Harold, thanks for the details you gave about NotePad.
[Harold Owen:]
>Finale makes it easy to upgrade to the relatively cheap
>programs PrintMusic (has MIDI keyboard input) and Allegro (adds
>editing features). However, Finale itself it not so expensive,
>especially if you qualify for the education discout price of about
>$235.
Finale is the one I would get, and I suppose I wouldn't then need the
others. (Are the others just subsets of the total features of Finale?)
I don't qualify for educational discounts, and before I purchase Finale I
do perhaps have to wait for other things currently in my life which could call
on my money to resolve themselves; but in the long run I do expect to purchase
Finale.
I guess my thoughts were a bit along these lines: I have not actually
composed music for some years now, and it may take me some time to get back into
the way of it - but I do have a backlog of unfinished scores in handwriting
which I may want to work on once again (mainly piano music and orchestral music
sketched in short score on anything from 2 to 8 or so staves).
I seem to find it difficult to organize my work when writing by hand, and
get bogged down when I have to make many alterations, and I believe the
unwieldiness of notating music by hand has significantly hampered my earlier
efforts to compose music. What I want to do is copy these scores into Finale
(or NotePad), and then hope I will be able to work more easily once I'm ready to
continue working on those scores. If the difference in ease I found in writing
using a word-processing program compared to handwriting before is any guide, I
should be able to compose music *far* more easily with a notation program.
So I will have to do a lot of simply entering already-existing music into
NotePad or Finale before actually composing further passages, which is probably
a good thing in a way, because I will need time to get familiar with entering
music, and it is surely best not to try to learn this at the same time as trying
to compose new music. So, by the time I've done a lot of note-entering and I'm
ready to compose, maybe I will be sufficiently familiar with note-entering by
then that I can do it on automatic pilot, and just compose. (I can compose
writing in a word-processor completely unhindered by typing which is completely
automatic now, if that's a fair analogy.)
So if I cannot purchase Finale yet, but plan to ultimately, I guess I was
just thinking that if NotePad were up to the job, I could perhaps meanwhile get
some of that entering of music done, and save a bit of time that way.
Another thing that could delay my use of Finale is the fact that I have
rather severe space problems on my C: drive, and I will need to either resolve
those or get a new hard disk before using Finale - and I do not have the
faintest idea what kind of hard disk to get for my laptop, and have been told
different options by different people. Thus I expect this problem to take some
time to sort out. So I assume that NotePad is simpler than Finale, and
therefore much less demanding of memory and hard-disk space than Finale, and I
could at least as a temporary measure use NotePad to get some work done until
I'm ready to get Finale.
You mention some limitations, Harold, some of which won't matter in the
slightest to me. But, for those that do, I suppose I could work around them in
a temporary fashion, thus:
>- can't change key or time signatures in the middle of a piece
If I want to change key or time signatures, put these sections in different
files, as if they were different pieces - then join them up in Finale when I get
it.
>- can't control layout
Just enter the music and let it lay itself out any which way - then later
fix it up in Finale.
>- can't do first and second endings
Just enter the bars and make them different endings in Finale later.
>- lacks special tools for special needs (like cross-staff notation
>for keyboard)
Could be a problem - but I guess I could just let the note-beams break and
fix it up later in Finale. (I assume you're referring here to beamed notes
which go from one staff to another within the same group.)
>- no way to enter or affect tempo changes during the piece, add
>ritard, accelerando, creschendo, diminuendo
Add them later in Finale.
Are there any reasons why these work-arounds would be infeasible, even on a
temporary basis? While I would not like to accept these limitations in the long
term, accepting them temporarily until I can use Finale sounds quite acceptable
to me.
I guess the point is that it would still allow me to do a great deal of
music entry using NotePad, and I could then add the refinements later in Finale,
and NotePad will have at least given me a huge head start in getting at least
some of the more routine work done beforehand, and allowing me to learn the
process on relatively routine but essential musical tasks I will have to do.
Does this sound a feasible way of working? Or could there be factors I
don't know about which mitigate against this? For instance, could it take so
long to tweak the files up later in Finale that in the long run I will waste a
lot of time, and that in fact it would be better just to wait until I can get
Finale, and not bother using NotePad beforehand?
Regards,
Michael Edwards.
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