Basic midi piano question, please help :)

[jonmkrobs]

Hi, I'm wanting a professional pianist friend to record some midi files for me so I can turn them into sheet music to study what she's doing. (she's a lounge pianist). I have a programme called MidiNotate which will do this for me. What I want to know is, do I just get her to record them onto a floppy disc (which is inbuilt to her digital piano) and would they then play on my PC as midi files without me having to do anything to them i.e. can I take the disc straight from the piano and it will recognise it as a midi file when put on my PC?

Thanks for your help

Jon

 

[altitude909]

As long as they are midi files, then yes you can play them back on anything

 

[AlChuck]

Not to dampen your enthusiasm, but you might find this a very frustrating means of learning.

Wriiten music is written cleanly and as simply as possible so that it's as easy to read as possible, but real people play somewhat imprecisely. A simple MIDI notation version of a performance is therfore often full of all kinds of weird rhythmic figures that are a dumb computer's best attempt to turn the musical events into notation based on the rules programmed into it. The nice way real piano scores are lined up, the way the notes are grouped vertically, won't happen cleanly. If she's doing anything at all interesting (which is probably why you want to figure it out), it will be very, very hard to decipher from a MIDI file of the performance -- probably much harder than just listening to her do it with your ears and try to get the basic idea, then notate it yourself.

 

[jonmkrobs]

Thanks

Thanks for the reply, I know notated midi files aren't great for reading, but I can slow it down too although you're right it does take a long time! Anyway I'll give it a bash I think,

Thanks again,

Jon

 

[AlChuck]

It's not the speed, it's that it's likely to come out notated in a way that's nearly unreadable unless you clean it up a lot manually...

 

[gecko zzed]

If her keyboard saves to floppy, it will save as a midi file, then you can import it into your pc software as a midifile.

However, there are some traps.

If the piece is not recorded to a metronome, then it will be difficult to decipher, because the bars won't line up.

Additionally, as other posters note, there will be a whole heap of extraneous notes, e.g. mis-hits and so on.

 

[AlChuck]

...there will be a whole heap of extraneous notes, e.g. mis-hits and so on.

!!! Well, I hope your friend is not that bad of a pianist!

There will only be a "whole heap of extraneous notes" if she plays sloppily and hits a lot of wrong notes along the way. So don't worry too much about that. The real issue is -- anyone who doesn't play like a complete robot has some natural rhythmic inflection -- swing is a word often used for this -- that is not the same as what is notated in sheet music. That's because it happens naturally, and to try to notate it precisely makes it too hard to read. So music is written simply, and it's understood that there's going to be triplet feel to the eight notes or whatever the particluar interpretation might be.