PC Plus SuperCD (UK) 1994 June

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Text File | 1992-12-11 | 19.2 KB | 645 lines

NoteWorthy is a music word-processor. It does not aim to be a music-playing program, but provides output to 9- and 24-pin dot matrix printers (and lasers). It is strictly WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get, so that what you see on screen is - pixel for pixel - exactly what you would see on a 9-pin dot matrix printer. The 24-pin printer format merely smooths out the 9-pin's dottiness. The WYSIWYG format means that what you see on the screen isn't the full-width of the printed music, there's a left side and a right side and you can flip between them with the Home and End keys. Or when you move the cursor too far the program will flip for you. By the way, if you've not run the NWSETUP program you should do so before attempting to print from this program. It defines all sorts of printer formats as well as screen types and which are saved in the file NW.CFG. Anyway the purpose of this tutorial is to get you up and running, so pin your eyes back and follow instructions: GETTING STARTED CLEFS Ideally you should have started this tutorial having defined a system of two staves bound together. It you've not done that then exit and re-start this tutorial from an empty screen, ie one with two bound staves and no actual music on them. If you continue with only one stave then you won't be able to add the bass part later. You're reading this tutorial just now, but you can return at any time to the music screen and then return to the same page you left. Just press Escape to go back and then Alt-F1 again to return. Why not try it? OK, so you've seen the music screen with an empty music stave. As with most music, what we need first is to create a clef for the first stave, so make sure the cursor (that funny I-shaped thing) is somewhere on the left of the stave. You can press left and right arrow keys, or Ctrl-Home will put it at a convenient spot over on the left. To make the cursor move faster you can press the control key and the arrow keys together. Got it in place? OK, now back to that clef. The package can manage 4 types, and they are all created by pressing Alt-S. Once, twice, or as often as you like to get the clef you want. Do it now. I suggest a treble clef. Done that? Now if your positioning wasn't ideal you can move the clef into place with the left and right arrow keys, but the clef doesn't become part of the music until you confirm it with one of two key presses: Space : fixes the clef and moves the cursor on, Enter : fixes the clef but keeps the cursor where it is Exercise: Put a treble clef on the top stave near the left. KEY SIGNATURES Now for a key signature. Putting this on the score is rather like the Clef, except here you press K (for Key) as many times as you like to move through the sharp keys, or Shift K to go through the black keys. When you're happy with the key signature and its position (use the left/right arrow keys) again you can press Enter or Space just as before to make the key signature permanent. Exercise: Place the key of one sharp after the clef Next job: time signature of course. C and ¢ are available by pressing Alt-T but let's put in a time signature of 4/4: that's slightly harder. Cursor in position (if not make it so), press Alt-U (for the Upper number) three times - it cycles through the digits 0 to 9. Then you should press ENTER so as not to move the cursor forwards before entering the Lower number in the same way with Alt-L. This cycles through 4,8,16,1,2 by the way. Exercise: Place a time signature of 4/4 after the key signature REVIEW Now we're ready to start entering actual music: but first let's review some principles: 1 Symbols are created with key-strokes and moved into position with the cursor keys. This applies to ALL symbols created in this package. 2 They are accepted with Space or Enter (there are others, we'll come to those later. Until accepted they are "not yet there" and can be changed moved with the arrow keys. They can even be changed to other symbols provided you don't "freeze" them with Space or Enter. 3 Clefs are Alt-S: Key signatures are K or Shift-K. Time signatures are Alt-U, Alt-L and Alt-T DELETIONS AND CHANGES If you make mistakes you can alter your work by entering Edit Mode: that's F10. Do it now and return to this tutorial. The nearest object (note/key signature/time signature/clef or whatever) turns red (or grey if you're monochrome) and you can move it left and right (arrow keys of course), delete it with Del or alter it in other ways as you will see. You can move from one object to the next with Ctrl-right and Ctrl-left, and finish your edit with ENTER, or abandon it with Esc. You can change lots of positions or things in one edit session and then complete it with a single return. There's specific help for Edit available by pressing F1 when in Edit Mode. Exercise: experiment with Edit mode, F10. Move some of the things around that you've put on the screen. HINT: If you seem to lose some bits of things when you're editing or adding things, you can type F2 for a redraw of the stave, or Shift-F2 for a redraw of the full screen. It's on one of the Help screens. ENTERING NOTES For the convenience of real musicians (!) notes are selected by their name (A to G) once a clef is defined. But there are so many other characteristics a note can have (length, stick up/down etc) besides this that we have to define a default, and this is shown at the bottom left of the screen. It's a crotchet with two tails when you first start the package. This indicates that notes will be entered as crotchets unless you say otherwise and that they will appear with tails up or down as the position on the stave demands. You can change the default note-value by pressing any of the number keys 1 to 8, giving note-values from breve to hemidemisemiquaver. To force the tail to do what you want, Press J for tails up, P for tails