At 11:34 AM 7/18/2007 -0400, David W. Fenton wrote: >Looks to me like he spent all his time on the curved lines and didn't >pay any attention to getting the music notation right -- none of the >music lines up correctly metrically, and the spacing is quite >strange. > >Now, I don't know how hard Dennis worked to get the spacing right in >Finale, but the point is, 2 hours on a single page with only half the >music in it, and most of the music that's there not really properly >notated doesn't say much to me about Sibelius's capabilities. > >All it demonstrates is that it can do curved lines like Dennis did. > >And, gad, those ugly 8th/16th rests! Ick!
I'll agree on the rests. But as to the remainder, I do think the focus on the larger picture is a good one. I'm impressed by his work, if only because he had no model to work with, only my PDF draft. The spacing on mine is still in draft mode, but yes, it is spaced by hand. All automatic features are turned off, and the work is being done in page mode with the measures pre-locked via "fit music". There was a lot of page planning to get this right (I have only a pencil manuscript in front of me), and it required some Skype-based consultation with the real master, jef chippewa, just in case I was missing some options. I was, but at the time I was trying to get part extraction and playback to be easy. As it is, I can't do the latter, and the former will require a lot of pasting and patching up. The music on the left side of the page is entered normally. The space between there and what follows is a narrow measure with a 'blank' staff style applied. The remaining part of the page is a single measure with a large hidden time signature. The music is entered (all in page view for this score) on separate lines (using other instruments and hidden clefs) and leftover rests hidden. The clefs, barlines, time signatures, instrument names, score dividers and the composer's improvisation indicator (that inverted curved V) are all expressions. The remaining unused measures between the two solo instruments are hidden with blank staff styles. And as I mentioned earlier, the curved staves were five curved lines placed with a metatool. At that point, I had a big mess of ugly stuff, and moved each item by hand to get it legible. After the whole 28-page score is done, I'll go back and respace more carefully. Then I have to create parts from as much of the full score as I can use. This whole page took four hours, including time spent on preliminary spacing of the music. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
