NIGHTINGALE NOTATION PROGRAM for MAC
Starting Nightingale
We will begin simply. Your assignment will be to launch Nightingale by going to the Aliases folder under the Apple Menu (far upper left hand corner of the screen). Hold the button on the mouse down while you scroll through the titles under the Aliases and find Nightingale. When Nightingale is highlighted, simply release the button and the application "Nightingale" will be automatically launched.
When the program is open, select "new" when you are asked "which score do you want to open?". You will then see a screen with a grand staff and menu headings at the top: " File, Edit, Score, Notes/Rests, Groups, View, and Play/Rec." You can examine the details of these different Nightingale Menus later. You are now able to use the mouse to input a melodic line and a bass line. Do not try to enter chords at this time.
You select values (notes or rests) and the place the cursor on the staff and click as to where you want it. You can also click on " undo" in the edit menu if you don't get it placed right.
In the example provided here you can see that a Bach Invention is being put in by using the Mouse to select note values from the Palette and then placing the cursor on the staff where the note or rest should appear. You can see that the eighth-note symbol is highlighted in the Palette. Note that the cursor turns into the shape of whatever you have selected in the Palette. In this case, the cursor is the small eighth-note symbol since the next to to be put in would be an eighth-note. Don't try to drag notes beyond just the simple placement you do with the mouse. Nightingale automatically places the note where it should go and will continue to track note placements as you add more notes.
Making Accidentals With Nightingale:
Entering accidentals for notes is quite simple. When you place the note on the clef, simply hold the mouse button down and raise the note (by pushing the mouse [cursor] up) which will create sharps or naturals, depending on the key signature. Hold the mouse button down while pulling the mouse [cursor] down to create flats or naturals, depending on the key signature. Pushing the cursor further up or down (while keeping the mouse button depressed) creates double sharps and double flats.
The Notation Palette
Explore the "Palette". Practice getting rid of the palette (by clicking in the upper left hand corner) and bringing it back (under the View Menu "Show Palette"). Practice expanding and contracting the palette by clicking in the upper right hand corner of the Palette. See if you can intuitively figure out what the symbols in the palette refer to. Experiment.
.You will notice that the Palette is arranged logically. The main cursor is the Arrow. You need it to locate your work on a system or a page or in a particular clef. It is your way of navigating around the page. The Arrow pointing to the note in the next box at the right is the Drag Cursor which lets you drag and place almost any element on the page. Essentially the top row are your tools: the two cursors for navigation, the dot (for adding a dot to a note value), the threader, and the tool for tying notes or creating phrases.
The left-hand column(column 1) of the Palette are the note values going from the longest value to the shortest value as you decend down the column. Clicking on a note value will enable you to enter that note value on the page. The cursor turns into the note value and you can then place the note on any staff anywhere on the page. The next column to the right (column 2) is the column for corresponding rests, while the next column (column 3) provides a heirarchy of dynamic values which can be placed on the score. With Nightingale all elements suchs dots for notes, accents, dynamics, text of lyrics, etc. must be attached to a note, so you click on the note you wish the element to apply to.
The last two columns of the standard palette provide score elements such as (column 4), in descending order) barlines, key signatures, meter, rehearsal letters, text tool, crescendo, fermata, etc. and the final column of the standard pallete (column 5) contains the repeat bars, the clefs, the grace notes, the metronome, and decrescendo, etc. The three rows at the bottom are specialized marking such as turns, trills, accents, chord symbols, accents, etc.
The Expanded palette adds three columns of less frequently used notation items such as additional clefs, slashes, pedal markings, rolled chords, a drawing tool, and so forth.
Explore each menu option at the top and look at the various commands. Some will be self evident, some will not. We will examine the menu commands later.
Develop some questions about things you don't understand. Remember that in order to add a system to the score, you click on "Add System After" under the Score Menu.
SAVE your work onto a floppy disk. Once you have notated the example (two systems is plenty) select "Save As" under "File". Click on "Desktop" and you will see the icon for your floppy disk. Click on your Icon and it will open your disk. Give your notation example a name and click on "SAVE". You will have now saved your work to Disk.
Menu Commands
The Menus at the Top of the Nightingale Screen utilize familiar aspects of the Mac Operating System. We were introduced to this menu generally when we first opened the program: "File, Edit, Score, Notes/Rests, Groups, View, and Play/Rec." The File Menu is the general menu for opening and closing files, for printing, for importing files, and dealing with the page setup. The Edit Menu contains the general editing tools for the OS, including copying, cutting, pasting, etc., and some additional editing tools are also available. The Command "Clear" is important because it lets you clear an element associated with a note or a system without erasing the note or system itself.
