Hello, this is Terry Ewell. This is your brief introduction to Aria Maestosa. Well, first you open up the software. We are not going to create a new sequence that will be later. We are not going to open a saved sequence, rather we are going to first import a MIDI file. I have made available for you the “Baby Elephant Walk” put together by Hitari. This is a Mancini tune. Here it comes up. Let’s examine some of the features here in Aria Maestosa.

We have “file,” this is where you open, close, and save files. We have “edit,” which is an editing feature for the notes. “Tracks.” Now each of these…This is a track here, flute track. Here is a track for strings. Each of these is called a track in Aria Maestosa. You can add, delete, and duplicate tracks and things like that. There are certain properties for the tracks, mainly which is the default volume for new notes. You can select which track you want that volume for.

Playback controls are actually found right here. So I don’t think you need to be in there. “Settings” –we don’t need to do anything with that yet. You won’t need to in the course. The “output” is very important. When you install Aria Maestosa it should be selecting a method of output for you. This is the card through which the MIDI is played. Remember, MIDI is not sound. MIDI is instructions you need to have something to play those sounds. You can see on my computer that I have Windows Software Synthesizer or the Synth from Microsoft. So one of those has to be selected.

“Input,” that is not going to be necessary for this class. You could have an input, if you wanted. There is a help file with a very brief manual.

OK, so we have our movie theme. This is the elephant walk. Let’s listen to a little bit.

[music]

Now, notice the red line is going through what we call measures. This is measure 1. Here is measure 2 and measure 3. So horizontally we progress through the music. This already tells me that there are 58 measures in the music. If I scroll all the way to the end we can verify that. Yes, there are 58 numbers, the length is 58. The tempo of this is 120. That means that 120 pulses or beats occur in a minute. If I was to change this for half the tempo, 60, let’s see how that would sound.

[music, slower]

It sounds much slower, huh? Not so good.

I will put that up to 120. We have here what is called a “time signature.” This is important for musicians, but you will not need to worry about this in the course. I do encourage you to learn a little bit about music if you can, but the time signature simply means that there are four beats in each measure (that is the first 4) and a quarter note gets the beat.

The “start” indicates where you are starting in the piece. Here we are starting in measure 1. What if I wanted to start in measure 3 then notice my red line moved immediately there. I could click play. If I wanted to start in measure 4, you see it leaps ahead. I can go back and start in measure 1. This is very helpful when you are working through your composition.

You could record here. We will not be recording. You need to have a MIDI input. Here is your play button and pause button; your stop button.

“Loop” is another feature that is worthwhile learning about. Let’s say for instance I want to hear the brass section. I select this measure and press the space key.

[music]

I would just hear that measure there. OK, if I want to loop some measures let me select those and depress “loop” and press play.

[music]

I am playing it by pressing the space bar. It will keep looping through this. You can stop it by pressing the space bar again. This will be helpful if you need to hear over and over again some of your music.

Now if you right click (for a PC) or control click (on Mac), this will give you the volume setting, the dynamics for that particular note. The maximum dynamic is 127 in MIDI. You can see that it can be adjusted to any volume there.

Now let’s look a little bit at the notation. Here in the brass, trumpet is the selected instrument, we have the fifth octave and it is playing an A. That is an A5.

OK, I have opened up the screen now, you are not going to see the full screen here but I need to show you some different features here as well. Right now you are seeing this in terms of what is called the “piano roll.” You have the piano keyboard on the left hand side and you have the note appearing here. If I press on the notes like this, this gives somewhat notational representation of the music. For a trained musician this doesn’t look like real music. But we can see some of the values of the notes.

Again piano roll; going here is guitar tablature. This is the percussion look to it. This is actually not a percussion part here. The last one we have here is for mixing and different aspects. Here we have a volume line. You could make contours throughout the piece. A lot of these are features that you won’t use. So for the pitched instruments use this piano roll here. For the percussion instruments, however, you will be definitely viewing in that framework.

Now changing your instruments is really quite easy. I am back to the original screen here. Let’s take a look at the flute. This is just a track title here. That doesn’t change the instrument. For instance, if I solo it. This is how you solo it. This would be to mute. Then you couldn’t hear that track at all. This is to solo that track. Let’s just play a little bit in this area here. I will go ahead and loop that.

[music]

OK, so that is our flute. Now what if I go and I want to change that sound. Let’s say that I want to get to an ensemble instrument. OK so I have chosen string ensemble 1, let’s listen to that. It is still titled “flute” but I chose another General MIDI instrument.

OK and we will lay aside the percussion instruments for now. We can look at those another time.