Sheet music software supporting standard stradella bass notation playback?

[Ed S]

The notation I'm referring to is that where the bass and counter-bass button presses are written out normally, but chord button presses are written as a single note high on the staff with the specific chord identified by abbreviation (e.g. "M" For Major).

Is there any good notation software that supports playback of this?

 

[daveburkevt]

Have you considered Musescore? I've been using it for accordion sheet music for a few years now. It has playback as well. It would support the type of notation you describe, but I write arrangements which look more like piano scores. I use custom notation to denote contrabass/bass rows when I feel it's needed. (The squared/circled 1 and 2's under the bass notes.) Full support of fingering as well though various Musescore tools. Let me know if you want further advice on using Musescore. Musescore website

 

[Glug]

I played with Musescore a while back to make it support accordions better - stradella bass and register changes.

I did a custom sound font (my Hohner Lucia IV P recorded) and made it so the standard Stradella notation was supported.
That includes playing bass notes and chord notes according to which bit of the bass cleff the notes are in.
What it doesn't do is play a full chord from a single chord note.
What it does do is let you select fairly realistic bass and treble registers and change them on the fly.

In practice I have one score for sight reading and a copy with the chords filled in and made staccato for playback.
I still use it for creating new scores.

The main issue with it is that Musescore 4 has broken the mechanism for selecting instruments so it only works with versions 2 and 3.
You can find the full info here

MuseScore with registers (2)

Hiya folks, apparently my original thread https://www.accordionists.info/threads/musescore-with-registers.5727/ is not open for new comments. Whatever the reason there's also now this new section it would have been in. I'm still using the soundfont for playback and haven't made any changes...

www.accordionists.info

MuseScore with registers

Hiya, Ive been messing about with MuseScore recently trying to get a better accordion sound and Ive found a way to implement register switches fairly easily. Basically you can define new instruments in MuseScore and you can have different instruments for the treble and bass staves. So a basic...

www.accordionists.info

 

[daveburkevt]

Hi, Glug. Yes, I read that entire thread and listened to your Accordion sound fonts. Excellent, really. Good work. And you're right, with Musescore 4 it's a Musehub world and we all have to play in it. I've been using Musescore 4 from the beginning and like it (now that it's more stable haha), but I never installed Musehub. Didn't want to take the chance or added complexity. The playback built into Musescore is good enough for my purposes since I only need to confirm the score is correct and not for true reproduction. Keep me posted on your work, though!

 

[Rosie C]

Have you considered Musescore? I've been using it for accordion sheet music for a few years now. It has playback as well. It would support the type of notation you describe, but I write arrangements which look more like piano scores. I use custom notation to denote contrabass/bass rows when I feel it's needed. (The squared/circled 1 and 2's under the bass notes.) Full support of fingering as well though various Musescore tools. Let me know if you want further advice on using Musescore. Musescore website

Nice score! I too use Musescore, but my abilities extend only to a single-note melody line and improvised accompaniment based on chord names.

 

[Siegmund]

If you read the other thread you'll have gotten to hear me whine about creating playback of register changes and Stradella buttons in Lilypond 2.22, and having it get broken with the upgrade to Lilypond 2.24, at almost exactly the same time as Glug had Musescore 4 problems.

I am hoping to re-learn Scheme so I can build a Lilypond 2.24 module this spring... but geez it is the least-favorite language I have ever tried to program in, so I've been dragging my feet while occupied with other projects.

 

[Zevy]

The program that I use is Finale. In order to make the (single note) chords “work”, I have to hide the prefixes. So FM becomes M, Fm becomes m, and F7 becomes 7. If I want subsequent chords to sound, I create the chord and hide the entire chord. That way, all you see on the printed version is the first appearance of the chord. I prefer not to bother with the last aspect, if you need to hear every chord that’s what you will need to do.

 

[daveburkevt]

Nice score! I too use Musescore, but my abilities extend only to a single-note melody line and improvised accompaniment based on chord names.

I've got a number of those on paper, too!

If you read the other thread you'll have gotten to hear me whine about creating playback of register changes and Stradella buttons in Lilypond 2.22, and having it get broken with the upgrade to Lilypond 2.24, at almost exactly the same time as Glug had Musescore 4 problems.

I admire you for staying with it, Siegmund. Pretty advanced coding. That hamster wheel of changing technology can be a killer though. Good luck!

 

[Ed S]

Have you considered Musescore? I've been using it for accordion sheet music for a few years now. It has playback as well. It would support the type of notation you describe, but I write arrangements which look more like piano scores. I use custom notation to denote contrabass/bass rows when I feel it's needed. (The squared/circled 1 and 2's under the bass notes.) Full support of fingering as well though various Musescore tools. Let me know if you want further advice on using Musescore. Musescore website

Yes, I use Musescore. I was hoping someone might have gotten A.A.A. bass notation to work.
In playing from the score, I find the full 3-note chord distracting.

