# Question about rolled chords



## Steven Brown

I am composing music for piano by working it out on a digital piano keyboard, recording the pedal and keystrokes via MIDI into a MIDI editor. Then I edit the MIDI file to align downbeats with measures, and I quantize note timings and durations to make the score readable. I am not sure how to handle the timing of rolled chords. Where they occur in the composition, a melody note is the top note of the rolled chord. Say a melody note is supposed to occur on beat 3 of a measure, where it would occur if there was no rolled chord. If that melody note is put at the top of a rolled chord, does it become delayed by the time it takes the pianist to roll the chord from bottom to top? Or should the melody note occur on beat 3, and the rolled chord anticipates the melody note by starting before beat 3, some time toward the end of beat 2? Or are the notes below the melody note in the rolled chord played independently of the melody note, so that the rolled chord begins before the melody note and finishes after the melody note? Or might the rolled chord begin at the same time as the melody note and finish after the melody note?

Looking at the score of Rachmaninov's Prelude No. 4, opus 23, which has rolled chords, does not answer my questions, because it shows all the notes starting at the same time, preceded by a squiggly line. Listening to a recording of the prelude played on a piano, it's difficult for me to ascertain whether the melody note occurs on the beat or is slightly delayed by the lower notes in the rolled chords which occur in measures 11 and 12, where melody notes occur at the top of rolled chords.

https://sheetmusic.pianoshelf.com/sheetmusic/rachmaninoff/prelude_23prelude_4.pdf

A simple answer may seem to be to play the music as it should sound and don't be concerned about timings, but in a MIDI file, timings of notes have to be specified exactly.


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## Steven Brown

Another possibility... should the rolled chord, including the melody note at the top, begin before the beat and end after the beat, so that the melody note is delayed, but not as much as if the rolled chord begins on the beat.


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## Taggart

Use a score editor and see what it puts out to the midi file for a rolled chord.


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## Larkenfield

This is probably not helpful, but I would get rid of the shoulds and try out each version according to how you can align your software. The usual idea of rolling a chord is to create a sense of spontaneity, and it’s interesting that some of the vintage pianists would sometimes roll chords that weren’t written that way. So if your melody is strong enough to stand without rolling chords, then you can think of the rolling as an addition and hear what sounds best to you. End of useless advice! Lol.


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