[LAU] MIDI note input by rhythm?

[Johannes Kroll]

Hi,

On Sun, 13 Jan 2013 23:05:36 +0000
Angel de Vicente <angelv at iac.es> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> my first post to the list. I hope MIDI issues are appropriate for
> it. I'm an amateur classical guitar player and I'm starting to use the
> computer as a "partner" to play duets, trios, etc.
> 
> At the moment I just enter a score in either GNU Denemo or Rosegarden,
> then just tweak a little bit the tempo and the velocities to make it
> more musical and then I play along with that. But the whole thing is
> very time consuming, so I'm looking for an alternative way for note
> input. I am hoping for something like the following:
> 
> 1. I just enter the notes, regardless of the duration of each of them.
> 2. Then I go into a second phase, where (using the PC keyboard or a MIDI
>    keyboard) I just worry about the rhythm (the note durations). Every
>    time I press a new key in the keyboard the program would play the
>    next note from the ones entered in step 1. and record its duration. I
>    don't care about how the score will look with these durations. I just
>    want an easy way to create a more musical accompaniment. This way, at
>    this step I only have to worry about the durations of each note.
> 3. The same idea, but for velocities, so I could easily create piano,
>    fortes, crescendos, etc.

You may want to try a tracker. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_%28music_software%29

Many people consider trackers non-intuitive, but it may be just the
right thing for you. What you describe sounds a lot like the workflow I
often use with trackers.

IMHO Renoise is good. Available for Linux, unfortunately closed source
commercial software (demo version available). Trackers traditionally
use samples for sound generation, but many can also output MIDI. There
are also MIDI-only trackers.