Is there a trick to entering quarter note triplets in the editable notation window?

Thanks,

Paul

Yes. But first, is your concern how they look, or how they sound?

Hi Matt, thanks. More how they look for easier reading, 3 quarter notes with a triplet bar over them.

Thanks. OK.

Just checking: I'm assuming a quarter note triplet to mean three quarter notes played over two beats.

In a typical 4/4 song, you can have either a straight-8ths feel style, or a swing style. Changing to swing style in the notation will get you closer, but you can adjust this manually whichever way you go:

If you have a straight-8ths feel, when you open the Editable Notation Mode, you see a measure in which time is divided into 16 vertical broken lines. Click on the Opt. icon (two to the left of the small print icon, lower left of all the stuff at the top of the screen).

In the far upper left of the dialog box, click the checkbox for Triplet Resolution Swing. Then click OK.

Now you see 12 vertical broken lines. Click to put a note on lines 1, 3 and 5.

The spacing will look a little odd, but if you go into Leadsheet Mode it looks better. That's the little green icon between Opt. and Print.

And, here's another trick:

The checkbox above can affect the whole song, but you can change the time resolution of each beat separately. Right-click above your music on the thin line directly under those icons (the row with the little white mark that shows where you are). You will see a Beat Resolution box. Change the 4 to a 3. Do this for the second beat as well. Then enter the notes on every other line as before.

Thanks so much, Matt! That's exactly what I needed.

Paul

I have a related problem... I'm trying to enter a triplet of three quarter notes *after* a quarter-note rest. And that doesn't seem possible. Am I missing something?

The bar is an quarter-note rest, the quarter-note triplet, and two eighth notes. It seems the best I can do is three eighth notes instead of a triplet, both for playing and printing.

That should be possible using the techniques above. I’ll try it later when I get to my PC.

I think you can only have triplets over the first two quarter note o the last two. Not the middle two.

You can have a rest as the first note of the triplet. Just follow Matt's instructions

I have to admit I gave it a good try earlier today, but was not successful. I hope someone can find a solution for you. I couldn't get a triplet to span across the two middle beats (2 and 3).

Yeh, it's a problem that been around for ever. But, to be honest, I don't think I have never seen a song where it was needed.

Call it a feature...

After testing, I think Dave & VideoTrack are right. This cannot be done to look right.

It sounds OK, but looks wrong. Even if I adjust the note start and duration manually, it still looks wrong.

I'm guessing this pattern might occur somewhere in Ravel's writing?

No, it doesn't even sound right. I end up with three very distinct on-the-beat eighth notes which sounds very stilted and I can't seem to force a swing feel onto them.

<sigh>

Mine sounded acceptable after I did some editing.

In Editable Notation Mode, right-click on the note, select Edit Note and it brings up a dialog box where you can adjust things like volume, channel, pitch, duration and time. Time means starting time for the note, expressed in measure number, beat number, and tick number.

Set the start time of the first note in the triplet to bar x, beat 2, tick 0.
The second note would be x, 2, 80.
The third note would be x, 3, 40.

Depending on how you enter the notes and whether or not you have non-zero entries in Edit, Slide Tracks, your tick numbers may not be exactly 0,80 and 40. They might instead look like 7, 87, 47. But you see the pattern, because 120 = a full quarter note (unless you've changed the default). So 0 is the beginning, 80 is 2/3 of the way through that beat, and 40 is 1/3 the way through the next beat. Triplets.

Back to the display readout status not correctly showing a triplet across beats 2 & 3, I'm guessing that's because there are two cells that make up the one measure (beats 1,2 and beats 3,4) and the individual cells don't 'talk' to each other. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing sort of approach.

Just a hunch, nothing more.

That actually makes good sense, given the result here.

They do talk to each other regarding not lengths. A note can extend from beat two to beat 3, even to half of it.

The triplet thing, I am sure, has been there since day one. I posted a forum entry on it more than 10 years ago. I am sure the answer from PGM was essentially "that's just the way it works"

Good point Dave, yes, notes and rests certainly cross those boundaries but the notation display appears visually incorrect when triplets are involved. The actual performance can sound correct though. "That's just the way it works" Yep.

I think we were talking about this prior to 2000, now that I think more about it.

I still maintain a quarter note triplet starting on beat two can sound OK, even if it doesn't look OK.

Yes, this was all part of my "Clean up the notation and print functions" thread from 3 or so years ago. The problem was and still is very few Biab users care about notation. I think the reason is few actually read music but regardless, after several months of bumping that thread and asking (begging) for more responses I had 6 or 7 people who gave it a +1. 7 people are not enough to get PG to do anything.

Bob

Thanks. Yeah, I had fiddled with step editing but hadn't gotten it the way I wanted it to sound. Close enough though, and I can just tell my bandmates not to play it the way it's written, so that's not a huge problem.

I've actually been using BIAB for over twenty years now, on and off, and have just come back to it, partly because of not being able to play with others for the duration. I'm surprised how many things were awkward back then are still awkward now. The triplets thing, for one. The fact that it's *really* hard to step edit notes - maybe this is different on Windows, but on the mac I can only edit every other note. It should be possible to select notes and edit/delete them from the notation window other than selecting Rest and pasting it over existing notes or having to resort to step editing...

Anyway... didn't want to turn this into a rant, thanks so much for the help.

I think your points are valid. Although there have been some phenomenal improvements to BIAB in those 20 years (closer to 30 for me), some things are virtually unchanged. MIDI and notation are among them.

Your perspective, returning to BIAB after a long absence, is very valuable. You should make some Wishlist posts as things occur to you.

Do check the Mac forum about your specific editing quirk. It doesn’t work that way in Windows. If it’s a bug in the Mac version, let us know so we can report it.

"(closer to 30 for me)" Ha! Version 3.0 is the first version I remember using, but I couldn't tell you when that came out. I'll check out the Mac forum. I just did a crossgrade to the latest Mac BIAB build after giving up on Windows some years ago.

You can delete notes by holding delete while clicking on the note. An easy and quick way to enter notation is to use the left and right cursor keys in editable notation mode to step back and forth and press the N key to enter a note, then up/down cursor to set the pitch. This is the same in the current versions for Windows and Mac.