Logic Pro 9 Score editor question

[Antiphones]

I've been using Logic for years and have printed many scores from it for both jazz and classical musicians, so I know it quite well.

One thing that I often have to spend huge amounts of time on is fixing Logic's tendency to display close voicings in an unreadable way. I'm wondering if there is a solution I don't know about here.

I'll explain what I mean. Say I take a common jazz chord like D Major 7 #11 and I want to voice the #11 next to the five (again a common occurrence in jazz) ie D, F#, G#, A, C# Score will display both G# and the A as one note on the staff with a # and natural sign next to it.

I find that most musicians, both classical and Jazz, will make a mistake with this and end up missing out one of the notes or play the wrong notes. Also it means you cannot select the notes individually in the score by clicking on and dragging them. And, this behaviour is not consistent, if I transpose this chord to to D#, D# or C all the notes are displayed, up to E and again they are not.

Why Logic should do this I can't imagine. It is possible to force Logic to display close voicings properly by selecting notes (sometimes using piano roll to do so) and enharmonically shifting them. I spend many hours on larger scores correcting all these by finding them all and enharmonically shifting them one at a time.

Is there a way to turn off this "feature" of not displaying all the notes in close voicings?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Eli]

Maybe Doug can chime in here with another solution, but I think you've answered your own question. Enharmonically shifting those problematic notes in the score editor is the best solution I can think of. Either that, or using a key signature that will force the accidentals to appear enharmonically. But that key signature may not be suitable for the overall piece of music.

 

[Doug Zangar]

OK, sucker for score editor posts here.....

Score will display both G# and the A as one note on the staff with a # and natural sign next to it.

You must mean the G# is displayed as Ab, thus the problem.

No default panacea that I'm aware of. You might find Attributes>Accidentals> Flats to Sharps and Sharps to Flats a faster approach (assign to key commands). You could stay in the score editor and swipe the chord, unless you need both sharps and flats in the chord. (C7b9#11, for example). In which case selecting a few notes still could work. It's possible you could edit multiple chords this way.

 

[Antiphones]

Thanks for your replies. Its as I feared, I just have to spend hours enharmonically shifting! I might try what you suggest about shifting all notes enharmonically up or down and see if that helps.

I wonder why Logic does this thing about combining two notes into one... is that good for something? I can't think what.

Anyway thanks for your ideas.

 

[Doug Zangar]

Welcome for my advice. As always take it for what it's worth - free.......

No idea about the logic behind Logic. I think it's behaved like this since Notator, so it must be an important feature

 

[Colin Shapiro]

For the record, if you have a key signature of C major, then your chord displays as you first described (ie flat/natural A).

However, if you have a key sig of D major, it corrects to G# + A (which is what you want).

I'd suggest you log a feature request at Apple's Logic support page. Hopefully they're busy brewing up Logic 10 so perhaps they may re-think this rather unfortunate default behaviour.

 

[Antiphones]

For the record, if you have a key signature of C major, then your chord displays as you first described (ie flat/natural A).

However, if you have a key sig of D major, it corrects to G# + A (which is what you want).

As I suspect you've gathered, using a key signature other than C is not really applicable to a lot of the music write. Of course that's true of a lot of jazz these days and obviously has been for a lot of classical composition for the past 100 years.

Yes I have told apple about it... whether or not they really read the feature requests is another thing... I suspect a computer 'reads' them and looks for key words or something... who knows...

 

[Colin Shapiro]

Understood.
I was simply pointing out that a different key sig affects Logic's "logic".

Ideally there would be a tab in Song Settings for each specific Project where you could define unique defaults or preferences for accidentals.

For now, it's lots of enharmonic shifting.....

 

[Antiphones]

Understood.
Ideally there would be a tab in Song Settings for each specific Project where you could define unique defaults or preferences for accidentals.

Now that would be good Along with the ability to assign staff split points individually for notes. At the moment I have to cut up regions every time I want to do this.

 

[Doug Zangar]

Along with the ability to assign staff split points individually for notes.

Have you tried the polyphonic staff styles? You can then assign MIDI channels to notes. On a two voice staff, typically notes on MIDI channel one are in the treble clef, MIDI channel two is in the bass clef. Also look at the voice separation tool.

 

[Antiphones]

Have you tried the polyphonic staff styles? You can then assign MIDI channels to notes. On a two voice staff, typically notes on MIDI channel one are in the treble clef, MIDI channel two is in the bass clef. Also look at the voice separation tool.

Thanks yeh I have tried those. The midi channel thing doesn't work for me because what I'm looking for are exceptions that I can make when necessary. So I'm happy with a middle C split point most of the time. But there are occasions where it really is necessary to indicate left and right hand keyboard motion over the split point. This could be done with midi channels but would still require cutting the regions to reassign midi channels for exceptions. I can do the same just by cutting regions and changing the split point for the bars necessary.

I'll check out the voice separation tool, I don't think I realised there was one! Maybe that will help. Thanks!