down (looks like a J or a P - geddit?) I for auto-tail O for no tail (useful for adding notes to stems at any old place, such as a D on a C's stem, or even chords. CASE STUDY: FRERE JACQUES Let's type in the first bar of Frere Jacques in G: Leave the default note as crotchet, auto-tail. Type G space A space B space G space Watch out, here comes a bar line! Easy - that's / on the keyboard. It's just like any other object - type / and move as you wish. Pressing / lots of types gives you different sorts of bar lines. Type / space Observe that you got a complete bar-line for the defined system (both staves). The second bar is just like the first: type it in. And the bar-line at the end. The third bar is easy, B - C - minim D. The minim D is easiest produced by leaving the default at crotchet, but typing Shift-D. The note durations can be changes on the spot as follows: The shift key doubles the note duration, Ctrl quadruples it, and Alt halves it. If you want any others you have to change the default (which -as usual- you can do before or after you define the note as long as you don't "fix" it with Space or Enter). Before we get embroiled in those quavers in the next part of the song, let's harmonise the melody so far. Go back to the beginning of the stave with Ctrl-Home, and now press Tab to jump from object to object. Or Shift-Tab to move backwards. Move to the first note of the melody, and on the next page we'll type it in. Our harmony for the first four notes is a sixth lower. Type a B, and before pressing ENTER, move it down an octave with the down arrow key. Accept it with Enter and then Tab to the next note - you could just have used Tab to complete it - and add the C,D and B to the next three notes. See how the crotchet stems line up. The harmony for the next four notes is the same: put it in. The harmony for the third bar is in thirds below, but we need to adjust the stems of the notes first so that they're going down. That's easy: Enter Edit mode (F10) move to each note press J, and complete the Edit with ENTER. Now pop in the harmony for the third bar. G - A - minim B. QUAVERS There's no great difference here between quavers and the other notes, except that quavers can be beamed together. There's only one rule in this package about the beams, and that's that you can't beam one quaver to another unless they are on the same stave and with the tails in the same direction. The beam is "attached" to the second note of the pair as one of its attributes and is made or unmade with the Backspace key (that's the big one above the Enter key on your keyboard. It's usually marked with a backward arrow to so should remind you of its function). Let's illustrate this with the rest of Frere Jacques. But first you should notice that we're getting close to the right-hand side of the screen (or maybe you've passed it). Anyway when you get there, you will see the screen jump to the left and a second part of the stave come into view. This is the right-hand part of that stave (we mentioned this earlier), and moving across the boundary will make the viewpoint jump around. Of course it's hard to see the whole picture, so we've put in a key to enable you to see the whole thing, that's F3. It toggles the Zoom In and Zoom Out. You can work in either Zoom In or Zoom Out as it pleases you (and depending how good your monitor is!), and can even see the whole page view by pressing Alt- F2, although you can't work in this extreme Zoom (we call it Preview Mode). The notes required are all quavers just now, type 5 to change the basic note to a quaver length. And let's have their tails all down so press P. Right. The notes are D-E-D-C-B crotchet G crotchet. Type D E Backspace D Backspace C Backspace and you should have all the quavers beamed together. The crotchets are easy: Shift-B Shift-G. Add a bar line to complete. Now I guess that you're getting close to the right-hand of the screen, ie the edge of the paper. Perhaps its time to see one of the other features of the program, the Compress and Justify functions. If you need to squeeze any more bars in, you can compress what you've done so far either to right or to left - usually to the left. Place the cursor at the right-hand end of the music and press Escape. Now a new screen has come into view which you've not seen before, with some more options: the one we want is F4, that will compress all staves in the current system by 20% (or so) to the left. If you don't like the result you can press F7 to undo the operation. (The 20% is a settable parameter - see the documentation or try for yourself with Esc F3) Alternatively if you've finished a bar rather short of the right-hand side then you can place a bar line in its natural place (NOT at the right-hand side of the screen), take the cursor back to (say) just after the key signature and then press Esc F6 (Justify right from cursor) and bingo! the notes are re- spread out so that the bar line you ended with is nicely placed against the right side of the stave. Easy, eh? Another bar line and you can repeat the whole sequence. FILLING THE SECOND STAVE Moving to the second stave is simple. Press PgDn and the cursor jumps to that stave. In fact PgDn will cycle between all the staves visible on the screen at one time, and of course PgUp reverses the motion. In fact I'm going to leave Frere Jacques bass part for you to fill in. Off you go and add a bass part. I refuse to be responsible for the way it would sound. GENERAL PRINCIPLES Now that you've created a piece of music, it's time to review a few general principles: 1 Symbols are created by a particular key-press, but are not fixed as part of the document until accepted by either Enter, Space or Tab (Tab jumps to the next defined symbol in the system) 2 Until that time they can be modified in ways appropriate to their nature, or changed to other objects by the appropriate key-press. 