There are different strategies for this general concept, but after initially filling everything with rests when there was nothing happening, I noticed that it works the same when the measures simply are empty, so my current strategy is to fill a measure only when there is at least one note in the measure, in which case it makes sense to ensure that the measure has the correct quantity of notes and rests . . .
Otherwise, I do nothing, which saves inputting time and has the additional benefit of reducing clutter . . .
There is another aspect of doing nothing with music notation when nothing is happening in a measure, and it has to do with the work Notion 3 does when rendering and playing songs . . .
My best guess is that if you put a whole rest in an otherwise empty measure, then Notion 3 has to read the whole rest and then decide that it maps to doing nothing, which takes a tiny bit of processing time that could be used more productively doing something else . . .
Of course, it might work exactly the opposite, where leaving measures blank takes more processing time, but I tend to think that it should be faster to process an empty measure than it is to process a measure that has a whole rest but no actual notes . . .
It might not be "standard" for printed music notation, but so what . . .
So what! My focus at present is on composing silly
DISCO and
Pop songs about ladies underpants, and the reality is that nobody including me actually reads and understands music notation intimately, so all that matters is that the music is rendered and played correctly by Notion 3 so that I can record it in Digital Performer 7 via ReWire as soundbites, which is fabulous . . .
[
NOTE: My "understanding" of music notation essentially transcends actual knowledge, which probably only makes sense to me, and the result is that I know what to do without actually needing to be aware of it in any immediately conscious way. With the exception of one of the electric guitars at top-center, which is a Notion 3 bundled Electric Guitar that uses the fantastic guitar tab articulations provided in Notion 3, all the instruments are IK Multimedia virtual instruments. This is what I call the "basic rhythm section" for a song, and at present there are 31 "heavy" VSTi instruments, which on the Mac requires the instruments to be spread across two separate but synchronized Notion 3 scores, which works very nicely, since through extensive experimenting I devised an excellent strategy for building a song in layers that allows the possibility of having as many as 500 to 1,000 "heavy" VSTi instruments, albeit spread across as many as 50 separate but synchronized Notion 3 scores and managed in Digital Performer 7 via doing a virtual festival of "bouncing to disk" techniques, since Digital Performer 7 basically has the same overall constraints as Notion 3 with respect to the number of tracks it can handle in a single project. This is a headphone mix, which is the way I mix when I am working on a song, and there is a bit of what I call "sparkling" on some of the instruments, which is a stellar technique for putting notes into motion within what I call the "Spherical Sonic Landscape™", where my avator for this FORUM is one of the vector planes of the Spherical Sonic Landscape . . . ]
"(Baby You Were) Only Dreaming" (The Surf Whammys) -- MP3 (9.2MB, 281-kbps [VBR], approximately 4 minutes and 23 seconds)Fabulous! 
Posted: Wed May 25, 2011 3:06 am
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