Staff notation is the universal method of documenting and communicating musical scores.  It is widely understood and a very convenient way of reading written music.

Drawbacks of Staff

Unfortunately, it has many limitations and drawbacks as a method for creating and writing music.  Some of these include:

• Staff notation deals only with simple fractional note timing and durations.  The fine variations in timing which are essential for expression in a human performance cannot be captured.

• Similarly, the detailed variations in velocity (or note strength) in normal expressive playing cannot be captured.

• The time base is not proportional in staff notation, so a short passage of many notes takes more space than a long passage of a single note.  This can make composing rhythms less intuitive.

• It is very difficult to represent the effects which are needed to make a performance sound polished and realistic, such as pitch bends, slide and modulation.

• Every note must be placed with care to fit with the existing staff symbols, effectively turning what should be a musical activity into an exercise in typography.

• Staff notation deals only with notes, making it tedious in the extreme to create chord rhythms, and prohibitively slow to change them afterwards.

Best of Both Worlds

Songtrix solves this dilemma by using segments and events as the primary method of working with your song.

Events and the segment sheets they are placed on are visually intuitive; their timing, duration and velocity can be precisely recorded, edited and adjusted; and they offer easy manipulation of pitch bend and other expressive effects; chords and rhythms can used easily.

At the same time, Songtrix compiles your events automatically, continuously and accurately into symbols for the staff sheet and Staff Sheet reports.

In this way, you get the benefit of staff notation as an output format with no effort, while you can work in the more visual and expressive environment of work sheets and segment sheets.

Compile Options

You have several options which influence the compiling and layout of staff symbols.  These include sizing, spacing and the selection of which tracks to include as staves, and which clef(s) to use for each track.

On a finer level, you can also influence the generation of the symbols in terms of their resolution (shortest displayed length), note naming, and use of beams.  The key signatures you place throughout the song are automatically used.

If events are too short (less than half of your specified resolution) or out of clef range (depending on your clef and leger settings), they may be ignored and not appear as staff symbols.

However, there are options to avoid this, by notating short notes at the minimum duration, and shifting the octave of notes to bring them back into range.  The results of the compilation are indicated in the status bar.

Editing Staff

Staff View is synchronized with the other views, both in song content the the current focus and range, so you can quickly switch between views, and see the same musical events in either format.

To ensure synchronized navigation and selection with work sheets, all tracks must be shown on the staff sheet in the workspace, in the same order as the work sheets.  However you can include, exclude or reorder any track when printing staff.

The symbols in the staff sheet are compiled automatically, so they cannot be, and do not need to be individually edited.  However, many editing functions are still available in Staff View, based on the current focus and range.

These include operations such as clear, cut, copy, paste, inserting and deleting bars, volume and tempo changes, section markers, key signature changes, transposing and so on.

It is important to be aware when you are editing a staff sheet, that you are really editing the work sheet behind it.  Occasionally, unexpected changes may happen, depending on structure of the work sheet.

For example, a repeat segment may be used to generate several bars of virtual events, based on a single bar of real events.  If you clear the first bar of real events, then all of the following bars will be cleared too.