BTW, I found MuseScore Forum responses that suggest (at least to me) that there may be a way to assign two different instruments to different Musescore voices, by using "S/A" and "T/B" special text markers. But I cannot find them on the palette. I mention this thinking it might be a way to get your soundfont working. I'm a newbie w/r/t this, so if that makes no sense ignore it!

 

[micahcowan]

I'm not going to go find them again, but I've run across suggestions re MuseScore, on having a "hidden" staff that contains the chords to be sounded, or to add "guitar chords". I haven't tried either of these, it's more work than I honestly want to spend on MuseScore's decidedly lackluster playback feature.

 

[Ed S]

I'm not going to go find them again, but I've run across suggestions re MuseScore, on having a "hidden" staff that contains the chords to be sounded, or to add "guitar chords". I haven't tried either of these, it's more work than I honestly want to spend on MuseScore's decidedly lackluster playback feature.

What is your process for notating stradella, then? Are you only notating pieces that you've fully worked out on a real-life instrument? If not, do you write AAA (standard stradella) notation from your imagination, and just see how it sounds in real life? Or write Musescore with a (presumably small!) accordion in your lap, to work out the hard bits? (I'm just getting started, asking for options to try, not being snarky!)

 

[dak]

If you read the other thread you'll have gotten to hear me whine about creating playback of register changes and Stradella buttons in Lilypond 2.22, and having it get broken with the upgrade to Lilypond 2.24, at almost exactly the same time as Glug had Musescore 4 problems.

I am hoping to re-learn Scheme so I can build a Lilypond 2.24 module this spring... but geez it is the least-favorite language I have ever tried to program in, so I've been dragging my feet while occupied with other projects.

Did you try convert-ly -ed on your file, assuming it has a correct \version header referring to the version the file was still working with?

If so and it didn't help, send the stuff over. There must be some reason I've been LilyPond's lead programmer for a decade. Of course you can also try the LilyPond mailing lists: the folks on those tend to be super helpful.

 

[Siegmund]

Of course you can also try the LilyPond mailing lists: the folks on those tend to be super helpful.

A big light bulb just turned on in my head.

One of the folks on the Lilypond mailing list was super helpful to me back in the summer of 2021 when I started my accordion type setting project --- and his initials were D. K.! He also told me a fascinating story about a unique accordion he owned...

Did you try `convert-ly -ed` on your file, assuming it has a correct `\version` header referring to the version the file was still working with?

On my machine, this throws six "error: Unable to open file" errors, and returns my file unchanged. I don't know if it's having trouble with my file, or with some dependency that convert-ly can't find.

If so and it didn't help, send the stuff over.

You'll be sorry you asked
I was learning Scheme as I went, in 2021... so I expect it would all benefit from a do-over.

Most of the right-hand part still works in 2.24 as-is. It is *something*, deep down in the function to replace a single left hand note (chord button label) by all the notes that actually sound when that button is pressed, that was broken by changing to Guile 2 -- but I have so little clue what I am doing with Scheme/Guile that I couldn't tell what it was.
Or, perhaps, something in the addNote or withinOctave snippets I lifted from the repository.

But if you're curious I'll send it over (along with the documentation for how it worked in 2.22) for your amusement.

 

[dak]

You'll be sorry you asked
I was learning Scheme as I went, in 2021... so I expect it would all benefit from a do-over.

Most of the right-hand part still works in 2.24 as-is. It is *something*, deep down in the function to replace a single left hand note (chord button label) by all the notes that actually sound when that button is pressed, that was broken by changing to Guile 2 -- but I have so little clue what I am doing with Scheme/Guile that I couldn't tell what it was.
Or, perhaps, something in the addNote or withinOctave snippets I lifted from the repository.

But if you're curious I'll send it over (along with the documentation for how it worked in 2.22) for your amusement.

I'm not saying I'll make a do-over, but I certainly should get it running again. And it might give me ideas. You can use a personal message here or send an Email to that helpful guy with initials D.K. you had contact with...

 

[micahcowan]

What is your process for notating stradella, then? Are you only notating pieces that you've fully worked out on a real-life instrument? If not, do you write AAA (standard stradella) notation from your imagination, and just see how it sounds in real life? Or write Musescore with a (presumably small!) accordion in your lap, to work out the hard bits? (I'm just getting started, asking for options to try, not being snarky!)

A bit of all of those, actually! Mostly, I'm notating pieces that I've worked out at least most of the way. In some cases, I'm writing out what I think it should be (I can sight-sing, and going in the reverse direction isn't really any harder).

