Both hands with imported MIDI file?

[PaulBinCT]

So, after lots of fumbling around (needless to say I'm a new user ) I think I have two principal questions.

1) If I want to learn a song with both hands, that is, split the entire song... would I scroll to the end of the song/file, position the split where I want, say middle C, assign one side to each hand and hit "continue"?

2) I'm trying to learn a MIDI file where it seems that they have assigned the bass, which I would want to play with my left hand, to a bass guitar track. It shows up on the keyboard, but if I mute the bass guitar there is no sound. Can I somehow reassign that track to represent my left hand?

Thanks in advance for any help... a bit frustrated but having a ball!

Paul

[icuurd12b42]

Not sure I totally grasped what your questions were from the wording, it's not clear.

1) You can position the song more accurately with the mouse if you turn on Sheet Music under the Gear Icon

2) After Selecting a song to practice you can click the Hands, Colors and Instrument button which allows you to choose what channel/instrument you want to use for each hand, and what to mute and what color or none to display for the falling ribbon for that channel.

If you want to make the channel play another instrument, I don't think you can do that without grabbing a MIDI editor and copying the channel notes to a new one... which is relatively easy to do. I think I used MidiEditor in the mid 2000 to do that.

[PaulBinCT]

Thanks... I feared my question was unclear because I'm still wrestling with the terminology. I figured out that I was overcomplicating it... I was able to just assign the bass guitar part to my left hand and that seems to have done what I was looking for.. playing with both hands (or trying to ).

Thanks for the kind reply, I suspect this will be the first of many questions, but hopefully I'll be more precise in the future!

Paul

[icuurd12b42]

Turns out you can change the instrument for the channel in the option I described, on the left of the play button.

MIDI files have 16 channels. each channel can play 1 instrument from a list of 128 (semi standard) instruments in the musical device. aka synth or PC....

Usually one channel has all the notes for the song for one instrument unless the midi creator had the foresight, especially for a keyboard instrument, to create 2 channels, one for both hands...

The program show what channel are active and the instrument it is set to.

channels.png (100.67 KiB) Viewed 2121 times

The top one is a midi file a youtuber created for Synthesia, I forget his name. easy to find he has a lot of MIDIs, the bottom one is a MIDI I got of a popular song. as you can see a lot more instruments in this case mainly to push the MIDI to it's limit, playing the same sound on multiple instruments to add body to the sound to try to make it sound as close to the real song as possible


If the midi file you got does not have a separate channels for both hands then you have to use an midi editor like the one I suggested to create a second channel and move the left hand notes to that channel. It's possible these is a software that does it already, based on your left of Middle C idea. Though many songs dont limit the left hand to left of Middle C or the right to the right...

[jimhenry]

You can split a channel between the hands in Synthesia. Hopefully someone will post a link to the "how to" as I don't recall where it is.

[Bavi_H]

At the top of any page on the Synthesia website click Support. In the section "How-to Guides", you may be interested in the following guides:

• "Splitting the piano part of outside songs into two hands" describes how to split a part into left hand notes and right hand notes.
  

  • 1) If I want to learn a song with both hands, that is, split the entire song... would I scroll to the end of the song/file, position the split where I want, say middle C, assign one side to each hand and hit "continue"?

    The how-to guide suggests doing this as an initial starting point. You can also right-drag diagonal lines to further customize the split or left click or right click individual notes to assign them to the left or right hand.

• "First-time setup for outside songs" describes the settings you can make on the Hands, Colors, and Instruments screen.
  

  • 2) I'm trying to learn a MIDI file where it seems that they have assigned the bass, which I would want to play with my left hand, to a bass guitar track. It shows up on the keyboard, but if I mute the bass guitar there is no sound. Can I somehow reassign that track to represent my left hand?

    I'm not sure exactly what you want, but, for example, if you see a bass guitar part on the Hands, Colors, and Instruments screen that you want to assign to the left hand and change it to sound as a piano you could do the following:
    
    Change the instrument to a piano. (See guide step 2.)
    Change the part to left hand. (See guide step 4.)
    Make sure the part is set to "sounded". (See guide step 6.)
    Optional: Click "Auto Color" to set left hand to blue, right hand to green, and background parts to hidden. (See guide step 10.)

[icuurd12b42]

You can split a channel between the hands in Synthesia. Hopefully someone will post a link to the "how to" as I don't recall where it is.

Found it

Under the Select for the channel in the options I mentioned


Left Hand
Right Hand
Background
Custom <-

custom.png (30.54 KiB) Viewed 2097 times

There you will find a Split from Here button . Click that and then click on the note fountain where you want the split to happen

Custom pops another screen. you click the ribbons with left or right mouse button to define the left or right

You can scroll with the mouse wheel and left and right click the notes that overlap.. Nice

split.png (56.96 KiB) Viewed 2097 times

The tool ribbon shows left, right , background and ignore tool to assign to the left mouse button, and same tool set for the right button, clipped on the right of the screenshot, to define what the mouse click will do