#Finale notepad add instrument full#
#Finale notepad add instrument software#

Last year, I took on the task of orchestrating the piano score of a stage musical, created on Sibelius and exported as XML. I know others were quite proficient with it, but I had no love for the platform. I tried Finale for awhile, but never really accomplished much with it it almost felt like I was in an old-fashioned printing shop painstakingly selecting each print element and placing it on the page.

#Finale notepad add instrument software#

I could still create parts if I really needed to, but it seemed that my creative juices were going into navigating the software rather than composing new music. Unfortunately, our tech support dropped Atari, so I tried early versions of Sibelius on both Mac and PC, and my creative output dropped once again to almost nil. I found that I could create a score in little more time than it would take me to play the individual parts on a keyboard. The developers at Atari placed MIDI functionality VERY high among their priorities, and the necessity of fitting the entire program on a 720k floppy disk (!) meant that there were few unnecessary frills beyond those tools that were most useful to composers. In short, Notator was a composer’s dream. Next, I used C-Lab’s Notator on the Atari platform, and was amazed at how well the program worked. Jim’s untimely death created a large gap in music development for the PC platform, so like many others, I left the Intel-based programs for the more reliable architecture of the Motorola 68000 core. Under Jim’s capable hand the home computer became a useful, if clunky tool, and I still have several compositions in my library that were created on his software. For the remainder of the decade, I used the late Jim Miller’s Personal Composer on MS-DOS machines. I accomplished far more working with pencil and paper at the kitchen table while my wife taught piano in our tiny apartment.

#Finale notepad add instrument full#

The functions were so limited, and the interface so cumbersome, that I composed next to nothing for a full two years. My first experience with computer music was on a Commodore Vic-20 sometime around 1980.