LMMS • Forums

I have composed some unstructured music, i.e. no tempo, measures or bars and it would be difficult if not impossible to add bars. It looks like lmms does not have any support for unmeasured music, which - I think - is weird, since the computer should not really care and be able to play anything with maximum precision, keeping the time exactly even for unstructured music.

Some people advice to choose a 1000/4 tempo, but that makes lmms practically unusable.

I can see you are a new user, so these are for you:
http://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&p=15232#p15232

You should be able to make unstructured soundscapes in piano-roll, if you change the Quantization :
https://lmms.io/wiki/index.php?title=Pi ... antization
to 1/1600, and ignore all bar, beat and tick-lines
That is as close you can get.

musikbear wrote: You should be able to make unstructured soundscapes in piano-roll, if you change the Quantization :
https://lmms.io/wiki/index.php?title=Pi ... antization
to 1/1600, and ignore all bar, beat and tick-lines

4/4 at tempo 240 would have each bar last a second, if that helps the reasoning. And the minimum quantization is one tick, i.e. 1/192, which would be slightly less than 5 milliseconds.

Thanks the same, but it's not very usable. Although my mysic is unmeasured, it is not random. I have precise relative note lengths. I think I am just going to use a text to MIDI translator like midge, because the lmms piano-roll interface is not suitable for unmeasured music.

BTW it would be nice if lmms developers would think about supporting unmeasured music better in lmms... It would not be a very complicated feature to implement. It's actually much simpler than the current piano roll.

ninuzzo wrote:Thanks the same, but it's not very usable. Although my mysic is unmeasured, it is not random. I have precise relative note lengths.

I have no idea where you found any implication of randomness in this discussion.

ninuzzo wrote: BTW it would be nice if lmms developers would think about supporting unmeasured music better in lmms... It would not be a very complicated feature to implement. It's actually much simpler than the current piano roll.

It would be nice if users asking for new features had something concrete for developers to think about. So, please tell us some more... what exactly is missing?

And as for what is simpler... some "simple" things can be pretty complicated due to past choices and strategies.

ninuzzo wrote:BTW it would be nice if lmms developers would think about supporting unmeasured music better in lmms... It would not be a very complicated feature to implement. It's actually much simpler than the current piano roll.

I'm no LMMS developer or expert but to me it sounds like a very obscure and specialised requirement...but perhaps that's because I don't understand what "unmeasured music" means to you and what actual facilities you're asking for.

Initially you said you have no tempo and to me that implies that every note can have a specific duration unrelated to any other note...but later you seem to be saying that your note lengths are all related. So what exactly are you looking for ?

Steve

softrabbit wrote: And the minimum quantization is one tick, i.e. 1/192, which would be slightly less than 5 milliseconds.

Why exactly is this number the minimum? Is there a technical reason, or is it somehow related to music theory?

caLRo wrote:

softrabbit wrote: And the minimum quantization is one tick, i.e. 1/192, which would be slightly less than 5 milliseconds.

Why exactly is this number the minimum? Is there a technical reason, or is it somehow related to music theory?

It's slightly related to music in the sense that it's the inverse of a multiple of 4 (quarter note = 1/4, sixteenth note = 1/16, keep multiplying by 1/4 and you get 1/192). I've never seen music that goes beyond a 64th note, and even 32nd notes are fairly uncommon. I think 1/192 is a logical quantization, because while it's a small increment, it's a "musical fraction" (in the sense that most rhythms are based on 1/4 or 1/3 time, and 1/192 can be used in both). Also, there's no reason to go any smaller; 1/192 is basically fine tuning the exact length note length you want.

To OP:

I would just keep it in 4/4 and keep track of your note lengths/beats. I wouldn't recommend automating the time signature (I had a piece that switched between 4/4 and 3/4 and it was a huge pain). This method might not work if you switch between triple and duple time though.

By unmeasured music I simply mean each note has a definite duration, but you do not have vertical bars on the staff. There are many examples of unmeasured music on the web. Of course duration is relative, so you can speed up or slow down the whole piece, so you actually have a "tempo" in BMP. What you do not have is a time signature like 3/4, 4/4 etc, because there are no bars. You may have "loops" but they are not constrainted between bars.

A lot of composers first write their music unmeasured and only afterwards they worry about fitting it in a time signature and bars, which often requires compromising and changing it. This is for the sake of keeping time and ease execution by other people, but it is not needed by the composer who knows his music so well and he will be able to play it good even if left unmeasured. BTW it is more difficult to compose music in the tight constraints of a time signature... you do not even know until the piece is written.

Even if one will structure his music, I think it would be useful for a composer to be able to try out how it sound like, so LMMS should support no time signature in the piano roll, which means no vertical bars. In this mode it should still be easy and quick to add notes of a definite length.

I can't see your problem. LMMS does very little with the bars other than draw lines on the piano roll. If you set it up with a time sig of 1/4 (or 1/1 or 1/16) you can put in whatever notes you want provided you're using the standard written notes crotchet/quarter, quaver/eighth , triplet etc. The only limitation is your total phrase length must be a multiple of quarter notes, or whole notes or sixteenths, whatever you've chosen as the denominator.

It would only become a problem if you were trying to do something really interesting like use notes which are 1/13th of a beat or complex polyrhythms when you need 7 notes played in the same time as 5 notes on another track. LMMS can't cope with that but then neither can standard music notation without a lot of fiddling.

Steve