If you read my intro post, you'll know that I haven't played an instrument for over four decades, when I used to play in high school bands and such. Now I've been relearning music and teaching myself MIDI keyboard, and all this fancy new music creation software that didn't exist four decades ago. So I'm working on a cover of Pink Floyd's "Set the controls for the heart of the sun".
My current problem is timing.
From web searches for scores and tabs and such, the ones I have found have the BPM set to anything from 110 to 126. I have tried some of the "tap to establish the BPM" things while listening to the various versions Pink Floyd made, and yep, they play somewhere between 110 and 126, sometimes during the same performance. Either that or these tap to BPM things are a bit variable, or more likely I am. So I went with 120 BPM at first.
While they all agree it's in 4/4 time, one of the guitar tabs has bars with 4 quarter notes AND an eight note. Sometimes.
If I recall correctly Pink Floyd is a bunch of architecture students, not trained musicians. I remember one of them saying that before Dark Side Of Moon they didn't even think they could sing, which explains the mumbled lyrics in Set the controls. They are great at jamming and tightly playing with each other, but maybe not so much at sticking precisely to one BPM in the early days. I suspect the whole "4/4 time maybe, 110 to 126 BPM perhaps" thing might be coz they didn't bother to write it down, and everyone else is having the same trouble as me figuring it out.
As a computer programmer for the last four decades I have trained myself to use my typing keyboard at speed and mostly accurate, coz I can always just go back and fix the typoes. Same goes for mouse clicks. Now I have to use my music keyboard at a set speed. I suspect muscle memory is getting in the way.
I figured out the main bass riff of this song by ear, and was only out by one note. Though there are different numbers of beats in the phrases of the verses.
One of my other posts was about the singing, since my singing voice is very rusty, so I got the computer to do the singing. Festival's singing mode was faster than the 120 BPM I told it to use once I had imported it into MuSE. Odd Voices at least agreed with MusE. Next step was to match my keyboard playing with the singing. Nope, I'm playing too fast. lol
I did try playing along with one of their performances, but I need way more practice. lol
Alas just changing the BPM in MusE isn't that easy, since I have to regenerate the singing, which has to be done with separate projects per verse / chorus / etc. coz of my previously mentioned "MusE can't export MIDI for just one track of multi track project", which at least the devs said they'll fix soon.
I want to have some of this cover actually played by me, but it would be a lot easier just to click into the piano roll and edit it to precise timing. Then the robot singing will be matched by the robot playing. lol
Is there any open source Linux software that can help me practice timing? I initially tried Pianobooster, but it sucks at reviewing your performance.
Any other ideas?