Halp! I am kinda musical but mostly ignorant. I can read sheet music if you give me long enough (and a piano keyboard would be helpful, too, thanks). I know enough music theory to be dangerous and usually get things like time signatures and incidental notes right. mostly. Well, OK, almost mostly.
For a present for my husband, I want to transcribe some of the silly songs we’ve made up for our baby into sheet music. I could probably write them out on staff paper without making too many horrible mistakes, but I want it to look, you know, all fancy and proper and stuff. I can prob’ly most easily notate these songs in terms of letters or numbers – like, if we’re in the key of C, 1=C, 2=D, etc. (These songs are really simple with basic rhythms.)
I know there are lots of programs out there that will take ABC notation and turn it into staff music… but I don’t actually know ABC notation. Is it hard? Do I need to learn it for this project? Or is there some other approach that might work that I don’t know about, like a drag-and-drop GUI type deal? Is there something easy out there I can use for free? Better yet, something easy and maybe web-based so I don’t have to download anything? Is there a Google Music app?
I Googled “music notation converter” and got a flood of hits, most of which I don’t know enough to make sense of. Plz to school meh.
I can’t vouch for it - I use Sibelius, myself - but MuseScore is a free music notation software. The video demos may be enough to tell you whether you could or could not use it.
D’ye have any kind of University School of Music or Conservatory any where near up theyah? Most theory/composition students have to do some notation software, and if they’re finished their juries and exams but haven’t gone back home for the break yet, they may want to earn some more beer money by doing some quick transcriptions for you. Just a thought.
I use it for classical guitar and mountain dulcimer music. You can enter note by note on the staff or from the keyboard and play it back at any time to hear what you’ve got. It does a nice job of printing, and you can also save the music as a midi file.
I’ve messed around something called LilyPond – it’s a LaTex-based music notation bit of open source software.
I couldn’t put in the time to make it do what I wanted, but for a simple tune, it’s really about as simple as putting the note names in a text editor and letting LilyPond do its thing. Well, you have to look up some of the basic markup keys to let it know which octave, etc., but the result looks very good – way better than the free version of Finale or quite a few other lower-end notation programs IMHO that I’ve used in the past.
Maybe the above programs are significantly better than what I’ve seen.
Thanks, y’all. I’ve ended up using the free version of **Noteflight. **It’s not quite what I described in the OP, but it turns out to be what I actually wanted; no messing around with conversions, and I can check to see if what I’ve added to the staff is what I wanted with the audio Play feature. It has idiot-proofing features like not letting you add more notes to a measure than will fit. I tried a demo version of a different one first, but, after finishing the first song, found it was crippled for printing (it puts a “PAY FOR THIS AND IT’LL BE TOTES AWESOME!!!1!” type watermark obscuring every single line). Since I tried the other one first, I’m pretty impressed with Noteflight – it was clunky to start using, as it has some different user-interface assumptions than I would have guessed, but now I have it more figured out it’s making my music look puuuuurty! Very nice customization features and nothing I’m scratching my head over (too much).
Le Ministre de l’au-delà, I could not possibly do as you suggest; they would all want to steal my incredible musical composerly ideas and make millions of dollars.
I would like to see you turn it into a four voiced fugue.
In all seriousness, it’s a nice tune otherwise. Generally in a sitauation like yours, I would be inclined to make a dotted eighth note for “they wanna be” and leave it to your singer to praddle it off fast enough, but after having looked at it a few times, I like it better the way you did it there!
One thing I’d suggest fixing - it’s confusing to see the three sixteenth notes barred together. It’d be much easier to read if the dotted eighth and first sixteenth were barred together, then the remaining two sixteenths and the final eighth were barred together. This goes for bar 2, 8 and 10.
Agreed. Not only is it confusing, it is wrong notation. Combine and beam each half of a 2/4 measure separately. That allows the player to mentally divide the bar into beats.
Second choice would be one beam for the entire bar if they are all eighth notes are smaller. Even then, you wouldn’t use a double beam to span the space between beats 1 & 2.
And now, to make your eyes bleed, may I present to you: The Rhinoceros Is Sneaking Up and Dancing on the Baby. In which rhythm notation is rather seriously abused. You can tell me what’s wrong with the beams if you want to, but I’m assuming they’re a mess.
Yes, we actually sing it that way.
Here’s my favorite, one my husband made up: The Daddy Song. I fiddled and fiddled with it to get the rhythms exactly the way he sings it, simple as it is.
There are two easy ways to fix this one. One is to leave all the note values the same, but change the time signature to 3 over 2.
The other way (which I’d prefer because it makes reading it a little more self-evident) would be to change all the note values down by one, and change the time signature to 3 over 4. This would come out as two eighth notes beamed together, triplet eighth followed by (triplet) quarter tied to another quarter.
You don’t want to have a triplet over beats 3 and 4 in a 6 4 time signature.
I’d rather see it this way, but perhaps this is me being unnecessarily picky.
♫ ♪♩◡♩
with a “3” and a bracket between the single eighth and quarter on the second beat. That tells the singer two straight eighths on the first beat, a triplet eighth and triplet quarter on the second beat, tied to a regular quarter on the third beat.
The way it’s notated in your most recent two examples produces exactly the same rhythm, but I don’t find it as clear and simple.
Music notation specialist here. I used to work in film scores, music publishing and the recording industry in Hollywood.
That’s unplayable. Put that in front of a studio musician, and the first reply will be WTF?
The proper notation divides the major beats and beams within each beat only. If a note is to be held longer, a tie is necessary to the next beat. Do not use augmentation dots in place of ties.
For this one, while it’s understandable, the triplets are probably too pedantic. What I think you intended was a very simple rhythm of quarter, quarter, eighth, dotted quarter in a 4/4 meter.
This one is fine except for the last line. Don’t span the middle of a 4/4 measure with a dotted note; tie thru the mid-bar division instead.
