Roland CM-64 and PC-200 keyboard, new low price!

[BlueMax]

I have a Roland CM-64 sound module (classic MT-32 with so much more!), Roland PC-200 MIDI controller keyboard, MIDI cables and power adapters (North American 120V of course) I need to sell.

I need to buy Finale 2007 so I need to liquidate anything unessential, including the software from the other thread.  

This is a great step for both playing those classic Sierra games in all their glory, but ALSO to do a little composing of your own - the CM-64 has a lot of advanced sounds and capabilities not found on the classic MT-32 and still sound good today!

Best of all, it's CHEAP!    PRICE LOWERED TO ONLY $100!

Let me know what you think.  Thanks for your support!

[BlueMax]

still available - will part module & keyboard.

[Alistair]

By the way Markell, what does a PC-200 controller keyboard do?

- Alistair

[BlueMax]

It's a piano-type keyboard.  4 octaves, full-size keys, velocity-sensitive.  Lets you play the piano with the sounds of whatever MIDI device you hook it up to - like the CM-64 in question. 

Not bad considering how cheap it is! 

$100 is a steal for both units, really - but I'm fairly desperate. 

[Alistair]

Seriously man, I'd put it on eBay. A CM-64 would go for a lot, and the keyboard would go for something.

- Alistair

[Zemus]

How much for only the CM-64?

[MusicallyInspired]

Yes, how much for the CM-64 only. I already have the PC-200.

[BlueMax]

$60?  20% of the cost of Finale! 

[Zemus]

I'll take it for $60 + shipping if you can ship to Norway

[BlueMax]

I'll take it for $60 + shipping if you can ship to Norway

Well sure!  Module now considered "Pending" and I'll take this to Private Message. 

Norway.... now that's shipping! 

[Zemus]

Ok, replied to your PM. It didn't appear in my outbox after I replied so I hope you got it.

[Tom]

You may need to setup your profile to "Save a copy" of the personal messages you send.  By default, they're not saved, so you won't see messages you've sent.

[Caliburn]

$60?  20% of the cost of Finale! 

BlueMax, I take it this means the retailer you're planning to buy it from has a price of $300?  Just FYI, the academic pricing at McCormick's Music is $229.

You will want to verify that it's identical to what you would normally get--based on the spec sheet I couldn't tell, for example, whether or not it had the reduced form of Garritan Personal Orchestra that you mentioned (though, as I recall you used to have the full version anyway).  I assume "Hybrid" means Windows and Mac version in the same box, but you can inquire about that by phone or e-mail as well.

What I can tell you is that McCormick's is a reputable business who I've dealt with in the past (in fact, a guy who used to go to my church worked there), so it wouldn't be like tossing a bunch of money in the direction of an unknown entity.  So if it is the same product cheaper, you might want to go that route.

Good luck!
-Luke

[Alistair]

Luke, I don't mean to appear rude, but:

What I can tell you is that McCormick's is a reputable business who I've dealt with in the past (in fact, a guy who used to go to my church worked there), so it wouldn't be like tossing a bunch of money in the direction of an unknown entity

Um, how is the church guy relevant?


But another question Markell (and anyone else)- what's the best uses you get out of Finale? just transcribing MIDI's as sheet music, or..?

Also, Norway's bad? I have to ship to Greece and South Africa today.

- Alistair

[Caliburn]

Ha, well, maybe it was a bit irrelevant , but all I really meant to convey when I said I knew someone who worked there and I had bought from them in the past was that they were safe to buy from.  Personally, I'm always a little bit leery about first-time purchases from unfamiliar companies on the Internet, so it seemed a worthwhile addendum, even though in truth most others probably aren't as paranoid about this as I may be.

As for the usefulness of Finale and other notation editors, what precisely are you interested to know?  (I don't want to repeat information with which you're already familiar.)  What the advantages of a notation editor over a sequencer would be if all you're doing is editing music that will ultimately be played back on a synth?  Or what the advantages of a notation editor are when using it for it's more typical end, which is printed music?  (Or neither of these, and I've guessed altogether incorrectly.)

-Luke

[BlueMax]

Votes for good experience is great!  (I wish just being a churchgoer automatically meant you were of sound character - sadly, it's not.)

I'll definately check out those guys with their much lower cost on Finale! 

Why do I want it?  It's all about the note entry!  I can't play piano well - certainly not well enough to keep up with a sequencer.  I realized all my best work was done in trackers because no live playing skill is required to get the notes in.  Some sequencers have limited notation, but it's mouse-based and very limited.  Finale (and Sibelius) are both geared for very quick entry of notes by combining numeric keypad as well as mouse/arrows/A-G keys/MIDI.  Then my ability to play correct notes or good timing is no longer required, and I can get back to writing music instead of battling my ability to perform live, no matter how much I slow down the tempo.

