Simple Software for a Simple Mind
December 19th, 2008Back to Finale
A few years back, when I first got interesting in writing music, I got a program called Allegro, which was the wimpy version of a program called Finale, which was a piece of composing software. I could not make heads or tails of it. Everyone on the web said Sibelius was the way to go, so I tried that, and it was not fun. When I sat down with the computer keyboard, the MIDI keyboard, and the manual, I was able to use it, but it was counterintuitive, and after a certain amount of time away, I forgot everything I had learned.
Today I decided to check out another Finale product: Finale Songwriter 2007. They have a fully functional demo you can try. It takes a month to download, but once it’s set up, it seems to work extremely well. It appears to be a very easy-to-use notation scratchpad, with MIDI playback and printing. Hard to complain about that. I have seen comments about it, saying it’s hard to do musically sophisticated things with it, but if you can print with it, presumably you can then scan the music into a more complex program.
Seems like a good choice so far.
December 19th, 2008 at 1:08 PM
I have SmartScore Piano Edition. It allows me to scan in sheet music and edit the score. It works pretty well, and I think I got it because it was cheaper than Sibelius. It’s been a while. I haven’t used it recently, because I don’t play in church anymore. I used it mostly to transpose and take out a lot of notes that I was never going to play anyway, so I’d be less confused.
December 19th, 2008 at 2:36 PM
Once you get the hang of Songwriter, it might be time to move up to real Finale if you’re looking to do really fancy stuff. The current version’s pretty good, and it comes with all of the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds, which make things sound not-midi, which is always good. All of my friends who do professional copy work use Finale, it’s a great program. It used to be less intuitive than it is now, but they’ve gotten it working nicely now. The only gripes I have with it are that a) sometimes they move or change the functions of certain buttons between version releases, which serves to confuse those of us who’ve been using it for 13+ years, and also files created in newer versions aren’t backwards compatible. Other than that, I can’t imagine living without Finale.
Interestingly, you mention that nobody started out on notation software before they did word-processing software, but that’s exactly what I did. When I was about 6, I started composing on the Amiga computer in my piano teacher’s basement, which had surprisingly sophisticated (for 1989) composition software. After that thing died, it was a number of years before anything for PC caught up and stopped sucking enough to be useful. There was one truly horrible program I had to use for a while (I’ve repressed the name) where you had to manually space between every note. Hellish. Anyway, Finale. Use it, love it.
December 19th, 2008 at 4:22 PM
I was at work earlier when I commented,and I forgot that I primarily used Smartscore for scanning, but Quickscore Elite for editing. That’s not to say that what Mango suggests isn’t more appropriate. It’s amazing how I fooled people at church into thinking I was a good musician.
December 19th, 2008 at 4:59 PM
Hogster—I make a life outta what you are talking about. I suggest Cakewalk but on line go to http://www.midimaestro.com and Midi Maestro is good too–I think they offer a 30 day free trial download.
Any questions just write me
December 19th, 2008 at 5:12 PM
Thanks for the help. I have an old version of Cakewalk, and while I was able to put together MIDI pieces with it, I don’t recall being able to do music notation. Has it changed?
December 19th, 2008 at 5:26 PM
I can with the new stuff but you might have better luck with Maestro…Like I said I think Midi Maestro has a full feature 30 day download. BTW I have several of the better (there are two types) Creative Prodikeys. It is a computer keyboard with a (3) touch sensitive 1/3 size piano keyboard built in…I have gotten to where I use it rather than drag out a Roland Console.
December 19th, 2008 at 5:32 PM
I also use this… http://www.acoustica.com/partners/notation/index.htm
December 19th, 2008 at 5:55 PM
One last time…I went in search of some pretty good notation software I downloaded and bought about a year ago…I found the disk and uploaded the exe files to my website and emailed you the link. I have the key that unlocks the 14 day free trial but it is on another computer. If this is what you need email me back and I will go fire up that relic and get you the software key…el freebo.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Cakewalk does not really do notation – not in the sense you’re talking about. I use Overture from geniesoft.com. It was once owned by Cakewalk as their actual notation program, so some of the interface is the same. It is also similar to the no longer made Encore. It was the first to include full VST hosting – I’m not sure if the others have caught up. When I bought it a couple of years ago, it was the closest I found to an actual notation-based sequencer.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:01 PM
Songwriter seems perfect, except that the MIDI playback is very quiet, and there is no way to turn it up. My mixer is maxed out.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:26 AM
I’m not familiar with Songwriter, but in Finale, the midi is quiet too, until you jack up the base key velocity. If you can expand the playback/transport window (where it lets you adjust tempo and things like that), there’s probably a field for base key velocity, and it’s probably set to 64. Try taking it up to 90 or 100, and see where that gets you. And feel free to email me if you need other assistance.