Rhapsody
APDL/ProAction
Common Problems
I want to start the music on an up beat but the program always plays a complete bar, putting rests after the note.
The way to start a piece with an anacrusis or up beat is to remove the barline which begins the piece. Actually, this barline is always obscured by the bracket which binds the staves together at the beginning of the line but you can tell that it is there because the next barline in the piece will be numbered 2. If you remove the first 'proper' barline, you will see that this number changes to 1. Unfortunately, this rather spoils the appearance of the score at the beginning so it is a good idea to replace the 'proper' barline with a 'supplementary' one eg the half barline.
Certain bars do not play correctly, particularly those with triplets and those with overlapping notes on a single stave.
If your triplets do not play correctly, make sure that you have marked all three notes with a triplet sign. Secondly, you must ensure that the notes are correctly aligned vertically. In particular, if you have triplet quavers in one part and duplet quavers in another, the second of the duplet quavers falls in between the second and third triplet and must not be aligned vertically below either. For example, the following score will not play correctly:
but this one will:
Problems with incorrect alignment can also arise when writing two part music on a single stave. For example, although Rhapsody is fairly tolerant about the positions of rests, some rests (ie those which help determine the rhythm of the piece) are essential and must not be omitted eg the crotchet rest in the following example.
If the rest is omitted, as in the following example, the first bar will not play correctly because the second minim in the bar must begin before the first minim has ended.
The following example on two staves will, however, play correctly because Rhapsody uses information on the second stave to work out when the notes on the first stave should be played.
It would still be advisable to put in the rest.
It is worth noting that Rhapsody works on a bar-by-bar basis and that mistakes in one bar should not affect the next (with the exception of the rather subtle problem which is discussed below). Note also that Rhapsody does not prevent you from putting too few or too many notes in a bar; it is up to you to get it right. Mistakes like that are pretty obvious when you play the score.
The odd note is missed out when the score is played
This is a subtle one. It is caused by a misplaced tie in a previous note. When Rhapsody encounters a tie. it searches the score for the next note with the same pitch. When it finds it. it adds its length to the original note and marks it as having been played. In this way the program knows to ignore the note when it actually reaches that point in the score. What sometimes happens is that you add a tie to a note and forget to check that the note to which it is supposed to be tied is at the same pitch. When the score is played, the original note gets tied to some other note later in the score which is therefore subsequently missed out!
In order to accommodate slurred notes in a future version of Rhapsody, it is,
In fact, permissible to 'tie' a note to another note of different pitch provided that they have the same type of stalk. In this way, the following score will play correctly (even though the tie is wrongly placed):
but this one will not.
I can't get the ties on long notes to 'bend the right way'
The reason for this is that you can't tell the difference between an 'upstalk' semi-breve and a 'downstalk' semi-breve for the simple reason that semi-breves don't have a stalk! Also the rules which Rhapsody uses for tie bending are a compromise which is not always entirely suitable. The rules are these:
For single notes on a stave, an upstalk note has the tie bending down while a downstalk note has the tie bending up eg:
Where there are two notes on the stave with different stalks (ie two separate parts), then the rules are reversed so that the ties do not clash.
The problem arises when you are writing in two parts but the parts overlap in such a way that the vital slot contains only one note eg:
The only way you can get over this problem is to rewrite the parts in such a way that all the vital slots contain notes in both parts. This is not always satisfactory.
(Incidentally, to find out whether a semi-breve in the score is an upstalk or a downstalk note, add a staccato dot to the note temporarily. The dot always appears on the opposite side to the stalk.)
Sometimes rests and notes are superimposed on top of one another.
A single rest on a stave is automatically positioned in the usual position. If the slot contains another note the rest is displaced either up (for a downstalk note) or down (for an upstalk note). This usually works but if, as sometimes happens, the 'lower' part goes over the 'upper' part, the 'lower' note may be printed on top of the 'upper' part's rest.
How do I transcribe triplets?
I am afraid there isn't really a satisfactory answer to this one. Suppose you wish to transcribe a piece of music which has triplet quavers in it. The difference between a triplet quaver and a quaver is only a little more than a demi-semiquaver. In order to detect the difference the 'quantisation level' would have to be set to a very small figure and your transcribed score would contain not only triplets but a lot of other undesirable demi-semiquavers as well. It is not a good solution, but the only practical method in Rhapsody is to ignore, say, the middle note and play the triplet as two ordinary notes. Then edit the middle note back in later.
If you have a repeated triplet figure, don't forget that you can put the figure in a separate score and use the 'Shift' and 'Copy' routines to put it anywhere you like at any pitch.
How do I transcribe a piece of music which includes time-signature changes?
In theory Rhapsody should cope with this in the following way. First you have to set up a blank score containing all the barlines with all the time changes in exactly the right places. Then when you use the 'Capture' option, the beat follows the time changes and the data should transcribe correctly. I say 'should' because there is a rather awkward feature of the way the MIDI ROM is written which means that Rhapsody can sometimes lose track of which bar each note is supposed to belong to. In particular, Rhapsody will not transcribe correctly an empty bar which immediately follows a time-signature change. It is a good idea to transcribe such music in fairly short sections and to save your work at frequent intervals in case anything goes wrong. Also note that Rhapsody expects to find time-signature changes immediately after a bar line, not before it.
Occasionally an extra bar gets transcribed which doesn't exist causing all subsequent notes to be one bar out of step
The responsibility for this bug also lies in the MIDI ROM which does not always capture data correctly. In my experience, I have only had trouble with early versions of the ROM and version 3.14 (the current version) seems to be all right - but the occurrence of this fault may depend as much on the configuration of your machine as on which version of the ROM you possess. If it happens to you, it is the data which is incorrect so you must 'Capture' the data again. Hopefully it will not happen too often.
The option I need always seems to be 'greyed out'. Why?
The following list shows the reasons why the various options are 'greyed out'.
The Rhapsody menu
'Block' - when there is no block defined in this score.
'Capture' - when either
- there is no cursor in this score or,
- any score is being played or,
- there is no MIDI interface.
'Transcribe' - when either
- there is no captured data or,
- any score is being played
The Goto menu
'Cursor' - when there is no cursor in this score
The Play from menu
'Cursor - when there is no cursor in this score
The Options menu
'MIDI' - when either
- there is no MIDI interface or,
- when the MIDI module has been unplugged.
APDL/ProAction