Guitar MIDI Controller to Notation

The initial notation that Rosegarden generates from a guitar MIDI controller looks like a complete mess.

But what we want is hiding in there. It just needs some post-processing. In the Matrix editor we can see that things aren't too bad.

Samples provided courtesy of Mike Knott.

Guitar controllers are a bit finicky and tend to generate spurious notes.

We can clean this up quickly using Rosegarden's Event Filter dialog.

• Select the segment and press “M” to launch the Matrix editor.
• Press Ctrl+A to select all notes in the segment.
• Press Ctrl+F to launch the “Event Filter” dialog.

Configure the Event Filter dialog as follows:

Make sure “Use notation duration” and “Select rests” are unchecked.

What this says is, “I want all the notes except for the ones that are 1/16th notes or larger.” This will select only the small spurious notes.

Luckily, the Event Filter dialog will remember its settings, so this will go more quickly the next time.

• Click Ok to dismiss the dialog.

Now only the small spurious notes will be selected.

• Press the delete key to delete them.

Next we want to make these all perfect 1/4 notes.

• Press Ctrl+A to select all notes.
• Press “=” to launch the Quantize dialog.

Set up the Quantize dialog to quantize to 1/4 notes.

• Click Ok to quantize.

Bring up the segment in Notation to see the improvements.

The notation isn't quite perfect because Rosegarden attempts to interpret a performance and add in tenutos and staccatos. To remove those:

• Press Ctrl+A to select all notes.
• In the notation menu: Note > Marks > Remove all marks.

And now we have something that looks like simple notation.

Noted some issues while going through this…

The event filter dialog fields should be ordered:

The current ordering with “include/exclude” on the front is odd. Sure, it kind of reads like English, but it is unclear.