joe ashby Posted October 22, 2002 Posted October 22, 2002 Been playing keyboards for years and writing recently. Doing everything from 4-part choral music, to stuff I need to write for a scorewriting class I'm taking, to writing charts out for a band I'm in. Need to get into recording and notation via midi with cool sounds. Any suggestions on gear? I have a midi controller I just got, some cables and plenty of keyboards (Korg OW 1, Alesis Q series, Kurzweil PC2 and another controller that is light weight). Been using a notation program with a mouse but this is obviously slow and tedious, and pretty limited as to what it can do. What kind of sound modules and software work well for you? I hear Sibelius is better than Encore but now I'm hearing about Sonar and Logic. I'd like to be able to not only print scores, but record stuff to disk with some decent sounds as I'm getting more serious about writing as time passes and want to ratchet it up a few notches.
cg1155 Posted October 22, 2002 Posted October 22, 2002 Well, there seem to really be two things going on here. Now, I'm not into scoring but I am into recording so I'll try to approach it from that slant. First answer these questions: 1. How good do your scores have to be? Good enough to hand out to your friendly local orchestra to play, or just passable so that people get the idea of what is going on. Does it have to be as neat and professional as what you find in published scores? If the answer is "yes," then you probably need to invest in a program that principally does notation and have a second recording program to use for making demos of those songs. If the answer is "no," then you can probably get away with the scoring functionality that comes in programs like Sonar and Logic or Cubase. The way I see this working is like this - you Cubase or Sonar to work up your song with sounds, recording midi tracks and such. You can even layer tons of sounds by doing a midi part, recording that track as audio, and then starting with another midi track on that same module. When you have your song finished you can export the midi tracks to Finale and tweak the score so that it looks appropriate and has the right accessory notation (a la dynamics, repeats, etc.) So there you go. There's my idea. Let me know what you think. It really all comes down to exactly what do you want to do, because there's a million ways of doing it. Casey
cg1155 Posted October 22, 2002 Posted October 22, 2002 Oh yeah, I forgot to ask what kind of computer you are using (processor, ram, hard drives, manufacturer, etc) and if you would be willing to upgrade. My reason is that audio recording programs require a pretty beefy computer (at least a PIII really or AMD Thunderbird) while midi scoring can be done on almost any computer. Oh, and your raw materials in the way of keyboards/modules will get you off to a good start. If you want to start adding live instruments you might want to think about a mic and audio card, and for scoring a sampler of some type is pretty much standard fare. Casey
Byrdman Posted October 23, 2002 Posted October 23, 2002 Originally posted by cg1155: 1. How good do your scores have to be? Good enough to hand out to your friendly local orchestra to play, or just passable so that people get the idea of what is going on. Actually the stuff you get as a professional in a pit orchestra is often written out by hand and often borders on the unreadable. My biggest gripe is when someone arrives with charts where, if you have 34 bars of rests, you see 34 bars with rests in them rather than one bar with a big 34 over the top. You spend a lot of time counting rests in an orchestra (1 2 3 4 2 2 3 4 ... 34 2 3 4 PLAY [oops]) and if you have to watch the sheet for 34 bars, instead of counting while checking out the audience, you are bound to lose your place.
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