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Big Noise Cadenza V2 For WindowsArticle from Sound On Sound, April 1993 |
The latest version of Cadenza for Windows offers everything you'd expect to find in a professional sequencer — but it's up against some pretty stiff competition from the likes of Cubase and Cakewalk for Windows. Brian Heywood discovers what makes it stand out from the crowd.
Since Cadenza was reviewed early last year, Microsoft have upgraded Windows to version 3.1 and Big Noise have updated their product range by releasing a new version of Cadenza for Windows and a bundle of MIDI utilities called MaxPak. Whilst Cadenza is not limited to using the new version of Windows, it can use the multimedia facilities provided, allowing it to employ any supported interface. Big Noise also provide their own drivers, so that owners who are sticking with the older version of Windows can still use Cadenza.
Cadenza for Windows version 2 is a professional, 64-track MIDI sequencing package designed to fulfil the needs of most computer musicians. Not surprisingly, Big Noise describe Cadenza as the 'most powerful sequencer available'. However, if you look behind the hyperbole you'll see a workman-like, no nonsense MIDI sequencer that compares well with its main rivals, namely Cubase Windows, CakeWalk for Windows, and Master Tracks Pro 4.
The Cadenza software comes on two 3.5-inch (720K) or one 5.25-inch (1.2MB) floppy disk, along with a 200-page, comb-bound manual. Like most Windows software, Cadenza includes an installer program which expands and copies the various program and data files to your hard disk and creates a program manager group for the new software. The only information you need to supply is where the software will be installed on your hard disk. At the end of the installation, you end up with a new program manager group called 'Big Noise MIDI' which contains Cadenza, the Addports utility, the MIDI Director and its setup utility.
Like most Windows sequencers, Cadenza uses the classic track-based format. This means that the sequence is treated as a number of linear tracks, rather like a multitrack tape recorder. There is limited looping and a way of stringing the tracks together called 'linking', but these are just variations on the main 'linear' theme. The Cadenza window is divided into three sections: the standard Windows menu bar at the top, the transport/status bar, and the work or 'desktop' area. The transport buttons are fixed above the top left corner of the work area and provide a quick way to control playback, recording and positioning within the sequence.
The status area shows information about the current state of the program. On the far left is the current SMPTE time of the playback point and the sequencer's clock mode — internal, MIDI/SPP or MIDI Time Code. These values are set using the MIDI Director which can be launched from one of the menu options. The rest of the status area is taken up with the song position, metre and tempo displays, all of which can be edited using the mouse, the first two only when the sequencer is stopped. When you move the mouse cursor over this part of the display, it changes its shape into a diagram of a mouse with plus and minus symbols over the buttons to indicate how they will alter the value. Personally I feel that using the left button to decrease the value and the right one to increase it would have been more intuitive than the current method, which is the other way around.
Cadenza provides a number of different ways of viewing and editing your sequence, each with different levels of detail. The main ones are the Track Sheet, the Song Editor, the Note Editor, the Staff Editor and the Event Editor. There are also various graphical editors and the Faders Window. The Track Sheet and the Song Editor are used to control the sequence as a whole, while the other editors allow you to control some other aspect of the data within a particular track. The Faders Window is the odd one out here, since it is really an alternative input method targeted at recording controller values such as MIDI volume or pan.
This page gives you overall control of how your sequencer uses MIDI. This is where you define the overall characteristics of each 'track'. A track in this context is a musical line or performance that you want to treat as a single entity. So a track might contain a single phrase, a complete chord sequence or even just a set of MIDI controller values (say volume or pan) that apply to a particular MIDI channel. This means that you can organise your work independently of the actual MIDI channels you might be using, and this is how you can use up lots of tracks, even if you're limited to a single MIDI port (ie. 16 channels).
The track sheet is set out as a grid with columns of the various parameters across the window, and rows representing the tracks, just like a spreadsheet. The track parameters are: track name; instrument used (ie. program and bank number); MIDI port and channel; transposition; initial volume and pan setting. Cadenza actually stores the channel number when it records MIDI data, so it is possible to have multichannel tracks; you can then use the Event Filter to strip out each channel onto a separate track or use the track channel parameter to 'force' the MIDI channel number to a particular value.
