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music software
I'm currently arranging a (modern) piece of music for choir and piano. I'm finding there are two software features -- easy to implement I think -- that would make me particularly happy.
(Note: I'm just grousing about my software here. I'm unlikely to change to something else unless an import path better than MIDI exists for all my current music, but feel free to say positive things about other software anyway, if you like. I may switch someday, after all. But this isn't explicitly a call for alternative suggestions.)
First, chords. The composer of the melody line sent me a melody with chords, so the first thing I did after typsetting the melody (he sent me PDF rather than source, which was fine in this case) was to populate a temporary line with block chords so I could hear the melody in that context. (Hey, if the tools are available I will use eyes and ears to arrange, thank you very much. Besides, I am so not used to modern music...) It would be nice if I'd been able to just enter the chord names and have the software fill in the multi-note blocks for me.
The second is the accompaniment line. A lot of choral music provides a piano line that is the union of the voice parts, which the pianist plays during rehearsal. Reading open score is a pain in the butt, so you want to provide that music to the pianist in standard piano notation. I want my software to auto-generate it for me. (Though in this case I'm leaning toward having the piano do something other than mimic the singers, so this would be something only relevant for rehearsal. And maybe it's not critical there? I don't know; I personally find a piano playing all the lines while I sing in a choir to be a distraction, not an aid, but I may be a mutant.)
Oh well. Life isn't perfect. For most of the music I do, neither of these features would be all that relevant. But every now and then I bump into something new. It's all part of stretching, I guess. :-)
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yes, it would be nice, but could also prove a pain as it might arrange the chord incorrectly... C-E-G-C is a C major chord, but it might be voiced C-G-G-E or something, depnding on the melodic line at a given point.
My experience with good accompanists is that reading an SATB score is pretty simple. I spent 3 years as a music major and one of the things I had to do was take 6 semesters of keyboarding. One of the skills we were required to start learning around the 3rd semester was playing from an open score, and not always SATB scores... sometimes we'd have to take a full orhestral score and boil it down.
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Hmm, good point -- though if, as a first pass, it always put chords in standard order (no inversions) and I sometimes had to move a couple notes around, that might still be faster. But you're right; it's not completely automatic.
(In this case, the chords are just on a scratch track and I just put them all in standard voicing. As I write parts of the other lines, I'm then dropping that track out to evaluate the work. Meanwhile, though, that track helps get a harmonic structure in my head for parts I haven't written yet.)
Hmm, I thought reading SATB was more of a pain than you describe, but maybe that's just the experience of the ameteur musicians I tend to hang out with. Most of us haven't been to school for this. If the pros don't care, that's fine with me. :-)
sometimes we'd have to take a full orhestral score and boil it down.
Yikes! Not on the fly, I hope!
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