And, as I have a Roland FR-1xb, lately I've been using that to input via MIDI, so that's my "accordion in my lap" (actually, just within arm's reach mostly, and since it's digital I can input notes without having to operate the bellows). Most recently I've been trying a piece of software called ScoreCloud, which listens to you play (either audio or MIDI!), recording it as a "snippet" of raw note pitches and durations, which can then be converted into transcribed sheet music, using AI. I've been very impressed with the results. Very often, the transcribed sheet music isn't quite right, initially, but still, much closer than any other piece of software I've tried for converting raw performance into score, and there are great tools for adjusting the transcription: you can shift the starting beat of the entire score (the "pickup"), you can draw the "beats" onto the raw "snippet" to give it clues on how to parse your shifting tempos, and in the transcription itself you can drag barlines to adjust where the "downbeats" are, and it will re-flow the remainder of the piece. You also adjust note durations and starts by just clicking and dragging them left and right. It's very different from other music software I've used, but fairly intuitive. There's a learning curve, but for the most part things work the way you (begin to) think they should.

But it can still be a somewhat cumbersome process. I think I will be using ScoreCloud when I'm transcribing a piece whose rhythms are somewhat complex (e.g. jazz arrangements), probably translating the results into MuseScore (this requires a paid subscription to ScoreCloud - actually using most of the features are free, if you're staying completely within ScoreCloud), and I will use MuseScore for most other situations. The easiest method so far for inputting music, for me, is to lay out the rhythms first, ignoring pitch (using the computer keyboard to input the durations), and then use MuseScore's "pitch overwrite" mode with the MIDI accordion. But that's when the rhythms are simple enough I don't feel like I'm hurting my brain to painstakingly count everything out.

Either way, though, I'm tending to notate pieces I've already worked out. That might not be a great fit for everyone, but for me I find MuseScore (and software score playback in general) to sound way too "canned" (and not really have great representation of the various registers), to get a good idea of whether what I've written "sounds right". So I just use the playback to confirm I have rhythms and such right, and otherwise deal with however MuseScore decides it's going to play my score back, including the crappy handling of AAA chord notation.

When I'm working through an arrangement, sometimes I'll keep a pad of paper handy and sketch out some of what I'm doing, whatever I think I'd have trouble remembering correctly when it comes time to transcribe it. So that's the other way I'm using an "accordion in my lap", heh.

 

[Tom]

A bit of all of those, actually! Mostly, I'm notating pieces that I've worked out at least most of the way. In some cases, I'm writing out what I think it should be (I can sight-sing, and going in the reverse direction isn't really any harder).

And, as I have a Roland FR-1xb, lately I've been using that to input via MIDI, so that's my "accordion in my lap" (actually, just within arm's reach mostly, and since it's digital I can input notes without having to operate the bellows). Most recently I've been trying a piece of software called ScoreCloud, which listens to you play (either audio or MIDI!), recording it as a "snippet" of raw note pitches and durations, which can then be converted into transcribed sheet music, using AI. I've been very impressed with the results. Very often, the transcribed sheet music isn't quite right, initially, but still, much closer than any other piece of software I've tried for converting raw performance into score, and there are great tools for adjusting the transcription: you can shift the starting beat of the entire score (the "pickup"), you can draw the "beats" onto the raw "snippet" to give it clues on how to parse your shifting tempos, and in the transcription itself you can drag barlines to adjust where the "downbeats" are, and it will re-flow the remainder of the piece. You also adjust note durations and starts by just clicking and dragging them left and right. It's very different from other music software I've used, but fairly intuitive. There's a learning curve, but for the most part things work the way you (begin to) think they should.

But it can still be a somewhat cumbersome process. I think I will be using ScoreCloud when I'm transcribing a piece whose rhythms are somewhat complex (e.g. jazz arrangements), probably translating the results into MuseScore (this requires a paid subscription to ScoreCloud - actually using most of the features are free, if you're staying completely within ScoreCloud), and I will use MuseScore for most other situations. The easiest method so far for inputting music, for me, is to lay out the rhythms first, ignoring pitch (using the computer keyboard to input the durations), and then use MuseScore's "pitch overwrite" mode with the MIDI accordion. But that's when the rhythms are simple enough I don't feel like I'm hurting my brain to painstakingly count everything out.

Either way, though, I'm tending to notate pieces I've already worked out. That might not be a great fit for everyone, but for me I find MuseScore (and software score playback in general) to sound way too "canned" (and not really have great representation of the various registers), to get a good idea of whether what I've written "sounds right". So I just use the playback to confirm I have rhythms and such right, and otherwise deal with however MuseScore decides it's going to play my score back, including the crappy handling of AAA chord notation.

When I'm working through an arrangement, sometimes I'll keep a pad of paper handy and sketch out some of what I'm doing, whatever I think I'd have trouble remembering correctly when it comes time to transcribe it. So that's the other way I'm using an "accordion in my lap", heh.

Thanks Micah, that ScoreCloud seems pretty interesting. I could see its utility in capturing new melody ideas.