Practicing Making A Score With Nightingale
Practice inputting music onto a new page. Focus on using Masterpage to set up your score. Select Proteus 1 as the playback device. Do this AFTER you have given the instrument a name. You are to create a score using at least two independent parts (two independent systems) such as piano and voice or another instrument, or two instruments. Use the instrument page to add the staff if necessary and to name the instruments. It is at this time you will assign the playback device (use Proteus1) and the patch number and channel number. Use channel 1 for your first instrument and channel two for your second instrument. Don't worry about whether your patches are correct at this time. Just practice putting in patch and channel; numbers at the time you are selecting the device. When you close the instrument page, use Master Page to return to your score and when it asks "Apply Changes to Score?" click on " apply."
Select MIDI preferences and activate the feedback on note insertion at the bottom of the page by clicking on it so that an "X"" appears in the box. Now Do "Save AS" and give this work a name so that all these preferences will be saved. Be sure to Save into your folder on the hard drive, and be sure to make a backup of your work at the end of your session on your floppy disk.
Notating a Chorale with Nightingale Nightingale
An excellent way of getting to know a notation program is to use various input techniques to notate a Bach Chorale. It is generally a simple context and forces you to deal with how a program handles independent voices.
Open up a new score. You get the default of the grand score. You can set this up as the score by using Masterpage to label the staff as "Chorale". The Text tool allows you to put a title and the composer and the drag cursor allows you to drag these texts to desired spots on the page.
Nightingale automatically assigns the first voice in the treble clef as "voice 1" and the first voice in the bass clef as "voice 2." This allows us to enter the soprano and bass lines without any problem. Remember to use "beam notes" to beam highlighted notes and to use the flip command (command key + F) to flip the stemps up for the soprano voice and all the stems down for the bass voice.
Now we must use the "Look at One Voice Only" under view to select a new voice. The computer will automatically label it "voice 3."
Now we can add the alto voice. Notice that when we put in the alto voice the stems will be in the wrong direction and the notes are not beamed.
We can quickly fix this. First use the command from Edit known as "Select All." Once everything has been highlighted, select the command "Beam notes by beat" under the Menu"Groups". After the notes are beamed use the Flip Command (Command Key +F) while the notes are still selected. The alto voice will appear correctly beamed and stems in the right direction.
We use the same procedure to put in the tenor line. Under "View" go to "Look at One Voice Only." If you click on new, the computer will assign the number 4 to the next voice.
Enter the tenor line. The same problem of stems in the wrong direction and unbeamed notes occur as we enter the notes.
We fix these problems as we did the alto voice. Use "Select All" and "Beam Notes By Beat". Then use the Flip Command to reverse the direction of the stems in the tenor. They will now be in the correct direction.
Notice that in the places where the score has the interval of the 2nd in adjacent voices, the notes are on top of each other (second and fourth measures).
You can use the Drag Cursor to pull the lower note of the 2nds slightly to the right, so that the notes appear as they should.
While we have been entering notes, we have also been creating a MIDI file. To make sure the MIDI file voices are all synchronized, we will use a special command to check the voices. First use the "Select All" command to select all of the notes.
Now go to the Duration Menu and select "Remove Rhythmic Gaps/Resynchronize". This checks the MIDI voices and aligns them as they should be aligned.
Now you can save the chorale as a MIDI file. Go to the File Menu and selct "Export as MIDI file". You can ignore the warning that some meaures are incomplete. That is the nature of how chorales are notated (starting on the upbeat and compensating for that in the final measure).
You can open up this midi file with your browser. It will play as a piano file. However, you will note that it doesn't observe the fermata. In a second version, the fermata will observed by simply making an alternative score in which the fermata is actually notated in the score. this is saved as a MIDI file and is the one we would use with the chorale in its traditional notation.
We can create a pict file by taking a screen shot (Shift+command key+3). Use Adobe Photoshop to open up the PICT file which has been saved on the hard drive as Picture # (a specific number will be used). Use the select tool to select just the chorale. Copy and paste into a new window (select "New" under File) in Photoshop. Choose either greyscale or indexed color so that you can save the image as a gif file. Be sure to change the image size so that it is small enough to use on the web. Now your final version can be posted and you can have your file play the MIDI file while it observes the fermata.
This exercise takes you through the basics of a notation program. We will look at other notation programs. It is important to get a sense of how notation programs work so that you can switch to different applications. Conceptually, most notation programs cover the same basic ways of inputting the elements of notation.
Printing With Nightingale
Practice printing a score. For best results, under view enlarge to the image 400%. Then under Page Setup under the File Menu, set the Scaling to 25%. This procedure makes inkjet printers produce laser-like results. Don't save these settings when you have printed the score. When you close the work or Nightingale, it will ask save "Changes to (Your File)?" and you should say no. It is trying to save the enlargement and scaling changes which you don't want to be permanently attached to your file.
Notation by MIDI Recording
After checking to make sure your MIDI connections are working (OMS Current Studio), choose MIDI Recording under the Play/Rec menu. You can either record by playing the keyboard in a live performance, or step record, that is , input in the music note by note or chord by chord. These features are quite common in notation programs, and can be very helpful n creating the first stages of a score.
