- General principles of Western staff notation
- Evolution of Western staff notation
- 20th-century notation
- Other systems of notation
While most agree the graphical MIDI data in Logic Pro is user friendly, there are many music makers out there who still enjoy writing their music with notation. The good news is that Logic Pro does contain a built-in notation system. This lesson will show how composing in the score editor will help you create different kinds of sheet music for different parts. Logic Pro can work with MIDI keyboards and control surfaces for input and processing, and for MIDI output. It features real-time scoring in musical notation, supporting guitar tablature, chord abbreviations and drum notation. The good news is that Logic Pro does contain a built-in notation system. This lesson will show how composing in the score editor will help you create different kinds of sheet music for different parts. Sheet music is used as a record or a guide to perform or compose a piece of music. To be able to read this sheet music, one has to study the musical notations, for which, one has to be acquainted with the symbols used to represent the notes. Given below is a list of the musical symbols employed to write sheet music. Quick Score Elite: Layout of the software works on the panorama view, which means all the bars can.
Our editors will review what you've submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
Join Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work!Musical notation, visual record of heard or imagined musical sound, or a set of visual instructions for performance of music. It usually takes written or printed form and is a conscious, comparatively laborious process. Its use is occasioned by one of two motives: as an aid to memory or as communication. By extension of the former, it helps the shaping of a composition to a level of sophistication that is impossible in a purely oral tradition. By extension of the latter, it serves as a means of preserving music (although incompletely and imperfectly) over long periods of time, facilitates performance by others, and presents music in a form suitable for study and analysis.
The primary elements of musical sound are pitch, or the location of musical sound on the scale (hence interval, or distance, between notes); duration (hence rhythm, metre, tempo); timbre or tone colour; and volume (hence stress, attack). In practice, no notation can handle all of these elements with precision. Most cope with a selection of them in varying degrees of refinement. Some handle only a single pattern—e.g., a melody, a rhythm; others handle several simultaneous patterns.
General principles of Western staff notation
The position of staff notation as the first notational system to be described in this article acknowledges its international acceptance in the 20th century. As an indirect result of colonization, of missionary activity, and of ethnomusicological research—not because of any innate superiority—it has become a common language among many musical cultures.
Pitch and duration
Staff notation, as it has developed, is essentially a graph. Its vertical axis is pitch, and its horizontal axis is time, and note heads are dots plotting the graph's curve. The five horizontal lines of a musical staff function like horizontal rulings of graph paper, bar lines like vertical rulings. In practice, the system is far more complex and sophisticated than this. The vertical axis of pitch operates to represent melodic contour in music for a single instrument or voice, but, when several staves are combined to form a score, the principle breaks down, each staff being a self-contained vertical system. Representation of time (duration) by horizontal spacing is used only in a very limited way. It is in reality made almost redundant because the symbol for a note gives the necessary information itself: not its absolute duration but its duration in relation to the notes around it. These symbols are as follows; each has half the duration of its neighbour to the left:
A system of 'rests' measures silence in the same way:
A dot placed to the right of a note head increases by half the duration of that note. Such symbols when placed on a staff may indicate relative pitch and relative duration. In the grid, lines represent alternate notes of the scale and the spaces the intervening notes. Pitch and duration may be fixed by supplying two further indications: a clef and a tempo mark. The clef assigns a definite pitch to a given line of the staff; the first clef fixes the second line up as the G (g′) above middle C (c′):
Tempo and duration
The tempo mark is a sign that lies outside the staff. It appears above and may be a precise fixing of one duration ('♩ = 120 MM' means that the quarter note lasts 1/120 of a minute, or one-half second), or it may be an approximate verbal indication setting tempo by reference to accepted conventions (allegro, or quickly; moderato, or moderate speed; etc.).
