Hi.

I've tried a few different methods of creating music for my games. The most successful so far have been MuseScore, Sibelius and LMMS. LMMS is particularly good for pure production in fact as I use the SF2 player.

My problem is this though: none of the above are able to bend the pitch of a note to the best of my knowledge. I believe LMMS can with certain plugins and with a MIDI keyboard, but I don't have a MIDI keyboard and the plugin I use doesn't work with the 'detuner'. If it's just guitar music I can play it myself, but other instruments need bending too.

If anyone knows of a good sequencer (preferably free) that can do this kind of thing, or at least a good way of achieving this effect with other software, that'd be awesome.

Thanks in advance,

Hi.

I've tried a few different methods of creating music for my games. The most successful so far have been MuseScore, Sibelius and LMMS. LMMS is particularly good for pure production in fact as I use the SF2 player.

My problem is this though: none of the above are able to bend the pitch of a note to the best of my knowledge. I believe LMMS can with certain plugins and with a MIDI keyboard, but I don't have a MIDI keyboard and the plugin I use doesn't work with the 'detuner'. If it's just guitar music I can play it myself, but other instruments need bending too.

If anyone knows of a good sequencer (preferably free) that can do this kind of thing, or at least a good way of achieving this effect with other software, that'd be awesome.

Thanks in advance,

Many DAWs have a parameter that you can use called Pitch Bend (or something similar). For example in Logic 9 you can go to the piano roll edit view -- select Hyper Draw -- select Pitch Bend and then you can actually draw or use straight lines to input the data. The how-to (and even names) can differ from program to program. No MIDI keyboard needed (although it's faster and easier with one). Not sure what DAW you're currently using or what you're open to considering but most DAWs (not straight notation software like Sibelius but DAWs like Pro Tools, Logic, Sonar, Reaper, FL Studio, etc) can easily do this. The real trick, though, is how GOOD are the samples (virtual instruments) that you're working with. Some can only pitch bend a small amount while others are VERY flexible.

Good luck!

Nate

To add some theory to nsmadsen's sound advice, MIDI pitch bend is a continuous controller like the others, and it can be edited in the same way in your sequencer.
The sequencer will send your hand-entered pitch bend change CC commands to your synthesizer, but if pitch bend is unsupported in your synthesizer you are out of luck. You should look for configuration options ("enable pitch bend", "enable continuous controllers", etc.) or synthesis parameters ("pitch bend range", "pitch bend amount", etc.; value usually in cents or semitones).

Some plugin connected after the synthesizer might be able to perform a pitch bend effect according to pitch bend CC messages, but I don't bet on such a replacement sounding good.