RE: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
From: Ian Brockbank [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] A friend is trying to persuade a very talented Scottish Dancing pianist and composer to publish some of her music, and said if he had a reasonable program he'd offer to typeset it himself. There are two problems here. 1: he's very definitely a user/computer novice, so I'm not convinced he'd take to ABC - he'd rather have something graphical 2: he uses a MAC well, i don't know if it's on MAC or just PC, but myriad software www.myriad-online.com might be their website) has a great program called melody assistant that is shareware for $15, i think (one fee good for life). it will read and write ABC, MIDI, TAB, and do all sorts of nifty things. we used it last year to create an arrangement of the STAR WARS main theme for middle school strings. it worked well and we were able to print out all the different parts, with bowings and dynamics and things. BTW, my wife, an orchestra teacher and quasi-professional violinist, has never expressed an opinion about how the bars line up... i'll have to ask her about it. i expect that she will say the only thing that bothers her is awkward page changes Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
H. 2 can play at that :) Touché! :D = IAN J. L. ADKINS - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Crown Malt Inspector Glen Lachart, Inverness-shire, Scotland http://www.glenlachart.co.uk - The Angry Scotsmen's Internet Asylum http://www.cyberhub.co.uk - Blackmill Networks, Limited http://www.blackmill.net = Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
Oops. That should have been an h. Happy as a tuned Harp. (But you CAN tune-a-fish, right?) Ok, I'm embarrassed. Gosh, I raise my head to submit a post after weeks of silence, and what do I domake a typo. Naw, ye spellt it richt th first time, A wis jist makin trouble. :D --Ian = IAN J. L. ADKINS - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Crown Fault Inspector Glen Lachart, Inverness-shire, Scotland H. 2 can play at that :) Derek Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I'm happy as a tuned carp. What??! Oops. That should have been an h. Happy as a tuned Harp. (But you CAN tune-a-fish, right?) Ok, I'm embarrassed. Gosh, I raise my head to submit a post after weeks of silence, and what do I domake a typo. sorry --Cynthia Cathcart Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
Oops. That should have been an h. Happy as a tuned Harp. (But you CAN tune-a-fish, right?) Ok, I'm embarrassed. Gosh, I raise my head to submit a post after weeks of silence, and what do I domake a typo. Naw, ye spellt it richt th first time, A wis jist makin trouble. :D --Ian = IAN J. L. ADKINS - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Crown Malt Inspector Glen Lachart, Inverness-shire, Scotland http://www.glenlachart.co.uk - The Angry Scotsmen's Internet Asylum http://www.cyberhub.co.uk - Blackmill Networks, Limited http://www.blackmill.net = - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2000 11:15 AM Subject: Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program? [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I'm happy as a tuned carp. What??! Oops. That should have been an h. Happy as a tuned Harp. (But you CAN tune-a-fish, right?) Ok, I'm embarrassed. Gosh, I raise my head to submit a post after weeks of silence, and what do I domake a typo. sorry --Cynthia Cathcart Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Ian Brockbank [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know there are several people on the list who typeset and publish Scottish music. What do you use for laying it out? What are the pros and cons? I use abc2ps (the vanilla version by Michael Methfessel, as of now) on a Linux PC for the music. My current project is a book of tunes in melody-plus-chords format, for which I generate EPS files out of individual ABC input files which are then included in a LaTeX document. abc2ps produces only the dots -- everything else, from the tune titles to the little stories and explanations of the tunes to the table(s) of contents, is produced by LaTeX. A makefile keeps it all together. I've been looking into the ABC-embedded-in-LaTeX idea that was bandied about here a few weeks ago and my prototype of that seems to work, but I haven't moved the book project over to that yet. I like to think that the quality of the typesetting compares favourably with that of, e.g., _To Dance To_ by Muriel Johnstone, which sucks (IMHO). I don't know what Muriel uses but I don't like it. Pros: - Reasonable-looking output for music - Top-of-the-line quality for non-music content like accompanying notes - Easy to rearrange stuff while keeping table of contents etc. consistent and up-to-date - You can generate PDF which then goes straight off to the print shop or on the Web - Dirt-cheap -- all free software Cons: - Too difficult to use for people not well-versed in LaTeX, general Unix tools (make) etc. May change once ABC-embedded-in-LaTeX gets off the ground - Requires fairly extensive and current installation, in particular for the PDF option - Unsure whether the setup will fly on a Mac My main beef with abc2ps right now is that »« comes out like -- - -- | |-| | o. o o o. (you get the idea) which doesn't look right to me -- I would much rather see something like --- | -| |- | o. o o o. Do any of the abc2ps variants offer that option? I haven't bothered to go into the code yet; I usually write »aa aa« which is still sub-optimal but doesn't hurt my eyes as much as the other thing. In my only foray into the field, I drew every note by hand in a drawing package, having tried MusicTex and Noteworthy Composer. It took a while... I suppose so! I used raw MusicTeX for my first book of dances and it is an experience I don't care to repeat. This is a job that you give to your worst enemies if you *really* want to see them suffer. I don't know Noteworthy Composer, though. Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau . [EMAIL PROTECTED] The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. -- Harlan Ellison Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
| I know there are several people on the list who typeset and publish | Scottish music. What do you use for laying it out? What are the | pros and cons? Well, I only "publish" on the Web, but you might be interested. What I have is a collection of music for Scottish Country Dance at http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/Scotland/ The first paragraph has a "ABC listing" link. If you follow it, you will get (somewhat slowly ;-) a listing showing all the tunes, and a lot of acronyms along the left for different graphical file types. Click on a PS link for a whole file, or EPS for a single tune, and you'll get back a page of postscript that you should be able to paste into just about any fancy word processing program. What I do is just send them to the nearest laser printer. But this might give you an idea of what can be done with free software. Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
on 29/11/2000 8:19 am, Ian Brockbank at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi All, No, this is not a question about Artificial Intelligence and computer-generated music. It's rather simpler. A friend is trying to persuade a very talented Scottish Dancing pianist and composer to publish some of her music, and said if he had a reasonable program he'd offer to typeset it himself. There are two problems here. 1: he's very definitely a user/computer novice, so I'm not convinced he'd take to ABC - he'd rather have something graphical 2: he uses a MAC Can anyone recommend something which doesn't cost more than about stlg100, and which runs on a MAC? I use a very affordable ($120) program called SongWorks II published by Ars Nova Software. It can be downloaded in a trial version from internet and paid for by CC on-line. Forgotten their website, but if try Ars-Nova you either get them, or a German firm which is kind enough to refer you to their site 'a priori'. They also do other notation software; SongWorks is aimed at the writer wanting a melody line, chord accompaniment, perhaps some other staves, and lyrics which snap to the melody reliably. It is very easy to use indeed, and can auto-enter with a midi keyboard set up, or via the QWERTY which must be far harder - or via a picture of a keyboard, and the mouse. Cubase SCORE is also available, of course, but I found SongWorks much quicker for my purposes. I am sure it does not succeed in the quality of printing of a program like SIBELIUS which we ran on Acorn RISC machines, but it's cheap, can run on older Macs, prints well to laser, and does useful things like taking PICT format snapshots of staves for web publishing after conversion to GIFs. David Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
If you would like to take a look at: http://www.maxwellplace.demon.co.uk/pandemonium/guitars.html There is a paragraph with a link to 'Last Words from a Foreign Field' which is an example of a GIF image (26K for a full A4 page - not bad, that) created from SongWorks II, with chords and lyrics. Sorry, I have never recorded this song (or even performed it). It always sounds dreadful when I try, and it seriously needs someone else to do it! I would post the direct link but there's no back navigation button, it would just open a GIF file, whereas the link above opens my home page which has just been revised. David Kilpatrick Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
I think it only comes for PC, but I'm using Music Publisher for my book (soon to be published!) and it's worked great. It's easy to use, even though I've LOST the manual! Plus it turns my scores into PCX format so I can pop it into my book (which is in PageMaker) and I'm happy as a tuned harp. --Cynthia Cathcart Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Music-writing program?
Plus it turns my scores into PCX format so I can pop it into my book (which is in PageMaker) and I'm happy as a tuned carp. What??! = IAN J. L. ADKINS - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Crown Malt Inspector Glen Lachart, Inverness-shire, Scotland http://www.glenlachart.co.uk - The Angry Scotsmen's Internet Asylum http://www.cyberhub.co.uk - Blackmill Networks, Limited http://www.blackmill.net = Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
