Once the Altos are comfortable and confident, you could take the Alto track out completely and see how they do, or add the others back in. If you’re working on the Alto part, for example, you could adjust the faders so that the students hear the Alto track the most, piano accompaniment a little less, and the STB parts even less or not at all. The volume faders will be the section that you will adjust the most, and it will depend on what you’re doing throughout rehearsal. If it does not, there is a place in the Settings to select so that the app will remember the pan positions. Sweet Midi will remember your pan settings for each song. It’s a very good idea to “spread” the sound in this way, rather than having all the sounds stacked on top of each other. It helps the students hear their part more clearly. Panning the parts is important for clarity. You will want to set your pan positions based on how you have your choir sections organized in the room. The Basses and Tenors were normally located in the center of the choir. I panned the Tenor part ½ to the left and the Bass part ½ to the right to enhance their clarity as well. In this way, each section heard their part clearly, not to confuse it with the other. Since I connected the Left and Right external speakers to the L/R speaker outputs on the back of the piano, the sound came out balanced that way. I panned the Soprano track hard left and the Alto track hard right because that’s where they were in the rehearsal room. The piano accompaniment track was kept in the Center pan position so that everyone heard it equally. The controls that I used the most were pan, volume, the locator scroll bar, and tempo. Normally then, track 1 was the piano accompaniment, track 2 was Soprano, track 3 Alto, etc. I always put the piano accompaniment on track 1, followed by the vocal parts. At the very top of the screen is another Play/Pause button, another locator scroll bar, and a volume scroll bar. At the very bottom of the screen are Help and Settings buttons that are very helpful as you are learning to use the app. Below that is a horizontal scroll bar that is used to quickly jump to a specific measure (bar). Under the white Channel label, you have a numeric Bar indicator, Play/Pause button, Time Signature, Transpose, and BPM (tempo). Looking vertically down each track you see that each has controls for Pan (Left and Right stereo field), Reverb and Chorus (I never used them), Volume, Solo, Mute, and Instrument. ![]() I don’t think I ever used more than 12 tracks. One of the fantastic benefits of using midi in rehearsal is the ability to be mobile and not stuck behind the piano all the time.Īs you can see, there are 12 tracks on the screen, but more are available if you scroll to the right using the black “Slide” horizontal bar. Our Music Boosters purchased a large electric adjustable desk to put everything on, so I could stand or sit in rehearsal. The iPad sat on the extended music rack of the piano, right within arms’ reach. The piano had on-board speakers which were very handy for some things, but mostly I used a couple of small powered speakers for output to the students. To use the midi file in rehearsal, I first connected the iPad to my rehearsal digital piano via a Lightning adaptor and USB cable (such as connects a computer to a printer). The focus of this blog will be the basic functions and use of Sweet Midi as the midi file playback device. I exported the music sequence from Metro as a midi file (Song Title.mid) into my Dropbox account and then imported it into the Sweet Midi app on my iPad. Several recording and playback generations later, I concluded my teaching career using a software midi sequencer called Metro (still available at ) to produce the midi files, and Sweet Midi ( ) on the iPad to play back in the classroom. It had eight tracks that you could record into and play back with digital controls. In the old days, I recorded the music directly into the wonderful Ensoniq ESQ-1. It should be every music teacher’s goal to promote the art of piano playing and accompanying. I do regret not pushing them more and using them more effectively. Of course, if I had a student who could handle it, I gave them the opportunity, but they were few and far between. So I would sequence the accompaniment part and vocal parts into midi files and use them to accompany the choir and play their parts during rehearsals. By the time I decided to be a music teacher and took it back up again, the old brain neurons just didn’t connect like they should. As I’ve admitted elsewhere, midi was a lifesaver to me during my teaching career because I unfortunately quit taking piano lessons when I was a kid.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |