5.2. Notation Editing

Those little piano-roll bars are awfully cute, and they let even nonmusicians see how long and how high the notes are. For musicians , though, skinny horizontal bars are alien life forms that bear little resemblance to standard musical notation.

So what did Apple do? In GarageBand 2, it added standard musical notation.

To see your software-instrument region displayed as traditional notes, click the little musical-note icon in the lower-left corner of the window. Now your fleet of horizontal bars turns into sheet music, with notes, stems , rests, and all of the other goodies described in Appendix A.

Now, the first time they see this new feature, most people who can read music usually have an immediate emotional spike-and-crash cycle. First there's the"Holy cow ”this is sheet music ! I'm a music publisher, baby!" moment.

Which is shortly thereafter followed by the moment best characterized as, "Wait a second ”a bunch of the left-hand notes are in the right-hand staff. And the rhythms are all off. That's not what I played ! And I can't put in any dynamics, lyrics, articulations, fingerings, slurs, crescendos, or anything else but raw notes!? And I can't even print this sucker? What a rip!"

In other words, the first step in mastering notation view is mastering your own expectations. The notation view is very limited. It's intended exclusively for editing in a form that's more recognizable than piano-roll notation. It's not for printing, dressing up, playing from, or taking seriously as sheet music.

Figure 5-2. The new notation view is usually way off, rhythmically. GarageBand rounds off every note to the nearest "Align" value (as determined by the Grid pop-up menu shown in Figure 5-1). But if you read music, notation view makes it much easier to grasp what's going on musically ”and to find and delete flubbed notes.

If you're cool with that, then here's the scoop on editing in notation view:

• You can make the measures wider or narrower by dragging the size slider shown in Figure 5-2.

• You can make the notes larger (and the editing window taller) by dragging the brushed-metal separator bar ”the top edge of the Track Editor ”upward.

• You can make GarageBand re-interpret the rhythms using the Grid Ruler pop-up menu identified in Figure 5-1. For example, if you switch it from 1/4 Notes to 1/8 Notes, you'll see smaller note values displayed in the sheet music.

• Most of the editing techniques described in the following section ”adding and deleting notes, adjusting their pitch and duration, and so on ”work just as they do in piano-roll view. It helps that when you click a notehead, it sprouts a green horizontal duration bar, which works just like one of the bars in piano-roll view.

• Even so, there are a few notation-only keystrokes that can make this kind of editing go a lot faster. For example, once you've highlighted a note (or a bunch of notes), you can press the right or left arrow keys to slide them left or right on the rhythmic grid. Add Shift to make them jump one measure left or right.

  Similarly, the up and down arrows make selected notes move up or down by a half-step ”and adding Shift makes them jump up or down by an octave (that is, from C to shining C).