Viewing and Editing the Performance of Notes

Whether you have imported notes from a MIDI file, or entered notes into a score by recording them from a music keyboard, or by manually entering them with the mouse, Composer offers you many ways to edit how the notes are performed during playback.

With convenient commands that you can apply to one or more selected notes at a time, you can:

Change the exact time that a note is played without necessarily changing where the note is located in the score (edit only the "as notated" score).

Change the exact duration that a note is played without necessarily changing its note value in the score (edit only the "as performed" performance of notes).

Request Composer to analyze the differences between as-notated durations and as-performed durations of notes in one region of a song and apply these differences as note duration adjustments to another region of the song.

Edit the loudness of individual notes. Create crescendos and decrescendos across a range of notes. Increase or decrease the contrast of loudness between notes.

Add pitch bends to notes, to simulate the musical effect achieved, for example, by a guitarist when he stretches a fretted string by pushing against it sideways with his fingers.

Procedures for accomplishing all of the above note editing tasks are described in the topics that follow.

If you wish to only view the performance aspects of notes so that you can annotate the score to give live musicians the directions for recreating the performance, you can use the "Show Piano Roll" command in the View menu (keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + Y).