Hi Ed,

Active Bass is built on the "Lesson Engine" technology that was created by the fabulous Chris Sung and Sean Kelly. The site currently generates the tab and music playback for you on the fly when you build a lesson, request a scale, create a bass line, or build a backing track. It's harder to have it auto generate notation at this point because of the much more infinate possbilities associated with printed music.

We will be able to do music notation eventually and your point and click method does sound like a great way to proceed.

I do think we may be able to design something that does not entail music playback but allows you to back up the auto tab function with music notation. Maybe the "notation builder"... Ahh, has a nice ring to it eh?

Thanks for your suggestions!
Chris

...too, is there a way to get tripletted figures in there?
Though I haven't tried yet, I'm assuming you can "trick" the Line Builder into pulling off odd times(?).

Trick the line buileder! Ahh, I think the line builder might be older and wiser than all of us..:-> In fact I'm not to sure what happened to the last person who actually tried to trick the line builder.......

Sorry, anyway, ya I think that it could be nudged into other time signatures... Let me know how it works out and please keep the suggestions coming as we are striving to make this the best site around!

Hi Ed and Jim,

There are three main factors that affect how we created the music authoring and display tools on the site:

1) How easy it is to enter a musical idea
2) The technical limitations of visually displaying that musical information and allowing you to play it back
3) The technical limitations of doing this over the Internet instead of a program installed on your hard drive

Personally, I'm not a big fan of tab, but there's a reason why you can use a text editor to create a tab display of a musical idea, but not a standard notation version. Tab is technically much easier to display. As Chris pointed out, at some point, this will be an option, but not for a while. Our tools aren't really comparable to applications you can download and install on your hard drive because they don't deal with the Internet. They are self-contained applications that aren't subject to the limitations of Internet technology.

Now, as far as being able to do triplets, this was a tradeoff we had to make. Essentially, we could have either provided the ability to do eighth note triplets or to do 16ths, but not both. This has to do with the visual feedback you get in the Line Builder (i.e. when you enter a note, you automatically see it displayed in the tab display). We decided on 16ths. To provide both would have opened up the possibility of crashing your browser when using the Line Builder, because of all the information we would have needed to keep track of by providing that level of rhythmic resolution.

It's for this same reason that the Line Builder is essentially monophonic, and that there are no hammer-ons, pulls, slides, vibrato, or the like. At WholeNote.com, we have a Shockwave app called the Composer that allows you to specify all these things to input a guitar part, but the learning curve is kind of steep. In the end, Chris and I decided that a stripped down version of the Composer that required no plug-ins and that was intuitive to use would be the best solution for creating lines. Thus, the Line Builder was born....

...thanks, guys; truthfully, I'm impressed with the Line Builder...it's cool!
Is there a way to delete "unused notes"?
For example, instead of 16 subdivisions, can you "delete" the last 2 1/16s?(will yield 14/16=7/8...ie ODD time).
Again, thanks!

I really enjoy playing with the line builder and think it's just great. Some suggestions would be to make it possible to have the music played by other instruments like a horn or something. It would be so cool to be able to write leads over our basslines! I also would like to see odd timings and triplets made possible, but I'm glad to have such a fun little tool either way. Great job!

Unfortunately, no. The Line Builder is set up to do 4/4 time only. You can certainly have a measure where there is nothing in the last 8th note, but when you view it or play it back, it'll look like a line in 4/4 that has a rest in the last 8th note.

As far as doing triplets, the closest you can get is to do 2 dotted eighths note and 1 eighth note to approximate quarter note triplets, but for those 8th note triplets, it's pretty much impossible to simulate it...

I just realized that I may be using the wrong terminology with what are called "quarter note triplets" and "8th note triplets". In this case, by quarter note triplets, I mean 3 evenly spaced notes within 2 beats. For eighth note triplets, I mean 3 evenly spaced notes in the span of 1 beat. Someone please tell me if I'm wrong...

Thanks

Yup dem's da triplets, Christophe...
Hey JIMK- if you want to get the three against four thing happening you can use groups of dotted quarters and dotted eighths to go across the bar lines. The rhythm track still plays in 4, though.

Ed-
Thanks(again).
Too, I'm sure you can get "5/4" happenin by-
4 bars of 5=20 beats
5 bars of 4=20 beats
"5/4"=/1234{2}/234{3}2/34{4}23/4{5}234/
That "should work"...though, what a hassle, eh?!