Any ideas? haha. I was mostly playing around.

dance.mid

dance.sib

Wow! That's really good! Some brilliant rhythms - I especially like the dotted rhythms. The harmony is very effective, the chords with the pauses are great. Maybe you could focus slightly more on accurate phrasing next time?

I agree with Mike...some of your phrases are very very abnormal. Ragtime is very structured, especially traditional Joplin. It is almost always built on 4 or even 2 bar phrases, which come out to be 16 bars per strain, well in the meter you put it(which is unusual), it would 32 per strain. Usually ragtime is in 2/4, with the left hand pulses being 8th notes.

You did good with the first strain, but the second is very wierd, with 17 bars... That first bar, after the repeat, is the one that screws everything up. You should put the last half of that bar in bar 27, making it repeat nicely. While the last strain does have 16 bars, the phrases are all jumbled and nonsensical.

I would consider this more of just a general 'Dance' than Ragtime, because the form is so unusual and disjointed. I have written many rags and I've found the easiest way to do them is to have a set form and work within that. Only then will you create true ragtime.

Are there repeats of individual sections? Can you make a midi file with repeats in it?

A standard Joplin rag goes like this:

(in 2/4 time, bpm approx 75-95)

1. Opening (4 bars)

2. First Strain (16 bars)

2a. Repeat (16 bars)

3. Second Strain (16 bars)

3a. Repeat (16 bars)

4. First Strain (16 bars)

5. Trio (16 bars)

5a. Repeat (16 bars)

6. Fourth Strain (16 bars)

6a. Repeat (16 bars)

That's it! Of course, one of Joplin's most popular, the Maple Leaf Rag, did all this without the 4 bar intro. But, except for a small handful, the rest follow this form.

Sibelius plays repeats, and that goes into the MIDI fine.

Wow. Pretty cool. I agree with the others that some of the phrasing seems out-of-character, but I like the freshness and how imaginative it is.

While we're on the subject of ragtime, may I share one of my own experiments? Not my usual stuff, but I had fun trying it. It's a Maxixe, a Brazilian dance popular about 100 years ago that eventually morphed into the Samba.

Nice work, Lee. The modulation is especially well done. Is the rhythm that repetitive because of the constraints of the piece being a Maxixe? Because I think you could do with some variation in that department.

Nice work, Lee. The modulation is especially well done. Is the rhythm that repetitive because of the constraints of the piece being a Maxixe? Because I think you could do with some variation in that department.

Thanks. This is my first (and probably only) attempt at this form. From what I've heard, this kind of rhythm is characteristic, but I may have overused it in my naivete. I've been told under no uncertain terms that this kind of music "has to have the Latin soul in it," and I haven't a drop of Latin blood in me. I suppose it's like a West African trying to write a minuet.

The great master of this form, as well as the Brazilian-style "Tango" (as opposed to the Argentinian) and the Valsa (a slow Latin waltz) was Ernesto Nazareth (1868-1931), an older contemporary and friend of Hector Villa-Lobos, and it was after his work that I patterned mine. His work tends to use a lot of stride bass in the left hand, and a lot of syncopation in the right - characteristic of the period in popular music, as well as of Latin music in general at the time.