I use a Microsoft Surface for my music. Much of my charts are images from sheet music like the real books or a collection of the music minus one variety of books that I have bought for playing solos in church. I use a pedal to turn pages.
Now, here's the problem. A lot of music like that wastes way too much space. And it skips around way too much. The typical D.S. al Coda is a real pain to navigate on a multi page chart using MobileSheets and a pedal.
So, far, I have been resorting to using Photoshop to edit the images. I can select and move staffs closer together. I also will erase stuff I don't need to see for a performance. And when it comes to D.S. al Coda, what I do is to make a copy of the portion with the D.S. and convert the music so that it's linear. That is, I make it so I don't have to go back. I'm able to use the pedal always in the forward direction. I'm also often able to reduce the screen real estate to half the number of pages if there is no jumping around. Often, a two page chart becomes one page. It's really nice to not have to turn the page.
One of the other things I do is to format each page to 1824 X 2736, which is the screen size of the Surface. This maximizes the use of the pixels that are there and makes the music easier to use.
Now, here's why I'm writing this, though I'd be happy to discuss some methods I use for using Photoshop to edit the music, and even discuss preparing tracks for use in performance. But what I have a problem with is how long it takes to prepare a chart in Photoshop. I spend up to an hour for each chart. It's worth it, but it takes a lot of time.
How do you handle this? Or do you? Do you just put up with how you find the music printed?
09-01-2020, 02:44 AM (This post was last modified: 09-01-2020, 02:48 AM by Geoff Bacon.)
I don't do these things as nearly everything I have is a single page PDF.
However, from posts by other, I suggest you use cropping to remove the white space at the edge of pages. This will zoom the page to the displayable size of the page
Re jumping back, edit the song and go to the Files tab. Change the page order so there are multiple references to a page e.g for a 3 page document where you have to go back and repeat something on the second page. Initially, the page order is 1-3 so change it to 1-3,2,3 (song is then pages 1,2,3,2,3)
You can now crop out all the unwanted stuff on the the 2nd instance of page 2 (both white margins and unwanted text/music). This allows you to move forwards all the time.
You might want to also set the display mode for these songs to "Vertical Scrolling" (it doesn't then matter if some of the pages are very short)
Another option is to make use of "smart buttons"; you can then use a pedal action to jump to a start button e.g. to play a coda.
Apart from using general cropping of a page and occasional vertical scrolling, I haven't tried the above techniques but they should give you something to play with and, once you have sussed it out, will be much quicker than what you are currently doing.
Thanks. I do use cropping. And I'll try the page ordering. That does sound like a solution for the DC/DS al coda problem.
But I didn't express myself well. I do have that problem, but the major problem I have is music that is "generously" spaced. I usually can get two pages onto one page, and I do that with Photoshop, but that does take a lot of time. Let me give you an example. Here's page one from one of my songs. Page two has similar spacing.
Now, I could put that on two pages, but that means hitting the pedal for half page turns. I would have to hit the pedal twice to get through that song. I know, 1st world lazy problem. But the more I have to think about when to hit the pedal, the less I can concentrate on my music, and believe me, I'm not a a top-notch player. Here's my version of the song on one page. It fits exactly on the display of a Surface:
I was just hoping there was some kind of software that would read an image file and remove bands of white between the staves. I don't expect it make it all one page or anything, just remove the extra spacing. And then I would spend a lot less time in Photoshop dragging staves.
Set the Display Mode to "Vertical Scrolling" ( 4th icon from bottom left)
You can also play with the "Scroll Settings" (bottom left icon) but I don't think you need to do that as you are using a pedal to advance
If you have a stave near the top of the page, a large gap, and another stave at the bottom then you will need to double up the page. Then crop out the bottom stave on the first copy and crop out the first stave on the 2nd copy of the page.
I rewrite such songs with MuseScore. With a little experience a song like your example can be done in less time. And you are completey free to edit whatever you like.
(09-01-2020, 07:13 AM)wthalliii Wrote: I was just hoping there was some kind of software that would read an image file and remove bands of white between the staves. I don't expect it make it all one page or anything, just remove the extra spacing. And then I would spend a lot less time in Photoshop dragging staves.
I do that most of the time:
Not only because of the spacing between the staves but you can change
- the amount of the bars in one line,
- spacing between the notes,
- the size of the font (music symbols),
- the size of the stave (space between lines and the thickness of the lines).
I could fit 25 bars of your example (which was originally on 6 staves) into 3 staves (version 2).
In the 1st version I would break the staves rather in phrases.
You can make the page break (page turn) at the most convenient bar/place.
I would also take the advantage of the colour sheet music to highlight important markings in red.
You reduce lots of music/space by putting repeat signs.
