New subject: Converting Midi file data to play on guitar

11 Mar 2009

I'd be interested in taking a look at your code, It should help get my brain
working. I'd also be interested in feedback from you if your interested to
critique my approach.

Nathanael

...
 About ten years ago (on Atari/MiNT) I wrote a C program
similar to this, but
...
 for baroque lute tabulature... I wanted it to help me
transform any midifile
...
 I was interested in, be it classical orchestral or
chamber works, piano works
...
 or pieces for classical guitar, in a semi-automatic
way, to Wayne Cripp's
lutetab code, and it worked out surprisingly good, given that I was a
lousy DIY hacker ;) (I don't really code anymore).

I didn't care much about 2) and 3) but for 1) I came up with an algorithm like
...
 this:
 - determine the string on which the pitch can be played at the lowest fret
  possible
 - check if this string is used already, and if yes move this note to the next
...
   (lower) string

For notes lower than the instrument range (13 course lute goes down to A, a 5th
...
 lower than guitar) I chose to just place a comment in
the tab output, so that I
...
 would be able to decide afterwards what to do with that
note (transpose up an
...
 octave, skip it, whatever).

Since it's been a long time now I can't remember how I dealt with files
containing more than one track, but I somehow managed to merge them into a
single tabulature, I have for example produced nice tabulatures of the
accompaniment of the first three movements of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater.
For these of course I had to prepare the midifiles, remove the voice tracks
and transpose to a key suitable to the lute.

Other problems I've encountered and I'm not sure if or how I solved them:
 - the bar/beat counting got screwed up sometimes, especially with grace notes
...
  - of course, I had to remove double notes when boiling
down ensemble works
 - there are different lute tunings, I only dealt with standard baroque
  d-minor tuning
 - on the lute, the diatonic basses (lower than the 6th course) are tuned to
...
   the key of the piece

The thing is based on the ancient midifile(3) lib by Tim Thompson et al. which
...
 is a little gem IMHO. The library parses the midifile,
all you have to do is
...
 to write a few callback functions for the events
you're interested in. Some
example code is in the archive, and it took me just a few days to come up with
...
 something useful.

I never seriously thought about releasing it, even after I compared it's
output's quality to what Django can do (an impressive M$ tabulature editor,
mainly for historic fretted instruments, the demo from
http://musickshandmade.com/lute/pages/django runs quite well in wine) and
found that I was doing pretty well. :)

I'm sure there are stupid things in there and it's not at all in a
releasable
...
 state, but if you are interested I'll share the
code...

Re: [LAU] Converting Midi file data to play on guitar