Speed Of Inputting Music, If you can't play a real-time keyboard, how's the fastest way Options

[Ricky Buchanan]

I am experienced with both computers and music, but not so much with the mix of both. Because of my disability I can't use a regular music keyboard to compose, and putting the notes in one-by-one with the mouse is a bit like pulling teeth! I do have a small keyboard - eKeys 37 - which I use to do note pitches and then use a programmed XKeys Desktop device to specifiy the note length, but it's awkward and slow.

I think what frustrates me most is that music entered like this with a mouse or the XKeys/eKeys combination has no extra "live" midi stuff like note velocity/etc. (I'm not sure of the terminology - sorry). So playing it back is a bit like listening to a robot, and very frustrating.

Is there any decent way of getting this information in so the computer can play it back and have it closer to the way it sounds in my head???

At the moment I'm using Sibelius mostly and Garage Band a bit (haven't really mastered that). I started off clasically trained so I'm used to notes and staves and such, not the MIDI type stuff, but I am willing to learn!

Best Regards,
Ricky
ATMac - http://atmac.org/ - Assistive Technology for Mac OS X Users

[randyman]

Hey Ricky -

I really wish you all the best with getting your input situation to work for you smoothly.

If you're ambitious, and feel like doing a little symbolic coding, you could combine the power of Max -

http://www.cycling74.com/

with an interface like the monome -

http://monome.org/

to make your own input device. A range of buttons could be assigned to note values, some could be duration values, and some - say one through sixteen - could represent a range of velocity values. Once the buttons were laid out, it would provide an easy way to input these three values for each note.

The initial coding in Max might be tricky, but I'll bet you could draw on the community at Cycling '74 for assistance. Good luck!