Nightingale is very effective in capturing a recording and transforming it to notation. When you select "Record" be sure to already have set up the staff and have the cursor located at the point you wish to insert music. "Record Insert" puts new material without attempting to merge the notation with another line. "MIDI Record Merge" synchronizes additional lines with notation already present.
When you select "Record" you will hear a metronome. Select "Metronome" under "Play/Rec" Menu and open up the metronome dialogue box. Select the metronome to be sounded from the computer as an internal metronome.
You can select the tempo by clicking on the metronome in the notation palette and then provide a metronome value for the beat note.
When you press Record and hear the metronome begin recording by playing on the keyboard. When you finish recording, click the mouse. Click on "DONE" and the MIDI notes will appear on staff without rhythmic values. Highlight the notes if they are not already highlighted and select "Transcribe Recording." You will be asked what note value to use as the lowest common denominator (8th, 16th, etc.). This step is called quantizing and is common to all MIDI recording programs whether they be sequencers or notation programs. You will then see the notation appear, rounded off to the nearest note values and beats.
The score can be further edited using the standard features of Nightingale.
Scanning Printed Music into Nightingale.
Place music on the scanner and open up a text scanning program such as Visioneer Paperport. Select Acquire from the File Menu. The recommended resolution is 200 dpi. Using the "Bright" control on the scanning program, darken the image, but don*t get it too dark. Then select "Final" and the scanner will scan the image. Take a look at the scan and see if it is acceptable. You can use a command in PaperPort which is called "Clean Page" to remove some of the blackness that clutters the page (if any does). If you have a good, clear and clean image save it as a TIFF file. Remember to use ".tiff" as a suffix to remind you of the file format you have selected.
Open the Program called NOTESCAN. In Notescan open the TIFF music file you just scanned. Notescan will then scan the TIFF file and recognize the images as notes, staff, stems, etc. This can be generally very effective. From a good scan you can expect about 90% or better accuracy. You will have to clean up things when you open the scanned music in Nightingale. Once the scanning of Notescan is complete it will suggest a file name to save the new file. Accept this and save it to your folder. You may now open the file in Nightingale and continue to work with the music.
You can also try putting STANDARD MIDI FILES (SMF) in Nightingale and transforming them into music notation. You must save the music as an SMF file from your MIDI sequencing program. However, if your MIDI file has not been properly quantized, you may find the results disappointing and sometimes disastrous.
Orchestrating Scores Using Threader
Threader is the hand icon on the Notation palette. Using it to expand a score into more instruments or to make an instrumental score from a piano score. Before actually using Threader you need to prepare the score for transfer of lines to the specified instruments. Open up a piano score that you wish to orchestrate. Then select Masterpage. In Masterpage highlight the piano staff. Now add parts above the piano staff. At this point you should have determined what instruments you are going to use and add parts accordingly. If you don*t know the instruments you intend to use yet, simply call the parts Part1, Part2, Part3. Otherwise you can give the names of the instruments to each part such as flute, oboe, clarinet, etc. Each instrument should be assigned a MIDI channel.
It is a good idea to assign channels to correspond to the Part Number. You can set up the score so that you can hear it in MIDI and you orchestrate. You should add tentative Patch numbers for each part. All of this is done through the Instrument Command under the Masterpage Menu. Once you have prepared the score, you can then use THREADER.
Threader allows you to select any note from a sonority and to move through the score sequentially so that you are creating an individual musical line for an instrument. You do this by holding down the mouse while you pass it over the notes you wish to include in the line. Once you have selected the notes, select copy and paste your selection into an instrument part. Don*t forget to also use conventional ways of copying as well: for example you can use "Look at One Voice Only" under the View Menu and select a voice (such as the melody), use "Select All" and copy the part. Then you can paste it into the appropriate instrument part. You can also use "Double Selection" as a way of putting a selection into a specific instrument part. When you have selected a line, click on "Double Selection" and Nightingale will then ask you the staff or instrument in which to put the selection.
If you have set up your pages in advance with the right Patch Numbers be sure that you have selected "Feedback" on note dragging and note insert as well as "Play From Patch Settings." This will enable you to check your work as you go along.
Threader is merely a convenience. The real advantage of orchestrating from Nightingale is that you can see the piano score (or whatever score you are orchestrating (i.e., expanding to instrumental colors), and you can add parts as you need from Masterpage. You could orchestrate the score using Nightingale, even if there were no such device as threader. In addition "Threader" can*t think for you. You need to take into account the resonance of the original score. For example, piano with the use of "pedal" is much more resonant than appears on the score. An 8th note may sustain through the measure if the pedal is used, therefore you would orchestrate the note with different note values. You might even use two instruments to create the single effect by the piano.