And humans are better at reading patterns than in fully comprehending meticulous directions concerning velocity and milliseconds. Or the mesmerizing surreal landscape of The Unanswered Question. Or the languishing serenity of a Chopin Nocturne. You'll never capture the frantic pent-up energy of Linus and Lucy on a piano roll. Nothing more can be conveyed beyond that. They exist to tell a computer or midi controller what pitch to sound, and for how many milliseconds, and at what decibel level. 'Piano rolls' just can't be that detailed. But also there are particular cuedms I get from mood markings, dynamic markings, key signature changes, special barlines, and phrase marks - not to mention the obvious pedal marks themselves when included. How do I know when to use what pedal and when? Any combination of these three, in varying amounts, may be employed at any time. Well, on the piano I have three pedals at my disposal to use to adjust the timbre of the song on the fly. So we've established that the two main elements of music, notes and rhythms, are served better by standard notation. Two different use cases.' I take a little offense to the idea that writing electronic music for a synthesizer doesn't count as 'reading and writing music.' It's definitely different from playing an instrument directly, but I think it has the same artistic merit. I don't think the piano roll is better, but you need both when working with computer music.ĮDIT: You wrote, 'For a sequencer, the concept of a pitch versus time graph is very good, but even then, you don't want to confuse reading and writing music with graphically depicting instructions for a synthesizer. I go into more detail about the advantages and disadvantages of traditional notation and piano rolls in my response to the OP. A piano roll is completely unambiguous about the precise timings of individual notes, which is information that traditional notation doesn't capture precisely enough for controlling synthesizers with MIDI. But, that’s why I’m tryna not do it anymore.Īs an electronic musician, I disagree with your claim that 'traditional notation is much more expressive.' Traditional notation is excellent for writing sheet music to be read by human musicians, but a piano roll is essential for writing computer music. Or some other elaborate way to make it more simple. But like a D3 quarter note would be 3r-2-(1/4) or just 3-2-.25. So like with a dotted half note in c, it would be r(3/4)….lol…jk. And than in brackets beside it, the duration. Or ya could just call the root by the key, but I’m not about to dive into that. And just putting a number beside it for the amount of semitones above the c it is. However, as a reader of midi….it’s hella flawed. But if I were, it’d be the same way ya print out sheet music. I’m here because I never learned to read music, but ended up learning to read a piano roll through producing…so like, as imma guess is the truth with sheet music, after a certain time it becomes subconscious.

Does liveprofessor have piano roll