3 In particular they can be moved left or right, sometimes up or down, notes can be beamed (Backspace), dotted (.), changed in size (0) and other attributes modified. See Help (F1) for a complete list. 4 Objects (once fixed in the page) can be modified by pressing F10 and entering Edit Mode. Common-sense rules apply to modifications and key-presses are the same as those for object creation, except that the delete key (Del) can be used to delete the object in question. 5 Bar-lines are something of a special case. While they can be created from any stave, as objects they exist only on the top stave of a system, and so can be edited only on that stave. 6 Squeezing in that extra bar, or expanding what you've got to fill the whole line is simple once the music is in. Place the cursor in the right spot and press Esc followed by F4, F5 or F6 according to your needs. OTHER SYMBOLS Now and again you'll need a rest (if you see what I mean). This obeys the same rules for length as notes, except it's the Z key. (Zzzz=asleep=rest, geddit?). So you've got Alt-Z, Ctrl-Z etc. You can move the rest up or down a line at a time with the arrow keys. There are in total over 100 symbols available in NoteWorthy. Some of the commonest other ones (like the eyebrow thing which makes a pause) are available by pressing Y. Pressing Y again runs through the half dozen or so common symbols, and as usual you manoeuvre them into position with the cursor keys before freezing them. Then there are others on the Alt-Number keys, eg Alt-1, Alt-2 etc. Have a look at those. Then ALL the symbols in the package are available under Ctrl-Y, pressed repeatedly. Or Alt-Y to go through the same sequence backwards. These are for rarer occasions, such as putting the "crotchet=120" speed annotation at the top of the music. (I use a small-headed crotchet with small text size for this). OTHER MODES - TEXT You will want to add titles and dynamic markings (eg ff) to your music. Pressing F9 takes you to TEXT MODE, and if you've got colour then you will find the border colour change to remind you. Now you see the cursor is a small cross: it shows where text will be entered. Also at the bottom of the screen you see the letters AaBb: these show the font which you will be using. The font can be changed (before you enter any text) by pressing F9 again. Do that now, and cycle through the four fonts. Text can be typed (and moved with the arrow keys). As with symbols, it needs freezing into place with the ENTER key. Adding text is easy - and due to the WYSIWYG nature of NoteWorthy you can be absolutely certain that what you type appears on your printout in exactly the same shape and size. There are just three special symbols in text mode: press Alt-C for a Copyright symbol, Alt-N for a natural sign and Alt-B for a flat sign. You can also make special chord symbols which print out normally but change when you transpose by pressing Ctrl-A to Ctrl-G. And the ~ sign is a bit bigger and meets its neighbour so that you can make a wavy line for trill symbols by typing "tr~~~~~~~~~" in text mode. We think of everything. While we're on the ~ key, it can also make a spread chord sign when you type it in Enter Mode: press ~ a few times and manoeuvre your symbol into position before freezing it. OTHER MODES - LINES Straight lines and curves can be drawn. Press Shift-F9 to enter LINE MODE. Now you have a large cursor which you should move to the place your first straight line should start at. When you're there you can press Enter and that's the start point fixed. Now as you move the cursor a line stretches out behind you. Pressing Enter again fixes the end of this and the start of the next line, so that you'll have to press Esc to abort the LINE MODE and the line being defined. Why not try a decrescendo line? Move to the start, Press Enter. Move along to the right an inch or two and down a few pixels. Press Enter, then back to the left to a point underneath the first point (the big cursor helps here). Press Enter again and then Escape to complete LINE MODE. OTHER MODES - CURVES You can draw curves to indicate phrases or slurs. Enter CURVE MODE with Ctrl-F9. (Again colour screens change border colour). Now move the cursor (which is a small box or set of four dots) to the start point and press Enter. The cursor moves slightly to the right now to get you started, so move it further to the right to define a second point on the curve. Press Enter again: now a straight line joins the two points defined. Move to the right again and up or down and define a third point. Now you see a curve joining the three points, you can continue this up for up to 20 points, but that's plenty because most slurs only need 3 points and phrases 4 or 5. One thing to note is that curves are drawn left-to-right so you won't be able to move left past a previous point but in practice this is no problem. Why not make a few slurs on the notes drawn? They also look good when near the ends of the stems of the notes (rather than the heads) and you should be able to make a good slur using only a rise or fall of about 2 pixels. OTHER MODES - BLOCK MODE It's handy in lots of places to copy blocks of music or text and so on. BLOCK MODE is entered with Ctrl-F10, and the instructions are all at the bottom of the screen as you go. First you move the cursor to one corner of the stuff you want to copy and press Enter. Then to the other corner and press Enter (as the notes say at the bottom). The stuff you'll copy is coloured red (grey) to show you what it is. Now you can move to the target position, on another stave or the same stave with the right/left/PgUp/PgDn keys. (If you move off the screen vertically you end up in Preview mode, but don't let it worry you!). Now you can press Alt-C to copy the stuff, or Alt-M to move it. Or you could have deleted it with Alt-D. All in the prompt area at the bottom of the screen. Well that's the end of this tutorial as we've got you started. Now off you go and read the manual - or at best browse through the Help Screens. There are some case studies too to have a look at. Off you go.