Generally speaking, if a score is headed for Finale and no one has to hear the sequence, I'll just quantize all notes on and off. It's a lot easier and faster (for me, anyway).mjmoody wrote:
So, you play everything in to DP? How do you deal with human playback issues? I'm a pretty good pianist, but I make little timing errors that are real hard to fix with quantization. The more tracks I add, the more "slightly off" things get, however, unless I quantize.
I am pretty quick at entering things in Finale - and, I enter things the way I want, so I don't have to mess with quantization. However, now that I'm getting better at DP, I am interested in trying other work-flow methods.
Now, if I'm doing a score that must go to audio, then I've had more success with playing a piano VI expressively first without regard to the click. I bounce that track and then beat map it to sync the barlines, etc. That way, I can still quantize the notes for Finale if needed without hurting the expression. There may be a moment here or there when something doesn't quite hit the mark, but a tweak of the conductor track usually fixes it.
Still, I'll work from separate copies of the project because it's a different approach from just doing a performance sequence.
I know some who put in all the notes and then they edit the conductor track to get an expressive performance. That hasn't always worked for me, so beat mapping an honest performance generally renders more gratifying results.
LOL. That's one way to put it. I barely remember the last time I used the humanize setting in DP because it rarely produced the desired results without a lot of twiddling. Even there, the results were "not quite". But if something is played like a human, it can be played well without being metronomic.mjmoody wrote: For one thing, I am a little confused between "humanize" and "wrong." When is something played "like a human" vs. when is it played with "bad time?"
It depends on the project. If I'm going for a performance, then I'll probably never quantize. If I'm going from DP to Finale, then I'll quantize everything so that all notes sit squarely where they belong in the SMF. Settings vary and are changed as needed. The only thing that's set is the note on and note off feature.mjmoody wrote: Maybe I need to just let things fall more where they fall, but, I'm still curious about ideas and practices. When do you quantize? If you do quantize, what settings generally work?
The one exception is when a tuplet of some sort is tied over to a different kind of note grouping, then the note on and note off points must be quantize independently.
As mentioned above, if the performance is the goal I'll make and beat map a real time piano mock-up recording. That keeps the performance real. If no one has to hear the sequence, then it doesn't matter what it sounds like on the computer because real musicians will play the score, eventually.mjmoody wrote: If you play a track and quantize, is the result still a recording of you, or is it something else??
It's like using DP in two different ways. For those Finale/quantize projects, I can use a lower profile orchestral VI that doesn't require running my external drives. I can also avoid dealing with automation and mixing or running gobs of fx plugins since no one will hear the recording. It just easier and faster for me to get the notes into Finale, and it's easier on the CPU. For a performance project, I'll use a higher-end library and run two machines in a network with eSATA drives spinning away.
That's for large orchestral scores. For smaller ensembles, it's probably just as fast to work directly in Finale from start to finish. This score I'm working on today started with a blank page at about 8 AM this morning and is now about 75% ready to go to Finale. Had I started in Finale, it would have taken me a few days to get all the notes in for 36 staves.
Not everyone works this way, but it has saved me SO much time.