Dawns Cwm Cynon: the software lead sheet and the MIDI data

1. What happened

Rhiannon Howells runs a youth folk group in Aberdare. She wrote a new jig, Dawns Cwm Cynon (Cynon Valley Dance), for flute, fiddle and guitar. She played the melody on a MIDI keyboard into a DAW, added a chord track, and then used the notation software’s MIDI import to turn the recording into a lead sheet: the melody on a stave with chord symbols above it. She did not change any settings before importing. The group reads from this lead sheet next week.

2. The composer’s notes

3. The lead sheet, as the software exported it

The number in italics at the start of each line is the bar number the software gave that bar.

4. The MIDI data

This is what the keyboard actually recorded. Start and length are counted in quavers from the very first note. The up-beat starts at quaver 0. Bar 1 starts at quaver 1, and every bar is 6 quavers long, so bar 2 starts at 7, bar 3 at 13, and so on. Velocity is how hard the key was pressed, from 1 (softest) to 127 (hardest): players press harder on the strong beats.

MIDI stores only a number for each key, so 73 can be written as C♯ or D♭. The software has to guess which spelling to use.

Melody track

Chord track

The same data is in dawns-cwm-cynon-midi.csv for use in a spreadsheet.

5. Useful facts

• Simple time: each beat splits into 2 (3/4 has three crotchet beats). Compound time: each beat splits into 3 (6/8 has two dotted crotchet beats). Both 3/4 and 6/8 hold 6 quavers in a bar.
• In 6/8, quavers are beamed in groups of 3 so each beat can be seen. In 3/4 they are beamed in pairs.
• Chords in D major: I = D, ii = Em, iii = F♯m, IV = G, V = A, vi = Bm. V7 = A7 (A, C♯, E, G).
• Quantise: a setting that moves each note to the nearest line on a grid. On a semiquaver grid the lines are every 0.5 quavers (31, 31.5, 32 …). On a quaver grid they are every whole quaver (31, 32, 33 …). The software imported this tune on a semiquaver grid.