I’m a little skeptical of something that ditches traditional music notation for piano roll, doesn’t offer any ways to reorganize sections of your song, and then gives you a bunch of tools for key signatures, modes, polymeter, and microtonal music. I’m trying to think of a programming analogy—it’s like checking out a new programming language that has dependent types, higher-kinded types and monads, and a borrow checker, but no strings or integers.
It’s really easy for those of us with analytical, mathematical minds to go diving into the more esoteric parts of music theory. Set theory, microtonality and alternative tuning systems, esoteric scales and cataloging all these different scales—but then you fuck up the basics or miss them completely. I noticed that the “major” scale is only available under its more esoteric name, the “ionian” scale, and then there are five different versions of locrian to choose from, not counting the ones outside 12-EDO.
https://github.com/helio-fm/helio-sequencer/blob/develop/Res...
Even with all these esoteric features, there is no such thing as, say, Eb. There is only D#. As programmers, we really want to normalize all our data so that it’s represented in exactly one way, but as a musician I like having both sharps and flats around. They’re convenient and make the music easier to read.
This is a neat tool for playing around with scales and tunings, but it seems like absolute hell to try and write music this way.
It’s not like a lack of a score view is awful, it’s just that it’s part of a pattern of missing tools that would be useful to people interested in composition. Like how there’s no such thing as a key signature (only scales), and you can’t reorganize parts of a song, and the chord tool uses a bunch of sometimes-correct names for chords so the tool can fit in with the scale. And then after you choose a chord, the name is gone. You can’t see what chords are already in the song. And there’s no flats.
People prefer piano roll, or score, or switch back and forth between both. The score is not just an artifact for printing books on paper, it’s a useful tool for reading music quickly. Piano roll is a lot more intuitive but it’s slow to read and falls apart when you start working with larger or more complicated stuff.
The people who want to “compose” music tend to gravitate towards the DAWs that have built-in scores anyway, like Cakewalk or Logic. That’s not universal by any means, it’s just kind of an average trend. Just like the people who call themselves “producers” tend to gravitate more towards piano roll. I put “compose” and “produce” in quotes because they’re somewhat arbitrary labels.
I keep going back to analogies—like, you walk into a kitchen, and there’s a sous vide wand, a centrifuge, and a Pacojet. But there’s no sink.
Or you go into a machine shop, and you see a six-axis CNC machine, but no calipers.
There's software I use (Reason) that doesn't have this, and piano roll or even things like Digital Performer's direct midi event list editor are one variety of really effective tools, but in my experience, anytime you end up working on a piece that might eventually need collaboration, lacks of notation will end up being a stone in your shoe.
D sharp is slightly higher in pitch than Eb in Pythagorean tuning.
For eg: Bb major uses: Bb C D Eb F G A Bb while A# major uses: A# B# Cx D# E# Fx Gx A# (x indicates double-sharp) Despite all the notes being exactly the same on a tempered instrument.
I find thisfeature very refreshing and liberating. Sure, having patterns or other blocks you can copy and move around makes life easier but too easily you might end in a trap of repetitive, schematic composition. Without patterns it is more natural to experiment with less orthodox stuff as you literally don't have any boundaries. I feel it every time I switch from Ableton or Milky Tracker to improvising with my Korg gear.
Section arrangement tools are not just about duplication. Like, the main point of cut and paste in a word processor is so you can rearrange things, not so you can have two sections of your document that repeat each other exactly.
Isn't this strictly incorrect in non-equal-temperament scales? Since Eb may be a different pitch from D#.
There are a few resources I point people to on YouTube as an intro:
43 Music Theory Concepts (what order to learn) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeS8txkoUH4
How I’d Learn Music Theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pirdPK5avU
There’s the Reddit r/musictheory FAQ: https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/wiki/index/ First question is, “I'm new to music theory, how do I start learning? What are the best textbooks/websites/apps to use?”
Counterpoint is a great ingredient to progressive rock à la Gentle Giant.
That brings us to the nature of innovation: applying a technique in a novel way or in a market where it was unknown.
Bring your moves to new horizons !
Rant: I imagine reading a novel, in which every paragraph came with an additional author note/explanation of the actual meaning. Clearly leaving room for interpretation and ambiguity is part of the enjoyment of reading or even writing that book.
This is to say, if we are going to make music, we don't necessarily need to constraint it to any particular theory or rules on how it should sound, which chord should come after the previous, etc.
On the other hand, some theory can go a long way in making the music understandable, like sharing a language with the listeners, and to collaborate with other musicians. It is a balancing act.
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I’m a bit curious; why are musicians so much against putting note names on their keyboards? It’s like having a computer keyboard with no letters marked on top.
Looks like it needs Jack rather than Pipewire
Also, slightly off topic, but the YouTube channel[0] linked on the footer has some very interesting 19edo music. Although I was aware of microtonality, I had never checked it out. It sounds unstandard yet amazing
The tl;dw is that piano rolls are intuitive to some degree but are inefficient at presenting information that musicians are interested in.
I link to some other software in this category below. It is nice to have an open source alternative.
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https://mixedinkey.com/captain-plugins/
Looks like it needs Jack rather than Pipewire
