I don’t really understand much at all about music or electronics. I do play keyboards by ear and would like to be able to generate sheet music. My electronic keyboard is a Kawai ES1. What program would allow me to sit at the keyboard and compose music that would print out as sheet music?
I tried Cakewalk. Either that wasn’t it or it was just way too far over my head. I even tried reading Cakewalk for the Terminally Stupid. No luck. I need something simple.
Any suggestions?
I’ve never really used this kind of software myself, but some applications I’ve heard good things about are Sibelius, Cubase and Finale. I’m not exactly sure whether they’ll be compatible with your keyboard, I’ve just heard the names mentioned in passing. Sorry if that doesn’t help.
There’s a free basic version of Finale, called Notepad. It’s not the most intuitive program in the world, but it’ll certainly do what you need (and far more).
I assume that you already have the keyboard hooked up to the computer via MIDI? If not, you’ll need to do that. If your computer has a sound card (rather than onboard sound), there’s probably a 15-pin D-socket beside the jack sockets. You need a lead to go from there to the MIDI sockets on the keyboard. Any computer shop should stock one, and know what you need. If you don’t have this socket on the computer, you either need to buy a soundcard, or a MIDI-USB adaptor like this.
…oh, and a good point about Finale is a friendly and helpful mailing list: http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
I tried several packages (demos of commercial, shareware and freeware) and read some reviews, and I’m under the general impression that none of it works worth a damn unless you tend to play extremely mechanically with the software’s metronome clacking out the beat for you.
• Even then, most of the software tends to “think” in half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes. Toss in a dotted half, come in with a note a split-second before rolling a chord under it, and it will “normalize” what you did to the nearest whole, half, quarter, eighth, or sixteenth of a beat.
• Most software will let you turn that feature off but, without normalization, slowing the tempo ever so slightly for a bit of phrasing will make it offset what you would’ve written as coming in on the 7th beat of 8 in that measure so that it’s a dotted 64th rest later and nothing but a computer would be able to look at and read or “hear” the stuff.
• And just forget about doing anything in 3/4 time, let alone syncopated 3+3+2/8 or 3+3+3+2+2/12, or 5/4. The “normalization” routines will turn it into disco every time.
If packages have improved (and I assume eventually they will) so much the better, but as of the last time I looked, there wasn’t much “there” there yet.
Yeah I’ll second what AHunter3 says though Finale is a very powerful music score-editing package and I normally sing its praises, there are problems with this method of producing sheet music that will probably never go away (though I hate to sound so pessimistic).
The sequencer Logic Audio Platinum or other versions (better than Cubase IMO) as far as I remember didn’t ‘normalize’ unless you asked it to, or at least it only normalized to very small divisions of the beat such as demi-semi quavers (32nds) and smaller. In some ways this was worse than normalizing to too large a note value as the score ended up with bizarre ties and short notes and weird note-values that would frustrate anyone else trying to read it. If you have some musical knowledge (as far as written music is concerned) you can iron these things out yourself afterwards or maybe get a friend who can read music to help you.
My advice would be to get a sequencer like Logic or Cubase rather than Finale if you aren’t hugely musically-literate as Finale is expensive and relies more on the ability of the user to read and write music pretty fluently. Sequencers on the other hand can be used for a variety of other fun and useful purposes that you don’t need to be great at reading/ writing music for.
Finale’s input options are certainly improved on AHunter3’s experience - any time signature is possible, triplets are no problem, and you can set the quantisation (the ‘rounding’ value) to whatever duration you need.
Another route to doing what you need is, as suggested, use a sequencer to record your playing - and then produce a MIDI file, which can be imported into Finale (or Finale Notepad) so you can exploit the wider variety of presentation and notation options this offers.
Wouldn’t you know it! The very first composition that I want to print is called Waltz for Sonja! Ratz. (And no, I rarely use my metronome. I was counting on the program to adjust to me!)
Thanks for all of the ideas. I will share them with a family member who can decipher them for me and help me make the right choices considering my limitations.
Thanks!
A fellow musician friend of mine has been using Score Writer to do the opposite of what you what to do. I mean, he can read music but can’t play the piano so he drags and drops notes onto the lines and plays them back through a keyboard. The software is really being used in reverse and is designed to do what you want to, Zoe. Best of all, there’s a demo version available from the linked site!
A few users mentioned that the software tends to pull notes to some round increment, like a sixteenth note. Isn’t this quantizing, rather than normalizing? I thought normalizing was smoothing out extra loud and too soft notes.
And like GorillaMan mentioned, look for the 15 pin Sub-D jack on the soundcard. This is also the joystick port and usually has a little joystick graphic pressed or drawn near it.