Force patterns to follow chord changes

[bvdp]

Looking for some suggestions on this. Not sure if it's a MMA problem or just a fact of life ...

Assume we have a track for a sustained string. I usually have something like this:

     Articulate 100
     Unify On
     Sequence 1 1 90 * 4

which gives us 4 quarter note notes. If you have only one chord for the bar, the 100% articulation and Unify pack all this into one long chord. Indeed, if you have the same chord for many bars, it gets packed into as many bars as you have.

One problem with this is that you also get a constant volume across the sustain. Two ways to fix that:

     - make the last note a little shorter than a full beat. This will cause a new chord at the start of each bar
       (and, depending on the voice) a noticeable hit.

               sequence 1 4 90; 2 4 90; 3 4 90; 4 4-64 90;

     - Use the MidiCresc facilities builtin to mma. That creates other problems, but it does let you
       vary volume on a sustained note over many bars.

Now, the next problem: What happens with chord changes?

Our simple sequence of {1 1 90 * 4} will work ... so long as our chord changes are on the beat (ie, at 1, 2, 3 or 4). But, if the chord change is at 1.5 ... the chord sustains until beat 2. Why? MMA doesn't really care much about turning things off. It goes though a sequence and sets up a Start/end note event for each part of the sequence according to the chord at that point of the sequence. So, in the case of the chord change at 1.5, the chord is looked at for beats 1, 2, 3 ... and for our 1.5 change, the change is delayed until 2.

Now, I have to to you that for most songs this works just fine. But, when you have a slow piece with goofy chord changes ... you can generate some very interesting dissonances.

At this point, I just look at the chord changes in a song and the effected tracks and write a Riff to "fix" the problem.

I suppose that one solution might be to force MMA to look at the next chord and make adjustments (this is very hard, esp. when we're at the end of a bar!). Remember, when processing MMA doesn't look at chord changes ... it looks at patterns and finds the chord associated with that beat in the song.


If anyone has a suggestion as to how we might look at the problem with more smarts, I'd appreciate it.