Staff notation is well adapted to two fundamental aspects of Western music: harmony and rhythm. For harmony, note symbols can easily be placed vertically together on a single stem, and these notes need not be all of the same duration; or more than one stem may be used to indicate multiple melodic lines in the musical texture. For rhythm, the existence of an underlying regular pulse, or stress, must be indicated. This is achieved by two devices: the bar line and the time signature. The bar line primarily indicates a point of main stress. Bar lines are usually equally spaced as to duration, though there are numerous exceptions. A time signature indicates, first, the duration of the space between two bar lines (a measure, or bar); and, second, the subsidiary stress patterns within that space. A supplementary system for indicating stress is the device of linking successive notes together by beaming, or stroking. Two eighth notes may be linked together as shown in (a); four sixteenth notes (b); or a mixed group of values (c):
The implication of such grouping is generally that the first note carries a stress. Beaming thus may be used either to reinforce the stress patterns of the time signature (the metre) or to contradict it and set up a cross rhythm.
Accidentals
Staff notation rests firmly on the Western system of scales, within which all notes are assumed to be natural unless accidentals precede them or a key signature is in use. An accidental (♭, or flat; ♯, or sharp) is a temporary lowering or raising of pitch by a semitone; a key signature is the use of the same signs on a more permanent basis, valid to the end of a piece or until countermanded by a new signature. Another accidental, the natural (♮), cancels a previously indicated flat or sharp and may be used to alter one note or in a key signature to emphasize a key change. Any combination of sharps or flats is theoretically possible in a key signature, but the actual combinations are usually governed by the Western system of keys, or groups of interrelated notes and chords.
Auxiliary signs
Timbre and volume are specified through a variety of additional signs: symbols such as 𝆓 (stress) and 𝆒 (increase in volume), and verbal instructions (frequently in Italian) such as forte (loud) and col legno (with the wood of the bow) placed above or below the staff wherever space permits. Additional symbols may also provide information about pitch and duration: the dot for staccato, the fermata, or hold sign (𝄐), the phrase mark, indications of amount of vibrato, and so forth. Other verbal instructions indicate the general manner of performance (pesante, 'heavy'; cantabile, 'songlike'; etc.) or expression (con dolore, 'with suffering'; giocoso, 'playfully'; etc.). Further, there are for each type of instrument certain technical signs, as for bowing, breathing, tonguing, or use of mutes.
New messenger update april 2018. Other auxiliary signs are a kind of shorthand. Most important are symbols indicating notes not shown on the staff. An ornament sign may call for additional notes to be played within the value of a note. It may even delay the sounding of the main note. The precise meaning of such an ornament varies from one style of music to another and must be interpreted according to the conventions governing a particular style.
Notation In Math
Comparable to the use of 'shorthand' signs for ornaments is the system of placing arabic numerals beneath a bass line in keyboard music of the 17th and 18th centuries. A numeral, or 'figure,' signifies a harmonic (i.e., a vertical) interval; thus, a '6' indicates a note six degrees of the scale above a given bass note (A above C, for example). It is in itself an imprecise measurement, specifying neither whether the interval is major or minor nor in which octave register that upper note should be played. But the figures are governed by the same prevailing key signature as notes on the staff and can, like notes, carry their own accidentals. They are thus not an independent type of notation but a hybrid representation of interval/pitch that works in conjunction with staff notation. Its purpose is to indicate the harmonies implied by a bass line (even absence of figuring has a meaning) while at the same time leaving the player free to choose the precise notes to be played. The systems of letters and figures used by jazz musicians have this same imprecision; they are less dependent upon conjunction with staff notation but lack clear rhythmic significance unless allied to staff notation in at least a simplified form. They operate by defining a harmony in relation to the tonic chord (the chord built on the key note, or tonic) rather than by interval or pitch.
- key people
- related topics
For Logic users there may come the time that one needs to get a file over to Finale or Sibelius to finish a project. Logic has its own proprietary notation display formatting and doesn't currently support Music XML. However, you can export a Standard MIDI File (SMF) and achieve good results. To maximize compatibility before exporting a SMF, you'll need to do some adjustments, as described below.
