# Recommend me a notation program - Full band scores and individual sheets



## yellowstudio (Jan 9, 2013)

Okay, here's a bit of a short story intro, you might want to skip this part:

I sing in a local ensemble that does a broad mixture of Rock, Pop, Musical and more classical /choral works. We're 18 singers and an 11-piece band. The group itself has been around for over 40 years now and from the murky dawn of its existence, our MD has been writing scores by hand. In general, he writes 4-part vocal sheets, although these can be split in all voices again, (Soprano I, Soprano II, Alto I etc...), and individual sheets for each of the band members. His form of writing is often a bit idiosyncratic, especially with repetitions and variations, and his scores often feature some performance remarks (most integrally so, there are numbers for patch selection in the keyboard players' scores, and in some cases special notes that trigger samples in a certain patch, stuff like that). We had a bit of a situation at our christmas concert where our 2nd keyboardist came down with a bad case of the flu and we had to get a replacement at 2 o'clock, with the show starting at 7. The guy was a remarkably good player, but having never heard a good deal of the songs before, he was helplessly in high water with the sheet music he had. 

The end result was expectedly catastrophic, which prompted us to seriously consider something that we've been throwing around as an idea for quite some time (and that also started briefly a couple years ago but was later abandoned): We need to create readable and well-commented sheet music, to facilitate entry for new members, but also to make life easier for ourselves. Oftentimes, things get changed during rehearsal, and there are several generations of sheet music around, etc., sometimes the drummer has an extra bar somewhere which he doesn't notice until the first rehearsal and so on and so forth... So we want to buy a couple licenses of a notation software and step by step convert all our sheet music to nice printed versions. Right now, we're facing the decision of which notation software to buy. Core functionalities would be creation of a full band (and chorus) score and the ability to easily print subsets of those, with or without lyrics, with or without chord symbols, performance notes etc... The full band score would be helpful, because it would immediately show any inconsistencies in the individual scores. Mind you, in the future it's still going to be our MD writing his stuff with pen and paper and our keyboardist, myself and perhaps one or two other members doing the copying into digital notation. 

What I'm looking for here are answers and comments to certain points: 

- Is it a good idea to go with Sibelius as a "new" user now, after the 2012 meltdown?
- Are there any idiosyncracies/issues in the programs you use relating to the requirements I posted above?
- Are there any programs that you would specifically recommend from personal experience?

Thanks a bunch
Andreas


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## composeradrian (Jan 9, 2013)

Hey Andreas,

I'm a composer/arranger/copyist for one of the premiere military bands in the USA. What you describe is a little what I deal on a daily basis, dealing with a wide spectrum of ensembles/musicians. My unit consists of full concert band, chorus, 17piece jazz ensemble, and rock band. So I can speak a bit more from personal experience in relaying advice to you.

1. I've remained pretty quiet about the whole meltdown. I certainly supported keeping Daniel and his team on staff, but that was the extent of my support. I can't simply rescind my use of Sibelius simply because I disagree with Avid. I'll continue to use it because it's customized to my needs (and increased efficiency for turning around a chart). Sibelius still has an easy approach and a light learning curve, even for intricate demands (i.e. formatting and subsets of parts). However, one of the big selling points for Sibelius was the backwards compatibility for files of previous versions. This is common for me, as I'm still resourcing files from Siblelius 2!! Now with the original team gone, it's uncertain if this will retain such a distinction. Some might recommend Sibelius First and that might be the more inexpensive option, but it does have limits. It works better for lead sheet based tunes (chords, vocals, and lyrics), but since you're a bit more stacked, I'd stick with the full version.

2. One of the bigger things I have to manage is the score vs. part differences. For a while, even though Sibelius has linked parts for some time, I would still make two separate versions to save the hassle of keeping everything consolidated into one single file. Of course, this can very daunting for a working environment of last minute changes (cuts, key changes, changing orchestration, etc.) because having to update both after separation. So in order to keep things in one file, it takes a bit of work. You may not have this problem with your setup, but with a full concert band, chorus, and soloists, score real estate gets eaten really quickly by so many staves. Consolidated parts are the only option because reducing staff size just makes it more difficult to read. And if the chorus needs a piano reduction, then you need to "show in parts only".... yadda yadda... FWIW, I think Finale handles chord comping better (i.e. putting in hashmarks and chord spellings), but a few plugins for Sibelius levels the playing field.

3. Personally, given all the info you need to keep track of, you're better off getting a program like Filemaker Pro. Then you can create a database of all the performance practices in regards to certain charts. You can easily put them in the score, but to me , something like that needs a certain amount of accounting offline. Also, I use the program Transcribe for alot of tunes that has limited sheet music (or none!!!). The name gives away its function, but it does help when you need a little direction for deciphering chords that may be a bit undistinguishable from recordings.

That's my 2 cents. Hopefully that helps. If you have anything more specific, don't be afraid to ask.

-Adrian


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## yellowstudio (Jan 9, 2013)

Hey Adrian,

thanks for your comments. Backwards compatibility is not an issue for me/us right now. 

I've had a bit of an issue with Sibelius 7 regarding chord naming before (I downloaded the trial to create lead sheets for a final exam concert I did as a guitar player where we were required to write sheets) but it was something pretty far out and it might just be that I didn't enter that chord in a format that Sibelius could understand, but I guess in general, that's not going to be a problem for us. 

As for the full score/individual parts thing, we'll just have to find a practice that works for us. The performance notices are not really THAT much, if there's a possibility to add free-text fields to a specific point in the music, that's going to be enough I reckon.

The general feeling I get from your post though is that there's not a real "showstopper" somewhere for that kind of copyist work in S7 and you're not expecting this to change either, which is good 

so long
Andreas


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