Composing Activities - Melody

Tempo, Volume and Timbre

Now that you have created a few tunes, it's time to decide what can be done to enhance them. A good question to ask is "How can I change the music without changing the music?". Invariably, this will be met by puzzled frowns. Hopefully, you may have replies which suggest changing the speed of the music (Tempo), the loudness (Volume) and the sounds being used (Timbre).

The following notes will explain how to change these features with Notate.

Tempo can be controlled using the Playback Controls in the toolbar, which also contains buttons for fast forward and rewind, play, stop and record. To make the music play faster, click the arrow to the right of the metronome; a lower number makes the music play slower. The value shown refers to how many beats (the note value in the box to the left of the number) are played every minute. A little maths work could be carried out here for pupils to work out how many beats per second are played if the Tempo is set to 120? Note that the record button can be used with an on screen keyboard as well as a MIDI equipped keyboard is attached to the computer.

To change Volume throughout the music use the volume slider to make the music sound louder or quieter. THe slider can be moved even whilst the music is playing so you should try to make your music slightly louder if the notes move up and quieter if the notes move down!

To change the instrument (sound or Timbre) assigned to the stave, Select Instruments... from the Song menu. This Instruments dialogue box displays all of the sounds assigned to each stave (Notate calls each staves a track) in the music. To change the sound, click on the pull-down menu next to the Track number (1 in this case). Now you can select one of the 127 sounds in the pull-down menu.

The quality of the sounds depends on the quality of the sound card inside your computer, or the device set to play the sounds. Most MIDI keyboards have a very good sound quality but you will need appropriate cables to connect your keyboard to your computer. If you are going to use a MIDI keyboard or some other MIDI device to play back your music, you should set it up by selecting MIDI setup... from the Song menu.

Once you have set up the MIDI keyboard and connected it, you must select MIDI output from the Song menu to hear the sounds from the keyboard.