Comments on: Creating a Lead Sheet

By: Omar Amirault

Omar Amirault — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:08:54 +0000

Greetings I recently finished reading through your blog and I’m very impressed. I really do have a couple inquiries for you personally however. Think you’re thinking about doing a follow-up submitting about this? Will you be gonna keep bringing up-to-date at the same time?

By: bonnie

bonnie — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:06:31 +0000

Barbara, you are a godsend! You mentioned your purgatory, but I’ll be sure to have you depicted with a halo on your head! I enjoyed your comments and had some great laughs, and you saved me many hours of agony! I didn’t finish my degree, but I had some university level classical training (mainly clarinet, band, and composition, a little vocal and jazz but not much.) I used to write lead sheets for pop and gospel musicians but I didn’t know where to find a program that makes my time worth the money, and affordable enough for impoverished musicians. After many years of being out of the business to raise my kids, I started to look for a program to restart my lead sheet writing as a hopefully viable business, and I have a feeling you have pointed me in the right direction. God bless you, and excuse my twisted jokes, but thank you for sharing for free the fruit of your redempive suffering! – Bonnie

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:24:49 +0000

Rick: I agree that as musicians we should learn the language of music, but shaming someone because they have not yet acquired the skill is snobbish. But I suppose you sprang from the womb completely fluent in the musical arts. Music is about delighting the ear and the mind, not about proving your worth by shaming others.

B.Bruce: Don’t let people like pRick Stone put you down.

By: Stephanie Ferguson

Stephanie Ferguson — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:44:12 +0000

I agree that both Sibelius and Finale are wonderful products and worth the investment for a person who writes a lot of lead sheets and is familiar with music theory. An alternative for someone who needs to create sheet music but doesn’t want to spend the time doing it themselves is a music transcription service like Lead Sheet Station.

By: Ken

Ken — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:59:24 +0000

Actually, as was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, some software *does* indeed convert audio to midi, and from there into notation. I have not run into any which can reliably do polyphonic audio streams, but with the right package, monophonic instruments and single vocals work OK.

I use Digital Performer in my studio, which allows any audio track to be viewed as “pitch data”, which can be copied and pasted to a MIDI track. At this point I refer again to the MONOPHONIC AUDIO note above – if you do this to a polyphonic track, you’ll get a monophonic stream of pitch data which bears little resemblence to what you expect. From there the MIDI tracks can be viewed and edited as notation on a staff or staves. I’m not saying that DP has a knock-em-dead notational device (it’s not intended for notation, it’s a pro-grade multitrack audio/midi recording/editing/mixing/mastering package), but if you happen to use DP anyway, it’s a great hit-the-road-running way to get basic notation onto the paper, including larger arrangements; as well as printing out whole scores, any combination of instrument parts, or individual parts.

For my primary notation program, I use a little shareware package called MUP. It’s text based, probably similar to Lilypad (which I recall downloading way back when, can’t recall why I chose to not use it), and it allows quite a bit of flexibility in positioning, sizing, grouping, etc of just about anything. It won’t allow “incorrect” measures (I recall an earlier reference to wanting to be able to do this), but you *can* change the meter without actually displaying/printing the new meter, so it can easily be made to *look* like a measure has an incorrect count if you want to do that.

Anyway, my $0.02.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:23:16 +0000

Rick the Dick, so Paul Mc Cartney isn’t a musician either huh? Dick.

By: Rick Stone

Rick Stone — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 03:18:44 +0000

You apparently don’t “reead” or write English either! It’s simple, if you’re going to call yourself a “musician,” learn to read & write music!

And jeez! Don’t you even have spell check?

By: Margaret Pangle

Margaret Pangle — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:19:05 +0000

I have not tried any of the programs being discussed here so I have no comments on them, however, I have used Myriad Music Notation Software trial versions of Melody Assistant and Harmony Assistant recently and am very happy with them and all the things they offer.

