sequencer view.
After starting Pizzicato, open the Ex042.piz document in the Examples folder. In the Windows menu, select the Sequencer item. The sequencer view appears:
This view behaves exactly like the score view: you can move it, close it, resize it or change the zoom level.
Its contents displays 4 measures in the shape of 4 small blocks in which notes are represented by horizontal lines. The length of the lines represents the duration of the note and the vertical position of the line inside the block represents the pitch (the high pitch notes higher than the low pitch notes). The melody is thus presented in a visual way in the shape of a curve which follows the pitch of the note.
The higher part has four buttons, respectively named H- H+ V- and V+. These buttons let you increase or decrease both horizontal and vertical sizes of the measures. For example, the H+ button increases the horizontal size of the measures. By clicking twice on V+ and once on H+, the sequencer becomes:
By clicking on the V- and H- buttons, the size decreases. These zoom functions thus let you adapt the sequencer view to the work you do. It is sometimes useful to look closer in some measures to follow a melody. On the other hand, to see the overall picture of an orchestra score, you can decrease the size of the blocks to the minimum in order to have the maximum number of measures visible on the screen.
Close this document and open the sequencer view of the Ex043.piz example. The 4 staves of 4 measures each are represented in the following way:
You can listen to the score with the space bar. A small cursor shows the current measure in progress, as for the score view. You may also use the buttons of the recorder, displayed to the left of the zoom buttons. Those buttons appear in almost each view and let you control the playing of the score:
- The blue square button stops playing
- The yellow triangle button starts playing
- The two little blue squares button pause the playing (the playing notes stay in suspension; by pushing this button again, the playing resumes from the exact moment of the pause)
- The red circle button controls the recording.
Just to the right, a text box displays the number of the playing measure. The "..." button give you access to various play parameters. We will explain them later.
The piano roll view [Light] [Beginner] [Professional]
To open this view, select the piano roll item of the Windows menu. The following window appears:
Increase this window with the zoom box
(on Mac: "+" ). You will be able to observe all the notes of the 4 staves, placed in the same view:
You will notice that each staff is represented by a different colour for the notes. If your screen is smaller, it can happen that some are not visible. The pitches of the notes are measured with a musical keyboard on the left and it can be used to locate them. The digits from 1 to 4 located in the higher part of the window are the measure numbers.
In the higher part of the window you can see the same H- H+ V- and V+ buttons which have the same function as in the sequencer view. They let you resize the display of measures and notes. Try the 4 buttons one after the other so you can see the effect they produce on the display. Note that you can use the same button several times. If you want to increase the thickness of the note lines, you can for example click three times on V+.
The instruments view [Light] [Beginner] [Professional]
Close the last document and open the Ex044.piz example. To get the instruments view, select the Instruments item of the Windows menu :
According to your MIDI configuration, the contents of some boxes may be slightly different but it does not matter now.
Each line represents the characteristics of a stave. It is here that you determine the name of the staff, the instruments used, as well as various other parameters which affect the way the piece will be played.
You can reach the other parameters by clicking on the
icon which reveals a popup menu with a list of the available configurations. Select for example the Volume+ effects item from this menu. The view offers you a mixing table determining volume, balance and two effects (here reverberation and chorus) for each instrument :
This view is a little different from the others, because it does not have a zoom box and its size is fixed. It can be moved but not resized. Close this view with the close box.
Association of a comment [Light] [Beginner] [Professional]
You can associate a comment to each musical score. Select the Comments item in the Windows menu. The following dialog box appears:
The text box lets you introduce personal notes, remarks or comments about the musical score. You can, for example, use it to specify the work that still needs to be done with the score or the explanations on its contents, etc.
These notes will be saved with the document and you can thus read or modify them again later. Close this dialog box by clicking OK.
Exercise
The main point of this lesson is to be able to easily open and close the various views. For this purpose and as an exercise, if you are new to computers, successively open and close the following views for the 3 examples Ex042.piz, Ex043.piz and Ex044.piz:
- The sequencer view
- The piano roll view
- The instruments view
- The comments dialog
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