I transformed your sheet music quickly with capella-scan and then imported output file into Capella notation software where you can play with the look as long as you want.
Exported PDF file from Capella software has 37.65 KB which is super small and fast loading in MS.
PDF attached to this post.
Uploading and backing up MS is a breeze with such a small files.
YES it takes time.
I have Finale. I was able to import Capella scan files into Finale by writing them to xml files. However, my success rates with getting good files from a Capella scan was disappointing. I would say maybe 1 in 5 was usable. I had even less luck with MuseScore. Its scanner apparently is an online web page. I tried one song on that, and it just said it failed. Not even a less than satisfactory output. Just a failed message.
The good news (for me) is that I have found a couple of techniques in Photoshop that speed up the process. It was taking me about an hour to reformat and load a song file into MobileSheets. With the new way of doing it, I have cut that by at least half. I can get a song prepared in about 20 minutes to half an hour.
09-03-2020, 07:57 AM (This post was last modified: 09-03-2020, 08:18 AM by BRX.)
I also think it's better for such "simple" sheets with just one voice and not much formating to just put it in your notation program of choice than to edit an image or pdf with cutting.
I want to mention again another nice notation option, completely free and hopefully will be supported by Mike in MSP in the foreseeable future similar to the chord pro notation.
I've talked about in the forum here in other threads: ABC. I don't want to go too deeply into it in this thread, but it took me less than 5 minutes to transcribe the sample above to ABC code.
Without any edits for bars per line, height of staff or something else the default result looks like the image above (also see attached pdf).
The syntax is quite simple for such tasks like here. Actually the sole code text is ASCII and not bigger than these 429 bytes:
Code:
%abc-2.2
X:1
T:Come, Thou Fount Of Every Blessing
C:Traditional American Melody
M:5/4
L:1/4
K:F
Q:104
Z3 | z2 z "_SENZA VIBRATO"(AG) | F> F- F A c | G> G- G A c | d> c- c A G | F3- F2- | F2 z (AG) | $
F> F- F A c | G> G- G A c | d> c- c A G | F3- F2- | F2 z c (d/e/) | $
f> e- e (d c) | d c/A/- A c (d/e/) | f> e- e (d c) | f3 (A G) | $
F> F- F A c | G> G- G A c | d> c- c (A G) | "_MOLTO RIT."F3- F2- | F3- F2 | z5 | z2 z "^PIU MOSSO"(A G) || [K:D] [M:3/4]
Actually one can do fairly complex multivoiced and formated sheet music with ABC. But for sheets like yours it's as simple as that. You don't even need an app for it.
You can simply use the this incredible webpage for creating and editing (also displaying if you like) ABC sheets
Just paste an ABC text like the above into the left part of the web editor and it's rendered on the right WYSIWYG.
I recommend Vivaldi or another Chrome based web browser (maybe IE or Firefox work too). You can directly print to a pdf from the browser which in my
example case resulted in the attached pdf.
If you (or anyone) is further interested into this I can elaborate. I just wanted to use the opportunity to show another way and to dream again of ABC support in MSP (maybe even
with the use of the rendering engine of the linked webpage since the javascript source code is freely available from the author who is a great guy) because that would mean
we can have very small files which can be edited and transposed within MSP like chordpro but with real notes, chords, lyrics, and so on. Also ABC can be quite easily converted
to MusicXML and vice versa so there would be an interface to import and export files from and to other notation programs.
Just a pointer to LiliPond which is quite similar to ABC and certainly is in a state of active development: https://lilypond.org/
The typical drawback is that you need quite some time of repeated usage to get efficient with those non-visual programs. You become familiar quite well with simple score styles, but as soon as something more elaborate is required you may have a hard time to find respective information to get/keep you going.
(09-01-2020, 02:45 PM)itsme Wrote: I rewrite such songs with MuseScore. With a little experience a song like your example can be done in less time. And you are completey free to edit whatever you like.
I have used MuseScore a while back, but recently attempting to reduce the number of bars per page so I can increase the note size, (my eyes are 81 years old, like the rest of me) I found that I have had a memory lapse, and was unable to re-write the music with the notes etc. I'm looking for a quicky review, can you redirect me?
If there is a way of scanning in pdf's, and rewriting that allows fewer bars and larger notes that would be even better.
I recommend that you first increment the staff space (sp) (Format - Page Settings... - Scaling) as desired. Then remove existing line breaks (Format - Add/Remove System Breaks - Remove current system breaks). If you don't like the resulting automatic system breaks and page breaks set them as you like via Add/Remove System Breaks or via drag&drop from the "Breaks & Spacers" palette.
For further questions just search or ask in the MuseScore forum https://musescore.org/de/forum. You can find many competent, helpful and patient guys there that answer your questions in English and German.
