Hi folks,
Phew, this one took a bit of work to get going .. ::) I think I've tamed it, but you never know. :P
It's a development from Jolly Roger's Midi$ composer 2004. I used that as a basis, because Roger had coded a midi system, and I needed midi output of the music, played on a Harmonica.
It was difficult to follow the complex code Roger used to generate the music - more comments would have been nice. ;D I've had to build around it as best I could. :)
I've made extensive changes to accomodate the scale ranges for each type of harmonica - Chromatic 16, 14,and 12 hole instruments - Diatonic 10 hole - and Tremolo 24 hole.
The Tablature I've used is a composite of the many methods discussed on the Web. It seems to be working well. :)
You can enter any music for a chosen harmonica, set the tempo, play the music with any chosen instrument, and save the tablature for re-loading later.
There is a fairly full explanation of how to use the program under Help - Using.
Printing the music was not going to be practical in any decent form - so I've output a simple text file 'out.txt' when you save, which can easily be loaded into a word processor, formatted nicely, and printed from there.
This is quite a substantial tool, and I'm finding it useful for my practice on several harmonicas.
I've included a couple of pieces of music for you to try.
Best wishes, :)
Graham
WHAT??!!
Two IWBasic programs in 2 days.!!!!
The Gods of Creative are going to get you! ;D ;D ;D ;D
He! He! .. I needed the PLAYMIDI command - That's what did it .. ;D
It doesn't look much, but there's a lot of Windows stuff encapsulated in that one command.
Graham :)
I forgot to include an example of a saved file formatted for printing. Copy attached.
This one is for the 'When I Fall in Love' song, formatted in Word and saved as an Rtf document.
The formatting for the printer could be improved with a few more tabs, but I left some space on the right to explain the symbols used for note duration.
You will notice they are not a full musical set - dotted notes are not indicated. But the idea is only to give the player a rough idea of how long to play each note. For a harmonica, the player will impart the feel he likes to the song anyway.
All the best, :)
Graham :)
Really nice Graham!
I'm not much of a player, but truly enjoy the harmonica, so this could come in very handy..
...just wish could get this Win 8 'puter to play midi files. :'(
Hi Doc,
Hope you are well .. :)
Looks like you've discovered another Microsoft baddie - they've removed 'midimapper' from their Win8 system. Lots of musical folk are hopping mad about it.
It's a shame, since it means you'd be missing an important bit of the program. :(
There's a lot of discussion on the Net, so hopefully you'll find a workaround.
Best wishes, :)
Graham
Hi folks,
I've posted an updated version of the program above .. :)
It now includes an option for a Baritone Tremolo harmonica - the notes for this instrument are an octave lower than a normal Tremolo instrument.
I've included a test piece of music so you can hear how it sounds. Make sure you select the Baritone instrument option before you play it.
I ought to say, that if you look at the code, expecting it to be all neat and efficient, you may be disappointed. It's a mix of blocks of my coding, with chunks of Jolly Roger's all mixed together.
I'm just pleased I got it working at all really .. ::)
All the best, :)
Graham