Because of how it's integrated, and the different approach, it's also much, much faster with fewer errors.

Why Finale over Sibelius? 
1)  It integrates with my Garritan Personal Orchestra 100% where Sibelius needs a $50 GPO upgrade.
2)  I've used it before - even if it has been 10 years since then.

I need it - and if I can get it VERY quickly, I stand a chance to get in on a paid position for a Christmas CD.  (I would have to buy this week and not sleep for the next two weeks, but I could do it and it would be rewarding beyond measure!)

But what do you do when the money's not there? 

[Alistair]

Sadly, you don't buy it. I want new synths and have so for ages (i.e. Korg NX5R). All I've been able to afford in the last year has been new headphones. But to be fair, that has made a HUGE difference, using good headphones.

Garritan's good- but I honestly don't understand why it skips (cuts off the first half-second of a note and skips and clicks to get back to where it's supposed to be, then plays normally). My PC's a Pentium 4 3 GHz and I have an ASIO soundcard. I think it's the sustain pedal or whatever controls volume, and it's weirding me out. If it wasn't so fickle, I'd use it a lot.

I've got Garritan Big Band as well. That's cool. But, same problems as GPO, fickle note drops and weird sound bugs. Guess I should Google it.

But, when you have 4 sound modules, other than strings, piano, guitar and drums, you really have the rest covered (unfortunately, those 4 crop up regularly ).


As for Finale, I've got musician friends who use it and I'm curious to what advantages generally, not just for example a opposed to using a sequencer, are. Why buy it full-stop? is it a MIDI->sheet music converter, and if so, is it more than just that? I could search, but I want a hands-on, layman's explanation.

- Alistair

[BlueMax]

Boy...  I'm not sure I know what you mean!

Short version - notation packages are often primarily for making music print nicely.  Sound production is secondary (but still critical.)  Notation packages are built from the ground up for inputting notes as notes on a musical staff as opposed to sequencers built for recording live players.

This is why it's essential for me - I can't play.  No matter how much I slow down the tempo, I'm bound to play a wrong note (or blow the timing) and screw up the recording.  Tons of wasted time as I record over and over and over trying to get it right.  In a notation package, I just choose the length of the note and then mouse-click or MIDI-press that note/chord and boom.  It's up there.  Move on the the next note/chord.   Make an error?  Press backspace and delete that single note rather than re-record that whole section.  This way you're also guaranteed that your timing will be right - choose quarter notes and start plugging them in, you can do 'em fast or slow, you don't have to depend on your fingers/brain to get the sequence right while the metronome beats away.  Sometimes I need to think slower than the metronome is going. 

Finale's for me.  And I need it NOW!  (I have two weeks!  It's still doable!)

[Caliburn]

Alistair,

Yep, think of a notation editor as a kind of word processor or publishing software for music.  Most of the key functions of a notation editor have simply to do with the way the sheet music looks in terms of layout (spacing between staves, spacing between notes, how many bars per staff, how many staves per page) and style (the font used for the notes, accents, expression markers).  In Finale especially, the control you have over these aspects (which are called "engraver settings") is so extensive that Finale is used by many music publishing houses themselves for formatting the music they print.

Looked at in this way, you can see that all the MIDI functions that notation editors have are really just a kind of bonus, albeit a bonus that's so logical and ubiquitous that it has become an expectation for even the most rudimentary of notation editors.  MIDI is used only because it's the most obvious way for a composer to hear what he's written, but technically speaking you could create printed music without ever hearing it played back, just like word processors don't need a built-in text-to-speech device to read back sentences to you.  Most people's "inner ear" isn't strong enough to imagine music like they can imagine reading text aloud when typing, hence the general desire for this playback ability.

That said, the MIDI functions of a notation editor are not wholly insignificant.*  Some reasons why a composer might choose to use a notation editor even if they never intended to print out their composition but only play it back on a synth are as follows:

1) Based on the composer's training, he may simply prefer the language of traditional music notation (staves, note length, accents, dynamics, expressions) over the language of MIDI (tracks, durations, velocities and controllers).  It may seem at first like these are synonyms merely represented with different aesthetics, but on closer examination that turns out not to be quite true.  An accent is often a combination of a change in duration and in velocity.  The difference between note length and MIDI's quantified equivalent, 'duration', is trickier--I'll come to that in a bit.

2) Like BlueMax, the composer may prefer the modes of input that a notation editor has.  Most good notation editors have Simple Input (point-and-click from palettes), Step Input, and Recorded/Transcribed Input.  What BlueMax described is Step Input, and although there's really no reason why someone couldn't program a sequencer to allow input in this fashion, I can't think offhand of one that does, though admittedly I haven't paid attention to the latest sequencers since circa 2001, so my knowledge of them is a bit out of date.

