Composition tools - Using styles |
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What is a style? [Professional] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] Music is basically composed of notes and rhythms combined into
innumerous possibilities. When you take some notes together, you
have chords, which are little constructions done with notes. When
you create a rhythmic pattern and some repeated melodic patterns
played with specific instruments and chords, you have a style. So
styles are a way to classify music. A style is an association of several music characteristics
that are specific to a mood, an atmosphere and that may then be
recognized as having its own character and personality. Practically, a style as used in most music software, arrangers
and synthesizers is a set of predefined rhythmic patterns for
percussion instruments and accompaniment instruments like the
bass, piano, guitar,... Each style has various patterns like an introduction, a main
rhythmic pattern, a break or variation pattern and a final
measure. You can assemble these building blocks into a full piece
of music by disposing them one after the other and then by
applying a chord progression to it that fits your melody. In releases 1 and 2 of Pizzicato, we had created 20 styles
with the first version of the library composition tools of
Pizzicato. The way to use styles was quite complicated. We
simplified it quite a bit with release 3.0, introducing the smart
link function and the groups of scores, but there was still some
specific and not so obvious operations to do to work with styles
and chord progressions. It was still too complex. With the
release 3.2, we have improved this process to the simplest
possible way. You drag and drop styles and chord progressions
into a score and you hear the result. Even if most of the needed tools have already been explained
in the previous lessons, here is a practical summary of how you
can work with styles in Pizzicato. Using the Pizzicato styles [Professional] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] In the Pizzicato libraries, you will find a folder that
contains 35 prepared styles. Each style has at least the
following elements: Depending on the style, each one of these building blocks may
have one or several measures. Some styles may have more than one
of each of these blocks. Music libraries / Prepared styles Let us say that we want to create a rock composition based on
that style. We will take a simple example of 10 measures. This
style has a one measure building block. We will create it
directly inside a score. We could also do it in a group of score,
as seen in a previous example. Both ways are possible. Music libraries / Basic libraries / Measure
4-4 / C Major - 3 notes chords / 12 measures - 2 chords/measure /
C Major / 1- 100 This was a simple example, but you can in fact also mix
various styles one after the other as well as use several little
chord progressions (here we used a long 12 measure progression in
one shot). Notice that you can also go in the basic chords
library and drag and drop single chords at a time to replace a
chord of the progression, or just to create your own chord
progression. The possibilities are numerous. Interactive styles and chords exploration [Professional] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] Until you know what composition or accompaniment you need, you
may want to test and try a lot of them and also test and try
chords. Here is the way to do that in an interactive way. Instruments and templates / Harmonic spaces
/ C Major - 3 notes chords + dominant 7th Importing styles from the Internet [Professional] [Composition Pro] You may object that presently Pizzicato has only 35 styles.
Here comes the next new function of Pizzicato. Pizzicato can
import all style files that have the Yamaha style format. You can
find literally thousands of style files on the Internet, some
that you must pay for but a lot of them for free. The style files that Pizzicato can import are basically any
MIDI file with marker in them that separate the various sections
of Intro, rhythm, break and end. The Yamaha
style file format uses this so Pizzicato can import that kind of
file. Notice that Pizzicato does not use the specific Yamaha
information blocks that you find in such a file. It only uses the
MIDI section of such a file. The corresponding file extension is
"*.STY". To find and download such files, just go on your preferred
search engine page (for instance www.google.com
) and type any combination of the following keywords: "free
Yamaha style files". You will find thousands of them.
Download them and put them inside a directory of your hard disk
(not inside Pizzicato yet). Then start Pizzicato and open the
conductor view. In the My library folder, add a new
sub-folder (right-click the folder and select the New folder...
menu item) where you will import the style files. Name it as you
want, for instance "Imported styles". Then
right-click on this folder and select either Import a
style... or Import a folder of styles... and then
select either one style file or the folder where you can have
many style files. Pizzicato will then start working and import
these files into your folder. After this operation is done (if you have download some
hundreds of style files, it may take some time), you will see
each style as a Pizzicato document, with a few scores in it that
you can use exactly as explained in the previous section. Notice
that some imported styles will not sound very nice until you also
use the real time arranger on them. Notice that you can also import MIDI files and folders of MIDI
files inside the library. Right-click a folder of the library and
you will see the corresponding menu items. Warning: be aware that the downloaded style or MIDI
files may be copyrighted by their authors. According to the site
where you download them, they may be available for private use
only. Styles that you buy may have another type of licence.
Consult the specific conditions of the site where you download
them to know what you may or may not do with them. There are many
free style and MIDI files that may be legally downloaded on the
Internet but there are also sites that offer illegally
"free" MIDI files to downloaded and by doing so, you
act yourself illegally. So we can only invite you to act in an
ethical way and only download the legally free MIDI or style
files and respect the conditions stated on the site regarding the
way you can use them (private or public use). Extract the instrumental patterns [Professional] [Composition Pro] Composing by using styles only may become poor after a while.
You are indeed only using pre-existing musical structures and you
may feel a bit restrained regarding your freedom to compose
music. This is where Pizzicato offers you the more elementary
music blocks that you can find in the various Pizzicato
libraries. Here is another function that may be used to create a vast
personal library of elementary instrumental patterns. The
principle is that you may take one Pizzicato document or a folder
that contains many Pizzicato documents and create a decomposition
of all the scores included in them and then classify all these
measures by instruments. The result is a new library folder or
document, containing individual patterns classified by
instruments. Imagine you have 100 midi files of various origins
and styles (but please use only legally obtained MIDI files, see
the above warning). You import those files in one shot inside a
library folder. Then you apply this decomposition function to
create, out of these 100 files, a library of individual
instrumental patterns of one measure each. You have then a lot of
raw music material to start building you own composition. This
aspect is mainly useful for the accompaniment instruments like
percussion, bass, piano,... This process has been applied to decompose the 35 Pizzicato
styles, and the results are included in the individual
instruments of the libraries. They may then be used outside the
context of a style, which is much more creative than only using
style: you create your own style by assembling individual
instruments. The way to decompose Pizzicato documents is very simple. In
the library, right-click a Pizzicato document or a folder that
contains Pizzicato documents and select the menu item entitled Extract
individual instruments patterns... The following dialog
appears: Summary [Professional] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] In the last twelve lessons, including this one, we have
learned to use the composition tools offered by Pizzicato 3.
Compared to the tools of version 2 (which still exist), we
believe that an important step has been done to improve the tools
regarding the user friendliness. We hope that music composition
will progressively be accessible to much more Pizzicato users. We
will continue in that direction and we are open to any suggestion
from you that may accelerate this process. Be sure you have understood the basic principles explained
here so far. If not, then we suggest you to read those lessons
again while doing yourself what is explained in them. You may
then start or continue to compose music. The richness of possibilities lies in the multiple potential
combinations of the various tools and music structures you can
use or create. You are the composer. Pizzicato helps you by
providing notation and composition tools. You express your
feelings, emotions and ideas by composing, so you are the one who
decides. Good luck and compose well!