I believe they have all the capabilities of the of the other programs (maybe more), are less expensive, and quite user friendly. I am very happy with the trial versions of both programs and plan on purchasing Melody Assistant first, and then Harmony Assistant.

I am using Windows XP and found installation and use to be really easy AND even though I have limited capabilities until I get the full versions, both programs are great for scoring or writing music.

I would like to ask both Keith and Dan do a review of them as I have read reviews of this kind before and wondered why Myriad never gets mentioned! It is excellent software! Check it out! Site Link below.

http://www.myriad-online.com/en/index.htm

Have fun!
Margaret

By: Scott Jacob Loehr

Scott Jacob Loehr — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 20:08:23 +0000

I compose 3 or 4 pieces every week directly into Finale. I have used the full version since 1994, and have stayed current with every upgrade. Here are my Top Ten Thoughts And Observations.

1) Finale can be quite intuitive if you have a background in theory.
2) There have been many features added to Finale that I don’t need, many of which are geared towards making the program more user-friendly for people without a background in theory.
3) Finale seems to be the ONLY notation program that gives the user 100% control of every element on the page.
4) I’ve never encountered a situation that didn’t have a workaround… sometimes it takes a little extra time, creativity, trial/error, or a phone call to Tech Support, but it’s worth it.
5) You can create your own “look” to your compositions, which is invaluable for publishing (to not look like the default templates of most programs).
6) Using Finale on a Mac is faster and less frustrating than using it on a PC.
7) I have never regretted sticking with Finale, as each time I learned other programs (due to working with other clients) I encountered limitations. On several occasions, I found it quicker to re-enter charts into Finale than to go through the phone Tech Support route with the other programs. Beats the eventual “you can’t do that” answer that I’ve received a few times.
Saving/sending/printing from PDF files has been a constant no-brainer for me and other musicians.
9) Finale’s Customer Support has always been helpful and patient.
10) I second an earlier post, using the analogy of Photoshop – it’s become a verb for a reason. Initially and eventually, it’s at the top of my list when it comes to choosing the right software for the job.

By: Barbara Goodrich

Barbara Goodrich — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 03:30:46 +0000

I started off on Finale (whatever was the “pro” edition a few years back) and never got it to work properly. There were problems after problems, with converting from SmartScore, with wrestling with complicated notation that wouldn’t go into standard patterns, with getting it to keep the proper number of beats in a bar, you name it. I’m a harpist and bought it originally so that I could add harp pedal change symbols in a harp solo arrangement of Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” which has some complicated rhythms. Finale lost track of these at the drop of a hat, and then _wouldn’t let me correct its bad arithmetic_, no matter how carefully I followed its immensely time-consuming and arbitrary rules. On the conversions from SmartScore, it would get quite a few measures correctly, and then move _just a few_ notes within one measure up or down several notes (the exact number varied, as well as whether it was up or down) — just the sort of thing that a quick proofing would miss. Overall, it was so counter-intuitive that it was conceptually offensive (sort of like the digital camera that has an “OK” button that you push in order to _delete_ the photo you’ve just taken), and couldn’t be relied upon to do anything correctly even after one had gone to the trouble to learn its foreign language. The poor Finale Help staff certainly earned their money trying to get it to work, though they took longer and longer to reply. I got the impression that they thought I was an idiot for expecting it to work for Debussy-type music, but that the company wouldn’t allow them to admit to its abysmal limits publicly, and that they were pretty overworked by other thwarted customers, too. Finale program CDs are good for one thing and one thing only — to hang by strings from one’s fruit trees to frighten away birds from eating one’s ripening apples and pears.

After having other musicians tell me that Sibelius was the one to get, I jumped on a sale directed at disgruntled Finale users such as me, and was very pleasantly surprised. Beautiful, just beautiful, conceptually elegant, reliable, and if there are any errors in math in any of the imports, they are few, and easy to fix. Further, Sibelius has all the harp symbols, even, and that’s pretty obscure stuff.

Learn from my many hours of Finale purgatory and avoid those horrors — don’t waste a cent on Finale’s products. Go straight to Sibelius.