IMSLP Forums

Hi everyone!


I was actually with my brother at a restaurant that had karaoke couple months ago, and it occurred to me that the idea of 'music-minus-one' for instrumentalists would be very, very useful. As a violinist, I know I've always wanted to 'play along' with the piano accompaniments for many of the great sonatas. Many people do not have the opportunity to play with real accompanists, and it's something that can be both fun and useful for concert preparation. Especially for concertos. I've searched all over the internet, and can really only find specialized files for this, but they are very few 'karaoke' files for classical music. I would say there aren't more than 100 in all.

I think it would be a really useful addition to IMSLP, and I really do think a lot of users would find this addition to be really beneficial. I was thinking that it would certainly justify a new tab in the recordings section (next to synthesized / MIDI).

Sadly, there are not very many 'MIDI minus one' files already existing, but I will try to seek permission to post a few if people here generally agree that this might be a good idea.

It also does not have to be limited to just MIDI files - real people can play these parts as well of course. Initially, it might be easy to take some FINALE or SIBELIUS renderings and extract one of the parts.

In theory, I do not see why we couldn't also do this for trios, quartets, etc, except that it might make the page a bit bulky.


Thoughts?

There is a software that I own called SmartMusic. It's intended for beginners, but I myself can still find plenty to play with. While showing your part on the monitor, it plays a recording (typically a synthesized midi). It gives you cues and all. You can export files from Finale to SmartMusic, thus allowing you to play along with virtually any piece you want. Is that what you're looking for?

There''s a huge number of programs that will allow you to edit MIDI files. Just load the file, mute the track with the solo instrument, and you're golden. You could probably even use the demo of Sonar.

Thanks for pointing out the program, it's really useful. But some people (like me) who don't know about the program might find it perhaps easier to find stand alone MIDI files on IMSLP. It's also much easier and probably better organized. Plus you could play along with things you didn't even know existed, which would be less practical to do with just a program. As I always used to say, "The next best thing to finding something you were looking for is finding something you weren't look for!"

I expect having a section of such files available would be very useful for many. Also, this idea ties in nicely with Alsonso del Arte's project to create a recording of an orchestral work by merging recorded tracks created by different contributors around the world - sort of the way Eric Whitacre did for his choral work which was a big hit on YouTube. The first question I have is: Should this be limited to MIDI? After all, there is an outfit called Music Minus One who has made a nice business out of providing what could be termed high-end accompaniment tracks recorded with real musicians. With audio-processing software such as Logic, there is virtually no limit to what can be done in this whole area of add-on or collective recording.

I actually don't see any reason at all this should be limited to MIDI, I just thought that it might be an easier way to stay. Ideally, real-life performances would actually be much better, but we would have to find some musicians willing to record only parts. I will ask around as I know a couple of pianists who might be willing to record a few things, but I can't make any promises. If more people approve, perhaps we should mention this somewhere on the main page (news?) so that more people are aware we are open to these submissions. It might jump-start the number of submissions we get as I suspect it gets more traffic than the forums.

As I mentioned on the wiki, this is something that would likely be worthy of a tab-level division in the audio/video section of workpages, following the present schema of "Recordings" and "Synthesized/MIDI". What would be a concise term for this that would be immediately understandable by the largest number of users? Some real thought will have to be give to it.

Assuming that "music minus one" is trademarked, how about "play-along"?

Good idea!

Don´t know. Compare http://www.whc.de/capella_playAlong.cfm