Contents
- Index
Rehearsal Review
M+O learns from experience, allowing the program to hear you more accurately and follow you better.
M+O performs two kinds of learning, discussed below, both of which work best when you first verify the audio alignment produced by the program. Some users may find that M+O performs well for them without any kind of training. If you feel this way there is no need to bother with this aspect of the program. But to get the very best out of M+O, it is necessary to check the alignments, and correct them if necessary, so that the program will improve over time. We expect that some people will find this aspect unnecessary at first, but will come to appreciate it as they get to know M+O better. The Rehearsal Review Tutorial walks you through the process of correcting a specific audio example. We strongly recommend working through this tutorial.
M+O's view of the correct alignment is shown by the vertical lines that mark the positions of the note onsets in the Spectrogram View, as well as the clicks or plucks it plays on top of the audio when "Note Markers" is set to "On" in the Mixer Panel. Occasionally M+O makes mistakes, however, and Rehearsal Review is your chance to correct these.
It is usually easiest to identify such errors by listening to the audio with the "Note Markers" set to "On." Choose "Plucks" in the Audio Settings form to hear pitched plucks on top of your audio, or "Clicks" to hear a simple click. The advantage of the pitched pluck is that you will immediately notice if the pitch of the pluck is different from the pitch of your solo note, thus identifying an error. Though, clicks are often easier to work with during fast passages. If you identify an error use the Move Mark Forward and Move Mark Backward buttons to adjust its position. When your mark is close to the correct location it is often as easy to see the note onset in the spectrogram as it is to hear it with the clicks or plucks. Many examples will have few, or no, such errors.
The buttons on the Navigate Panel are the most intuitive way to play and navigate through a rehearsal. However, it is more efficient to use the keyboard equivalents described in the Navigate Panel documentation.
How accurate does the alignment need to be? Rehearsal review is concerned with fixing alignment errors, rather than precise fine tuning. If the markers are within a couple of frames of the ideal location, this is fine for most purposes.
When correcting fast passages it is often easier to first check the notes lying on beats, or perhaps every other beat. You can change the collection of note markers that are displayed and heard with the Set Increment panel. M+O will mark only the notes that are multiples of the chosen increment.
Occasionally M+O will make alignment errors in "bursts," with numerous errors clustered together. Fixing each individual error can be tedious in such a case. When this happens it is usually best to fix the first error you see and then to Realign the audio. M+O will recompute the alignment without changing any notes you have marked. This often helps the program to correctly identify unmarked notes.
Since all subsequent Realignments leave your hand-marked corrections unchanged, it is important that your "corrections" are, in fact, correct. If you see that you have made an error, you can undo the mark with the Unmark Note button on the bottom row of the Navigate Panel. This option tells M+O that you no longer think you know where the note belongs, so the program chooses the location it thinks best next time you run Realign.
The Set Increment and Realign options often work very well together. For instance, it can be effective to first correct the audio at the "beat" or "measure" level, using the Set Increment option, and then to Realign using the corrected notes as a guide.
Occasionally in a cadenza or other free musical passage, M+O will misalign the audio because the actual tempo being played is far different from the tempo specified in the Set Tempo panel. In such a case, the easiest thing to do is to change the tempo in Set Tempo. This often will fix the alignment problem (after Realigning) with no further intervention on your part. Don't forget to also tell M+O, using Set Tempo, where the tempo is restored with a future tempo setting.
When you are done with Rehearsal Review you must Save any corrections you have made. The Save option will give you several choices concerning how M+O should interpret your corrections.