3) Starting with the debut of Sibelius, some newer high-end notation editors started incorporating rudimentary AI that could do things like take a melody you had inputted, where every note had the same default velocity, and the AI would take a wild guess as to what other velocities it could assign to the notes to make the melody play back in a manner that seemed more human.  Again, there's no reason a sequencer couldn't incorporate the same function, but since most people use recorded input in a sequencer in the first place, the performance they gave on their velocity-sensitive keyboard is probably far superior than what such an AI routine would come up with.

So coming now to your suggestion of importing a pre-existing MIDI file into a notation editor to convert it to sheet music, we now discover the need for a slight distinction between a note length like quarter note and a seemingly equivalent duration like 60 units out of 240 in the measure (60/240 being, of course, equal to 1/4).

Say I'm playing on a MIDI keyboard, and I let up on the key a bit early so that now I have a note of duration 57/240.  In notation terms, that's still pretty clearly a quarter note, just a slightly shorter one, right?**  If I shorten it even more, I quickly run into the conundrum of how soon it ceases to be a quarter note and becomes the next shortest note length.  A dotted eighth note would be 45/240, so I seem to have a lot of room to work with before it becomes confusing.  But if I also allow thirty-second note divisons then I can have a dotted eighth note tied to a thirty-second note, and the total value of this tied entity (which could also be called a double-dotted eighth note) is 52.5/240, which will be rounded to 53/240.  The gap narrows.  So long as we stick with durations we really don't have to decide whether to consider a 53/240 duration a very short (stacatto) quarter note, or a double-dotted eighth note.

Where this does become an issue is when I want to transcribe something from MIDI to notation.  A notation editor alleviates this problem by letting the user set a quantization value for the transcription.  So if I know perfectly well that I don't want anything as small as a thirty-second note in my music, then I set the quantization value to the next higher length, a sixteenth note.  Now when the software comes across a 53/240 duration, it's easy for it to decide that it should be notated as a quarter note, because I've forcibly eliminated the other possibility.

Without this quantization, notation can become quite messy.

If quantization were the only issue in transcribing MIDI files, life would be bliss.  Sadly, often times MIDIs that you find on the Internet aren't actually recorded at the proper time signature and tempo in order to transcribe cleanly.  Let's say for example, that I record myself playing on a MIDI keyboard (or I record the MIDI data from a computer game).  I play a Viennese Waltz in three-eight time at a very fast tempo.  But my recording software cannot magically intuit what I am playing.  If I explicitly tell it the time signature and tempo at which I will record, and then I record being careful to stay aligned with the metronome, then I'll have no problems transcribing such music aside from quantization decisions.  But if I leave the recording software at its defaults, which might for example be four-four time at a moderate tempo of 90 bpm, then the software will mathematize every duration I play in terms of that time signature and tempo.

Now, if I simply play back my recording I will hear--get this!--no difference between the correctly and the incorrectly set recording.  This is because my computer can do fractions to its little heart's content!  What does it care what the supposed time signature and tempo are, so long as it can express what I play as some fraction (however complex) of it?  (Which, I might add, it can always do since this is obviously just a matter of math.)

But the correctly set recording will transcribe beautifully, whereas the incorrectly set recording will transcribe with a lot of bizarre short note values tied together in a way that makes no coherent sense in terms of the barlines.

Consequently you're best off transcribing MIDI to notation when the MIDI itself was recorded strictly according to the metronome, or when it was inputted manually by someone rather than recorded.

Hmm, sorry if these last several paragraphs are confusing.  Feel free to ask for clarification on anything and I'll try to re-explain.  (This would be easier with visuals...)

-Luke


* I'm also ignoring the fact that a couple notation editors like Cakewalk Overture (now owned by Geniesoft) have sequencer-like functions.  I use Cakewalk Overture myself because, aside from being in my opinion much better programmed than Finale, it has a so-called Graphic Window which is actually a piano roll editor much as you would find in any of Cakewalk's line of sequencers.  Through it you have easy one-screen access to durations, velocities and controllers.

** And it's not an error to play it shorter, it's a different articulation style: marcato (marching) rather than legato (smooth).  But this does kind of illustrate how note lengths are really fuzzy or imprecise fractions, whereas durations are strict or precise fractions.

[Tom]

Very thorough explanation, Luke!  Very good.  One thing I'm curious about, though....
Most sequencers I've used from day one allow for step entry of notes, though granted -- not in a notational sense.  But Cakewalk and Voyetra's Orchestrator allow for notational step entry.  A lot of sequencers only offer a psuedo method of step entry, though, from either a controller, or PC keyboard... using nontraditional characters as note  references.  These later step entry methods restrict you to entering the same length note (all quarters, eigths, etc.), too, which would be a pain in the butt to edit later, I would think.