The track sheet also shows how many events have been recorded in any particular track and allows you to mute or solo each track. One final parameter is the track mode; this can be either Linear, Loop or Link. In linear mode the track will play normally, in loop mode the track will keep looping as long as at least one track is still playing. Link mode lets you define a 'pseudo' or virtual track that simply strings together other 'normal' tracks in an order that you determine.
All the track parameters can be set or changed by double clicking on the appropriate box, which pops up a dialogue according to the type of data that needs to be changed. Numeric values can be altered by 'selecting' the parameters and then using the plus and minus keys on the computer's keyboard. Unfortunately, the track sheet parameters can only change whilst the sequencer is not playing, so you can't transpose or re-voice tracks on the fly. One thing that caught me out is that you need to set the MIDI channel before Cadenza will send out program changes, which may be logical but is not intuitive. There also doesn't seem to be any way to customise the track sheet, either by changing the order of the rows or columns or by 'hiding' information you don't want to see.
The Song Editor is probably the most useful window, since it gives you an overview of the contents and structure of the sequence. This window shows the overall layout of the song in terms of bars, with empty bars being shown as unfilled boxes and bars containing MIDI data filled in with grey. Since Cadenza obviously stores its note information as a start time, a pitch and duration, you only 'see' the note in the bar it starts, which means that notes that are held (say drones) only change the appearance of the bar that contains the start of the note. Though this means that the Song Editor display is not necessarily an accurate representation of which bars contain 'sounding' notes, it is useful nonetheless.
You can easily select blocks of bars using the mouse to copy and paste sections of the sequence, merging the copied data with existing bars if you so choose. Whenever you select or copy data, the Event Filter comes into play. This lets you select the type and range of events that are affected by the edit operations. So you could select all the note events that fall in the range C3 to D4, or with a duration of less than three clicks, or controllers with values outside a certain range, and so on.
This is simply a matter of selecting a track to hold the MIDI data and clicking on the record button (or typing [R]). Any data currently on the track — before the start point — is lost, so you can't incrementally record by adding material to the end, although you can overdub an existing performance to build up a new composite track. In the default record mode, multiple MIDI channels are placed on the same track. You can also choose a 'multitrack record' mode which automatically splits the channels onto different tracks. There is a punch in/out mode — although it's buried in one of the menus — which allows you to replace a section in the middle of a track as well. You can either record in time to the metronome or, more interestingly, you can lay down a performance without a timing reference and then tell Cadenza the beat afterwards using the 'tap tempo' feature.
There are three different windows that allow you to edit the MIDI note values in detail, and four graphic controller editors for note velocity, aftertouch, pitch bend and other MIDI controllers. The note editors consist of the standard 'piano roll' editor, a score editor and an event editor, giving you three different ways of representing the same data, and allowing you to choose an editor to suit your preferences or the particular situation at hand. I found the separation of the velocity and note editors slightly awkward, since the velocity information by itself doesn't mean much unless referenced to its associated note data. You can have as many editors active as you want (or can fit on the screen) and the windows can be iconised onto the Cadenza desktop to hide them whilst not in use. You can also make the editor windows operate on the currently selected track only, which saves you having to keep closing and opening new edit windows as you move around the song.
The 'piano roll' or Note Editor gives you a graphical representation of the notes, similar to what you find on old player piano rolls. Notes are represented by horizontal bars; the length shows the duration of the note and the vertical position denotes the pitch. There is a diagram of a piano keyboard down the left hand side of the window and the bar numbers are shown along the bottom. The window can show either one, three or nine bars of music — depending on current 'zoom' status — which lets you see the notes in context and still lets you work on the fine detail. Clicking on the right mouse button pops up a floating 'tool box' window; this contains buttons that allow you to set the editing mode and default note data.
