Start a Conversation

Helpful Articles

What options are there for preparing piano parts?

Notation Musician and Notation Composer offer many options for preparing piano parts from MIDI files:

If the piano part in the MIDI file is all in one staff (track), you can split that staff into right-hand (treble clef) and left-hand (bass clef) staves. This option is offered as part of the "recommendations" dialog that opens by default when you open a new MIDI file.

If some notes are too high above or below the staff, you can add 8va marks to shift the notes down or up by an octave, and you can insert clef changes anywhere in the staff.

You can extract the melody line from a piano part to create an "easy note" part where the notes are displayed in a large font size, and the letters of the notes ('C', 'D', 'E', etc.) are displayed inside the noteheads.

If there are too many ties between notes because some notes overlap, you can automatically re-transcribe the piano part to use split voices so that some notes have stems up and others stems down.

You can prepare a piano reduction of an instrument ensemble (such as a string quartet or even orchestral score), with a single command.

Add a "third hand" staff, for passages in which the right or left hand is frequently jumped two octaves or more.

Detailed instructions for the above tasks are described in the Notation Musician and Composer Users Guide. Use the Help / Users Guide command, and in the index, look up "piano / preparation of (tips)".

You can also view the Tutorial Videos that we have for preparing Parts at https://www.notation.com/TutorialVideos.php