From manuscript to digital copy

[silvestrione]

I have a friend who is not in the digital world at all (still uses a typewriter!), but is a fine pianist and composer. His major work for piano, about 40 minutes long, is in manuscript only of course, and just the one at the moment.

I was thinking of offering to 'type it up' for him, as it were, and was looking for tips on the best (easiest) way to do this these days, e.g. perhaps using a free introductory offer from some app that would enable me to transcribe it, print it off for him to proof read, and then make a decent copy or two.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[RichardB]

There are some free solutions but they have a relatively steep learning curve. On the other hand, Sibelius, which is quite easy to learn, is available on monthly subscription which I think is about £10 a month.

[Simon Biazeck]

I have been using Sibelius for a long time and have refined my editions of 16th choral works with various fixes, particularly for editorial accidentals within the staves. (I use the Norfolk music font set - available separately for a small one-off contribution). As a sixth-rate composer of choral music, I don't challenge its capabilities but it is very flexible for contemporary music. I have an erstwhile Aussie colleague who is a disciple of LilyPond - free and open source - and gets superb results for early music. It is very complicated - a steep learning curve as Richard says. Good luck!

~SBz.

[RichardB]

And maybe I should add, as Simon has, that Sibelius is what I use myself. I wasn't a particularly early adopter, having used it since 2010 when I realised that I could actually do everything with Sibelius that I could do with ink and paper, even if sometimes this requires more or less messy workarounds. But I don't think you'd have any problem setting piano music. If you do decide to go that way, feel free to get in touch with any questions or problems.

[silvestrione]

And maybe I should add, as Simon has, that Sibelius is what I use myself. I wasn't a particularly early adopter, having used it since 2010 when I realised that I could actually do everything with Sibelius that I could do with ink and paper, even if sometimes this requires more or less messy workarounds. But I don't think you'd have any problem setting piano music. If you do decide to go that way, feel free to get in touch with any questions or problems.

Thanks for that. I'll see what my friend thinks, and then see if I can have a go!

[Dave2002]

Thanks for that. I'll see what my friend thinks, and then see if I can have a go!

Musescore has similarities with Sibelius and Dorico, but is effectively free. See it and download it from MuseScore dot org, but beware the confusion from MuseScore dot com, which is a related site. The MuseScore program works on Windows, Linux and MacOS. I don’t think it’s significantly harder than Sibelius. The new version MU4 is liked by some but detested by others who prefer the earlier version 3.6.2, which doesn’t do fancy sonic tricks or work with VST sound libraries. There are some boring limitations, but possibly other notation systems have similar problems. One thing which is a real pain with MuseScore is not having a proper album feature, so if you write a few pieces and want to combine them into a suite that can be a pain. Also if you write a symphony and then want to reorder the movements that’s also a pain. However some people are happy to work with paper, or PDFs, and “simply” get round these issues by rearranging the PDFs/pages. Handling instrumental parts may be an issue, but it is with most notation software.

For piano music MuseScore should be fine - certainly worth a look, and also look at some of the piano scores posted on MuseScore dot com.

A free trial of Sibelius should cope with piano music, and indeed there is a free version which may be good enough for a piano score. It is possible to use a few notation programs interchangeably, for example using Midi or Musicxml files as exchange vehicles, which will allow some interchange between some programs - MuseScore, Dorico, Sibelius. However when it comes to fine detail it is probably going to be best to choose one system and learn how to do the best engraving with that. Using these tools to give sonic renditions is a different matter again.

[RichardB]

Here is an (admittedly rather extreme) example of piano music set in Sibelius:

[Dave2002]

Here is an (admittedly rather extreme) example of piano music set in Sibelius:

That’s good, though several notation systems can do that - I listed some of the front runners (IMO) above. Some notation programs are a pain to work with - for example some based on TeX or LaTex, and there are others thought to be difficult. For any really tricky or elaborate score there is likely to be quite a learning curve, with significant attention to technical detail required whichever notation system is used.

If a piece is playable, then some of the systems can do at least a rough cut by playing on a MIDI keyboard and using that as an input device, but it is often easier to just learn how to do the notation. Doing direct Midi keyboard entry is likely to require very slow and precise playing as the key presses are captured. Rather like Optical Character Recognition for documents, this approach may be quick at producing a poor first representation of what’s wanted, but the subsequent editing and tidying up often requires more effort, such that direct data entry and editing would have been quicker.

[silvestrione]

Here is an (admittedly rather extreme) example of piano music set in Sibelius:

Wow! That's very impressive, the above-and-below-the stave work in particular. Might need a John Ogdon to sight-read that.....

Incidently, can I hear that played somewhere?

[RichardB]

Wow! That's very impressive, the above-and-below-the stave work in particular. Might need a John Ogdon to sight-read that.....

Incidently, can I hear that played somewhere?

Not yet... It's from a very short (2 minute) piece written for the Australian pianist Alex Waite, who has played it a couple of times but not in the same room as any recording equipment. (It only has a couple of bars that are piled up like this!) Actually something that always happens when I post a page of notation online is that I immediately see things that ought to have been tidied up before letting it out in public, like the way one of the hairpins at the bottom impinges on the "pp" dynamic marking.

The nice thing about Sibelius (and computer music-setting in general) is that it sorts out all the horizontal positions of notes in multipart textures like this, which I previously would have done by measuring everything out with a ruler, making construction marks in light pencil and then erasing them once the notes were inked in. Doing things that way, I became accustomed to the look of scores where equal horizontal distances always corresponded to equal durations, which is not the way traditional scores are done, and not the way Sibelius does things by default. The workaround was to have another silent and invisible "instrument" which is just playing repeated notes with a value smaller than any of those in the actual score (64th notes in this case) so that everything is forced to line up to these even though they're hidden from view. Otherwise a bar like this would (to my mind at least) be even harder to read; although I dare say it wouldn't have made much difference to John Ogdon!

[Joseph K]

The nice thing about Sibelius (and computer music-setting in general) is that it sorts out all the horizontal positions of notes in multipart textures like this, which I previously would have done by measuring everything out with a ruler, making construction marks in light pencil and then erasing them once the notes were inked in. Doing things that way, I became accustomed to the look of scores where equal horizontal distances always corresponded to equal durations, which is not the way traditional scores are done, and not the way Sibelius does things by default. The workaround was to have another silent and invisible "instrument" which is just playing repeated notes with a value smaller than any of those in the actual score (64th notes in this case) so that everything is forced to line up to these even though they're hidden from view. Otherwise a bar like this would (to my mind at least) be even harder to read; although I dare say it wouldn't have made much difference to John Ogdon!

Reading this reminded me of my final year composition project, mostly a string quartet, and all manually written down. For the first half or so I was really fastidious in measuring out everything with a ruler until the deadline started to approach, so I had to abandon the nice calligraphy and exact relative measurements of everything (let alone begin to bother with wondering about how it might sound).