Quote from Forum Archives on October 24, 2003, 4:30 pm

Posted by: wulf <wulf@...>

Chetin <bandaddie@hotmail.com> wrote:

> I think, from what I have been reading from the thread,
> PrintMaster, or Finale may be a good investment, as I need
> to bring our new guitarist up to speed on this new music,
> and work with the other guitarist and the drummer. I have a
> great deal of work to do. The gospel band's song book, for
> instance, has 290 pieces, all of which are written for
> piano.

I purchased PrintMusic (not PrintMaster) about 11
months ago. My justification / excuse (delete as you
please) was that I was preparing music for our Christmas
Carol service and I needed to produce music with time
signature changes (can't remember which carol) and
sections transposed for Bb instruments. PrintMusic did
all of that and I found it at a reasonable price on Amazon
(having spent a couple of weeks enjoying the free
'Notepad' version but getting frustrated by the limitations).

I've found that the investment has paid dividends - not
only was it more than adequate for the carol service but
I've made extensive use of it for both what I do at church
and for my band. The output has been useful... and it's
also given me input as a brilliant self teaching tool. So
far, the only thing I've wanted but not found an easy way
to do in PrintMusic is ghost note heads, but I can live
with that.

Whether it will do the job for what you require, I don't
know. Presuming the piano part is neatly printed, you
may be able to scan it in (I've not tried it) - a scribbly,
handwritten, annotated score won't be any good though.

I would tend to suggest a dual approach (beyond
experimenting with variants of Nashville Notation):

1) Learn to play from the existing music - if you can get
to grips with this, it saves 290 jobs of typing in or
scanning, correcting and rearranging the score.

2) If you're interested in notation software, try the free
Notepad version. You'll probably find limits fairly soon but
it will help you decide if the upgrades might be useful to
you.

Wulf

--
Wulf Forrester-Barker <//<
NB. new preferred address: wulf@web-den.org.uk
[wulf@bcs.org.uk will stop working shortly]
Website: www.web-den.org.uk/