Synthesia losing its place sometimes

Trouble with Synthesia, your keyboard, or adapter? Think you found a bug?
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If your keyboard has USB or MIDI ports, there is a tremendously high chance (>99%) it will work with Synthesia. See what you'll need on the keyboards page.
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reachdabeach
Posts: 20

Post by reachdabeach »

Windows 10 - Synthesia 10.6.5425

Trying to learn the bass line to The Thrill Is Gone (attached). Lead guitars silenced, other instruments in background and one hand bass. Sheet music, no falling notes. Playing melody in wait for me mode. It often does not have anything highlighted when it gets to the end of a "line"; you just have to know when to play the first note on the next line. Sometimes the place indicator is one note behind. It will even show the note there, which is really annoying when you play the note shown there and it still shows it on top in red. You have to play the next note for it to advance. My timing is awful and this song is new to me as far as playing goes, so I screwed up a *lot*. The workaround is to practice and not screw up, but I think you might want to look at it... :)
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TheThrillIsGone.mid
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Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

That song looks like it was recorded from a live performance with little to no quantization. If you look at the falling note view (zooming in vertically if necessary with PgUp/PgDown), you can see that some notes have a tendency to begin just before (or a little after) the measure line. Today the sheet music display is rather rigid about needing perfectly quantized notes whose onsets are lined up exactly with the beat they're supposed to fall on.

If you were to run that song through the quantizer in some MIDI editor, I suspect it would iron all those problems out.
reachdabeach
Posts: 20

Post by reachdabeach »

Actually, I wonder if a DAW did that. A couple I have worked in have "humanize" as an option that is often performed just after quantizing so that all notes on all channels don't line up exactly.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

I'd never heard of a "humanize" option. That's horrifying (for Synthesia's purposes). :lol:
reachdabeach
Posts: 20

Post by reachdabeach »

Some pads have really slow attack profiles and need to start early. You won't like tip #1 in this article much:
https://flypaper.soundfly.com/produce/h ... tion-tips/

If you Google "humanize MIDI", you will see it isn't rare.

Note that the author specifically recommends leaving the synth track(s) raw. That's where the instruments with the weird ADSR envelopes will be, though some strings have very slow attack profiles also and you will tend to subconsciously account for it while playing. The recommended way to handle those is to quantize but add a negative delay to the instrument track it drives.

But the upside is that you will rarely if ever see this in piano music; certainly not from anything generated directly from sheet music, like importing a PDF into MuseScore or creating the score from scratch in an editor like that.
reachdabeach
Posts: 20

Post by reachdabeach »

Oh, and also check out some "LoFi Hip Hop":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZGi1SCj1fU

It's kind of an ambient jazz fusion with some randomness.

Not something you are likely to try to play on piano. Believe it or not, much of that is done with MIDI, but the notes are triggering audio samples and it would sound really bad on a GM softsynth.
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