Another problem in playback. Let's say we have a chord consisting of 8 wholenotes (in 4/4)on the keyboard, four wholenotes in the right-hand (treble clef) and four wholenotes in the left-hand (bass clef.) Now lets place a wavy line signifying arpeggio in front of the entire chord spread over the two staffs. In other words, the wavy line extends from the lowest bass note to the highest treble note.
A pianist would play the chord as an arpeggio: eight consecutive notes, with each note held for the duration of the chord. But that is not what Sibelius plays back when it encounters this notation. It plays the left hand as a four-note arpeggio. Together with the first note of the arpeggio, it plays all four notes in the right hand (treble clef) simultaneously.
How can one get Sibelius to play back correctly an arpeggiated chord stretching over the two staff in a piano keyboard -- that is without re-notating the entire chord as an arpeggio with each note tied to the chord.
You can't do it automatically. You can play with the Live Playback data to space the playback. I think the Strummer plugin does this. It might be worth seeing if it can do what you want.
> You can play with the Live Playback data to space the playback. I think the Strummer plugin does this. It might be worth seeing if it can do what you want.
Unfortunately, Strummer only works with chords whose notes are in the same voice on the same staff. It would definitely be handy to have something that would work across voices and staves. I sometimes do this by hand -- really nice sounding results, but tedious.
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Martin
Sibelius 6.1; Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz, 4 GB RAM (3 GB accessible), WinXP Pro SP3, two monitors, Echo Indigo IOx Express Card audio interface, KeyRig 49 -- year 2009
If one fooled with the Live Start Position in the Playback Pane of Properties Window of the upper stave, I suppose you could get a perfect timing a little better than in this attachment.
Depends on how important the playback is to you an how much time you have on your hands. :-)
Uh oh, I feel another Bob Z. plugin possibly coming!
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Richie Vitale-Sib 6.1 User
iMac 2.66 Ghz Intel/Snow Leopard
2 GB RAM
http://www.myspace.com/richievitale
I wrote a plug-in to do this. It's for the harp, but would work for piano. In fact it works over an arbitrary number of staves, and is useful for taking the calliope effect out of woodwind chords. It has the added advantage that the arpeggiation starts before the beat, which is what people usually want, rather than on the beat, with the other notes trailing after, as Sibelius does it.
It's pretty rough and at the moment you have to edit the plug-in to choose different speeds of 'roll' for the arpeggio. Also, at the moment, due to the carelessness of the script's author, it doesn't always play the notes of the chord in the right order. But no-one has ever noticed in the general grand sweep of the big chord.
I can let you have a copy if you want: click on my name at the top of this post for a mail-to.
(I might even have time to think about considering a plan to contemplate the possibility of designing a theoretical way of evolving a draft description of a method of working towards examining a putative philosophical basis having as its object the intention to propose the future likelyhood of maybe adding a dialog to control the speed of the arpeggio, but no promises.)
All these answers are interesting, and I thank you for them. Unfortunately, no one mentions the elephant in the room. This is a gaping failure of Sibelius to read correctly a very common symbol in music notation. There are countless scores for keyboards and harps that spread an arpeggio over two staffs. Sibelius should be fixed so that it reads and plays back correctly (consecutively) all of the notes covered by an arpeggio wavy line.
Also, even though the arpeggio wavy line is now better and easier to set in the keypad, I still encounter spacing problems when the chord has lots of accidentals, and when the chord follows key changes, meter changes, repeat barlines, etc.
Leaving aside your elephant (!), I'd be interested to see some examples of spacing problems with new note-attached arpeggio lines. I would guess that in all cases you have attached the arpeggio line to the chord in the wrong staff and then dragged it onto the other staff, and that if you had attached it to the chord on the other staff it would look better; but feel free to prove me wrong!
Admittedly, an elephant is a bit heavy-handed for a description of the playback problem.
As for the spacing problem, it does seem to make a difference whether the wavy line is attached to the chord in the treble staff and dragged down, or attached to the chord in the bass staff and dragged up. Here are two examples (not your everyday arpeggios) to show the difference.
Yes, as you say, the arpeggio line doesn't know about the staff you drag it to, so you should either add it to the staff that has the widest conglomeration of accidentals, and drag it to the other, or simply drag it left until it clears the accidentals on the other staff.
Your chords are ridiculous, by the way. :-)
Jeremy
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music editor/engraver
iMac Intel 2GHz 2GB | OS X Version 10.6.2 Snow Leopard | Sibelius 6.1
>Ian, for us ignoramuses could you please explain what the calliope effect is?
A calliope is a steam organ, usually associated with fairgrounds where the same steam engine that turns the carousel also drives the organ, using a set of linked perforated punched cards as source material. The point is that all the notes start at exactly the same time (unless some of the pipes are leaking) and so the effect is, understandably, mechanical.
Replace the punched cards with MIDI messages and the steam pipes with KontaktPlayer2 and woodwind chords (in particular) can give a similar effect. It's useful to give them slightly different start times (thus simulating a leaking steam pipe). My plug-in is so badly constructed that it can be used for this purpose.
But with two chords, one in each staff of a piano or harp, it sounds quite like an arpeggio.
Arpeggio.sib