There are three edit modes: Pick mode, Draw mode and Step Edit mode. In Pick mode you can select a single note or a range of notes and use the normal cut and paste functions to alter the data. If you select a single note you can also alter its 'note on' velocity and its MIDI channel number. Draw or 'pencil' mode lets you either draw the notes onto the window or pick up a note and move it. Inserted notes use the default values (duration, velocity and MIDI channel) which can be altered using the rest of the tool box. Step mode allows you to insert notes at the current play position from your MIDI keyboard; the insert point moves on so that you can enter a string of notes or chords in step time. One oddity with step-time note entry was that the window didn't automatically move to the next bar when the insert point moved off the end of the screen, so I had to keep chasing the 'insert' point.
I always feel that a score editor is a bit of a gimmick on a sequencer, but I can see that it might be useful if you are more at home with notation. Unfortunately, the manual supplied with the review copy didn't actually mention the staff window, but luckily it's covered in the on-line help. The notes are displayed on a grand staff (ie. treble and bass clefs) and you can define the resolution down to a 64th note (hemidemisemiquaver), effectively quantising the display and removing some of the silly notation effects due to nuances in the performance. The number of bars displayed per line depends on the resolution, rather than the number of notes in the bar so you tend to get very spacious scores unless you either have a very 'busy' sequence or limit the resolution to quavers. Although you can print the score — a single track at a time — there is no way of adding any marks, symbols or lyrics to the music, so it is no substitute for a 'real' notation package. The printing feature could be useful if you need to run off a quick lead sheet for a musician to use, as long as they're not too fussy about their scores.
The Event List editor simply displays a list of MIDI events, in the order in which they were recorded. The display is colour coded to help you pick out the different types of MIDI event and you can filter out unwanted data. Note information is displayed as a single entry with a duration rather than as separate 'note on' and 'note off' events, which means that you cannot get at the 'note off' velocity; this applies to all the note editors.
These all have more or less the same format and resemble the Note Editor in operation. The tool box contains buttons that allow you to pick and draw events, limit the range, re-scale and thin the graphic data. One thing you need to be careful of here is that the window display will default to the MIDI channel of the track, so if you've forced the MIDI channel to a new value from the Track Sheet, the bend or controller data won't appear until you've selected the correct channel using the tool box.
Once your music is safely recorded into your computer, Cadenza provides a number of tools for manipulating the data. So you can quantise, swing, humanise, re-channelise, remap, slip the start times of the notes, transpose and even 'retrograde' a phrase (reverse the order of the notes). Some of these features are pretty basic, but when combined with the Event List mechanism you can get some pretty sophisticated effects. One tool I would like to see added to the list would be a time compress/expand feature.
I had various problems with this program on both of my studio PCs. At first I thought it was due to the fact that I was running the program on a 386 SX PC (25MHz); however, I found similar problems on my 40MHz 386 PC as well. The oddest of these problems was that it caused Word for Windows to crash with a general protection fault if the PC received MIDI data whilst Cadenza was in the background.
I also couldn't get Cadenza to recognise the second MIDI input on my Voyetra V24S MIDI interface, though this might be due to a bug in the Voyetra driver. I think the crux of the problem is that Cadenza takes over the Window timer at a fairly low level to ensure that the timing is accurate (which it is). This means that if anything goes wrong it tends to take Windows with it.
There are really no surprises with Cadenza. It uses the tried and tested user interface that has been developed over a number of years. The most interesting thing about the sequencer is how it can 'multi-task' with other Big Noise software using the MIDI Director (see box). Whilst Cadenza will not win any prizes for its graphics design, it has everything you'd expect to find in a professional sequencer, plus the scope to become part of an integrated music environment.
Further information
Cadenza for Windows £292.58;
MaxPak £175. Prices inc VAT.
Turnkey, (Contact Details).
Cadenza - The Graphic Sequencer
(SOS May 92)
Cadenza For Windows - IBM PC Software
(MT Aug 92)
Browse category: Software: Sequencer/DAW > Big Noise Software
Review by Brian Heywood
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