A Few More Questions

[MJL54-]

Originally Posted by richiebee

One of my arranger friends uses Finale (despite my recommendation that he buy Sibelius!), and I know he had a bitch of a time doing the MIDI set up. What's more, he found that the latency was way too high to allow him to play live anyway!

I use Sibelius, and since I'm not a great keyboardist, I actually find it faster to input notes by hand. Once you've got the key strokes down, it's really easy (and apparently also in Finale: another composer friend of mine uses manual input even though he's an accomplished pianist).

I've done three piece horn section arrangements in Sibelius and had them printed out before our rhythm section is ready to bash out new arrangements with horns on new tracks.

But, I guess if you want to do it by inputting notes, Finale should be able to handle it for you. I'm sorry I don't have any other answers for you. If you are inputting everything with a keyboard though, you might consider putting your parts in in Cubase. Cubase will give you a much more friendly graphic representation of what you're doing, even if the actual notation side is not as comprehensive. You can export from Cubase to Finale if you want to check the integrity of your parts, although I'd go with whatever sounds right, is right and forget Finale altogether.

I only use notation software where I need to print out parts and give them to real musicians (maybe you're the same). With samples and synths, too much tweaking needs to be done with controllers to get stuff to sound authentic to bother with notation software for this task.

I'm not saying you're wrong to consider using Finale for your input, but just that its not the only way.

Actually, my work is not so complicated as what you're suggesting. I only do piano arrangements - period - basically for myself. I do an arrangement, and then I learn it and adjust it to a real playing/recording environment, thought practice, just as if I hadn't written it myself, because I often come up with stuff in my head that I can't play right away, without first understanding what I actually wrote! It provides me with an excellent guide for the later development, both in the structure of the piece and in the improvisation I later derive from it. My musical abilities are mostly in the improvisation area, and though I write arrangments, I don't have the acquired skill to write music out away from the keyboard. I guess my forte is keyboard arranging. I'm only mentioning this because it casts some light on how I work, and that is relevant to the kind of software one uses and how. So, what this amounts to is, yes, I agree you can input manually - I've done a lot of that, and it isn't complicated. I wrote a whole bunch of arrangememts that way before I even had a keyboard! I did it all with just a mouse.

Recording in Finale is not great - certainly now that I understand how Cubase works - it's much better for me to use it for playback and practice. The only thing is that found it easier to manually input notes into Finale with the keyboard, as opposed to using the mouse. I also agree with you the Sibelius is better. I've always found Finale to have certain nagging bugs that just won't go away. It's just little things, but it's really annoying and gives me the impression that Finale is a less sophisticated software, put together with less attention to detail and, unfortunately, quality. It also has a whole bunch of egraver opitions, and other things like that which I condider unessential. The program has crashed on me many times for no accountable reason.

I don't know enough about Cubase yet to know all the ins and outs, but I'm looking into all the ways to streamline my work.

Sorry to write so much, I always talk a streak! I'm probably going to export the Finale files into Sibelius, and just unload Finale - simplify!

I have one question I'd liketo ask you, besides this. Could I send you a PM?

Mike.

[richiebee]

Originally Posted by MJL54-

I have one question I'd liketo ask you, besides this. Could I send you a PM?

Mike.

Sure, go ahead...