The important proprietary formatting items are Display Quantize, Interpretation mode and to a lesser degree, Syncopation mode. These items affect Logic's display only – playback remains unaffected. You may also need to deal with pedal markings (these do affect playback). Let's look at what they do, and how to pass along this information in a SMF.
Interpretation
If you play parts in live, you will generally get much more readable part(s) and score by having the Interpretation mode selected. (If you add notes by hand this is normally not needed and best left unchecked.) This can be achieved globally by checking the Interpretation box in the Score Editor's Inspector.
This can also be managed on the track level by making a note selection and navigating to the Attributes menu > Interpretation and selecting Force from the sub-menu.
You can also double click on a note to open up the Note Attributes window and go to Interpretation, selecting Force from the pop-up menu.
What does Interpretation do? For example say you play in a quarter note, but its actual duration is closer to three 16th notes long as you played it just a bit short. Interpretation mode assumes you want a quarter note and displays it as such, avoiding a look of a tied 1/8th to a 16th followed by a 16th Logic pro 9 tutorial mixing. note rest. You may have also played the note a bit early, Interpretation puts the note on the beat. You probably want this Interpretation quarter note look to be passed along in your exported SMF, see below.
Syncopation
This is toggled on/off in the same methods as Interpretation and is always found next to it in the above mentioned areas. I find it easier to leave this off and add only as needed. Typical use example is an eighth-quarter-eighth look that shows up as a four eighth notes, with the second and third notes tied together.
Selecting the tied notes and applying Syncopation creates the eighth-quarter-eighth look.
Symbolic Notation Logic
Display Quantize
If you look in the Score Editor's Inspector you'll see an item called Quantize with a pop-up menu just to the right. It defaults to 16,24 (16th and 16th note triplets will be the finest division of the beat, so notes are snapped to its grid). For viewing fun, move it to 128,384. If the view doesn't change much, it probably means you did the entry by hand (as opposed to performing the parts live) or you've already quantized the performance elsewhere (and this would affect playback). Now move it to 4 – every note snaps to a quarter note (again, display only, playback is not changed).
An example of when to use this would be playing in a swing feel. Logic may show triplets or dotted eight/sixteenths, an unnecessary and cluttered look for a jazz feel. Change the display quantize to 8 and the smallest division will be eighth notes. Playback will be the same, the look will be eighth notes – your players will be happy.
(Tip: as this parameter is region based, you can create new region for the triplets or sixteenth run you have. In score mode regions that abut will be shown as one part).
Sustain Pedal Modern warfare 2 call sign generator.
A typical situation might be if you played a chord for four beats for a string part, but the sustain pedal is held for two bars. You need to transfer the sustain pedal note length information to the notes, so the notes are eight beats instead of four. Go to local menu Functions > Note Events > Sustain Pedal to Note Length. Your pedal markings are also removed in the process – back up/duplicate if these are important!
Preparing to Export the SMF
With Sustain Pedal preparation covered, let's get back to the Display Quantize, Interpretation and Syncopation functions.This information needs to be 'normalized' (in Logic speak) before you export a MIDI file.
Logic Music Notation
There are two menu items in the Score Editor's local menu, found together following this local menu path: Functions > Quantize. They are 'Fix displayed Note Positions' and 'Fix displayed Note Position and Duration'. So what do they do?
These functions will lock the MIDI notes to their displayed position (this is a destructive function – duplicate/back up if you want save the original). 'Fix displayed Note Positions' moves the note start position to match the display grid. This is a typical quantize function. 'Fix displayed Note Position and Duration' additionally extends the note length so your dotted eighth/sixteenth 'quarter' note is now actually a quarter note in length.
While these steps may seem like a bit of work, all of this will help your parts and scores look much closer to your intentions when you export them as a SMF and bring the material into Finale or Sibelius.
Logic Pro Music Notation
Doug Zangar is the author of Groove3.com's 'Logic Score Editor Explained', teaches courses for the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program, Discovery Tools and Crywolf Training, and is the founder of the Seattle Logic User Group.
