The Basics
The basics of Practica Musica activities
When the program begins you will see a music window and an onscreen piano keyboard (you can change it to a fretboard) that also can contain various tools as needed by particular learning activities. You can select a desired tool by clicking on it, and you'll see that the cursor changes its appearance to display the chosen tool.
The opening screen is a "Practice" window in which you can choose the note tool and play intervals or chords, and the program will tell you what they are (for example, "diminished fourth," or "D major triad."
The keyboard or music window will often display messages telling you what to do next - when you start the program you'll be asked to choose your student file, and the next thing you'll see will be a suggestion that you choose an "activity" from the activities menu. Choose an activity, and a new menu will appear for that activity. Each activity will guide you through a lesson, and remember that every one of them has an "instructions" menu command that you can use to get more information.
Some of the activities will involve entering music notation on the screen. There are also writing tools included among the activities that you can use to notate your own music and save it, print it, and listen to it. Below you'll find information on how to use the notation tools when they are appropriate.
Activities will each have different tools available! The writing activities will tend to have a complete set of notation tools; others will limit their tools to just what you need to do the exercise.
The basics of editing music
1. To enter notes and other symbols you click on the desired symbol and then either click in the music or play a note. To select items or drag them, use the arrow tool to click on the item. Notes or rests can be dragged up or down with the arrow; text and most of the miscellaneous symbols can be dragged in any direction. For more information on entering and editing notes, click here.
2. To enter text, choose the text tool ("A"), click where you want the text to appear, and start typing. Once text is entered, that block of text can be selected with the arrow tool like any other symbol and can be dragged to a new position, modified, or deleted. If it's lyric text, put it on one of the green lyric lines and it will follow the notes. For more information on entering and editing text, click here.
3. To enter a chord symbol (this is relevant only in chord progression activities), click on the desired chord's box and then click in the music where you want it to go. In one of the writing activities you also have an option of using a chord tool to enter chord symbols; you can get more information on that tool here.
4. The Practica Musica music editing window contains at least one staff (in most writing activities you can add as many staves as you like, in any clefs of your choosing) and tools for controlling the position of each staff and its related lyrics and chords, if any.
The "long" edit window displays music in a continuous roll scrolling left and right. Some activities use a "short" window that displays only individual intervals or chords or notes. But if you are writing music on a normal staff you can use the Page Preview command (File Menu) to see what the music would look like arranged on pages.
Each staff has a "handle" at its left that you can use to drag it up or down, and each staff has a lyric text handle that will drag the lyrics up or down (text not on a lyric line keeps its position relative to the staff unless you drag it to a new position). In addition, the edit window contains a chord handle to control the position of the chord symbols if you are using them, and two more positioning controls called the title height and score height controls. You can drag the title height control down a bit if you need more room on the first page for the title. Drag the score height control up or down to decrease or increase the space between staff systems in the printout.
5. One staff is always the "active staff." Notes entered via the piano keys will appear in whichever staff is currently the active one. You can make a staff the active one either by using the arrow to click on any of its notes or symbols, or by entering a symbol directly in that staff, or by clicking on the "handle" at the left of the staff. The active staff's "handle" is filled in red.
6. Each staff can have up to eight melodic tracks, the first of which we call the primary track. Each track gets its own "handle, " so a staff with several tracks will have several handles lined up left to right like a string of pearls. For more information on entering multiple tracks in one staff, click here.
7. Each staff has its own text world. Text items are always associated with a particular staff: the one that was active at the moment the text was entered. If you move or delete a staff its associated text will also move or be deleted. For more information on handling text, click here.
8. There are three editing layers: staff symbols, chord symbols, and text. You can edit and select items in the active layer, whichever it is. Practica Musica will automatically change layers depending on which tool you've chosen, and it will also change layers according to the item you click on in the music. If you click a note tool or click on a note in the music, Practica Musica will change to the "staff layer" for entering and selecting staff symbols. Click on a chord tool or any chord symbol in the music and you'll be in the chord layer. Similarly, clicking the text tool ("A") or on any text item will place you in the text layer. (Not all activities will support this degree of freedom! Some will have nothing more than a few multiple-choice boxes to click on).
The only significance to these "layers" is that you can drag-select a group of items in the currently active layer even if they overlap with items in different layers. For example you can drag a selection rectangle around a group of notes without getting any text items in the selection. And if two items are overlapping, the program will first select the one that's in the active layer, so it's always possible to separate items that get on top of each other.
9. To select items for editing or deletion, click on the item with the arrow tool. To select a range of staff symbols, click on one side of the area, hold down the shift key, and click on the other side. Or hold down the shift key as you click on several different items. Or use the arrow tool to drag a selection rectangle around the items to select. For more information on selecting items, click here.
10. All items entered in your music have an information window that offers extra control. Just select the item in question and press command-i (Ctrl - i for Windows). In some activities this will not be allowed, as it could give away the answer.