Music Writing Program

[Jam0864]

Does anyone know of a decent freeware music writing program. Hammerhead is good, but I'm kinda getting sick of drum sequences.

[bat]

Anvil studio!!!!!!!

you get to control everything!

[bluemonkmn]

There are a lot of free trackers out there.  Durnurd just showed me another one a few days ago called ModPlug: http://www.modplug.com/.  I'm looking at it because it can kind of convert MIDI files into tracker mods (but not very well sometimes).  I found a bunch of good tracker MODs at http://www.modarchive.com/ yesterday (trying to contact authors to see if they want to contribute to the SGDK2 music library).  But I haven't seen many good freeware MIDI editors.  MIDI is the way I've been composing a lot lately (in the past 10 years), but I'm thinking about getting back into MODs now.  I used to write mods about 15 years ago.  At the time I was limited to 4 channels of audio using MED (the "Music EDitor for the Amiga") then the sparkly new "OctaMED" became available that supported 8 channels.  Modern trackers have all kinds of new features and support countless channels I suppose.

[Jam0864]

What's a tracker?

[bluemonkmn]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker

[Jam0864]

I see.

[eric22222]

Well bat, I tried out Anvil studio a while back, and I really didn't care for it. However, since my computer was recently nearly wiped out by something or another, I've had to reinstall my software. Since MusicWrite didn't put the registration code on the CD, I was left without a midi editing software. I gave Anvil a second chance, and I don't regret it. It has a ton of cool little things that I wish MusicWrite had (my favorite is being able to use the keyboard as a, well, keyboard).

Thanks for pointing this one out. It's really gonna help out on the game. 

[sam]

I've been using it too. Ofcourse I'm pretty brutal at writing music but I'm learning .

[bat]

yep!... im might want to look into this MOD thing...

[mccool]

hey anvil studios is cool, but how do i make a note hold and go up and down at the same time? isnt that called a cresendo and a decresendo? i shouldve payed attention in music class! 

[bluemonkmn]

Well, I don't know much about anvil studio, but I can familiarize you with a few terms:
Crescendo: Increase in volume
Decrescendo: Decrease in volume
Portamento: Change pitch (usually to another note)
Vibrato: wavering pitch

These are unofficial definitions off the top of my head.

[eric22222]

Oh yeah, I tried to get something like this to happen but couldn't find what I was looking for. Apparently, to do anything, you're supposed to go to Edit > Insert Midi Controller Event. For some events you need the professional version...

I'm not sure if what you mean by go up and down at the same time, but here's a few work arounds:

• Crescendo/Decrescendo: If there are a series of notes (instead of one long note), you can change the volume of individual notes, slowly approaching your new max volume. Just right click on a note and go to properties.
• Vibrato/Trill: Make the notes very short, maybe 64th notes (4 flags). Shift every other one up by one half step.

[sam]

Oo! I paid attention in music class...
Couple things I can think of: Staccato = Quick loud-ish note
Adding a dot to a note adds half the length of the note to itself (if you can make sense out of that).
Tying notes to eachother makes it so there's no space inbetween; the notes aren't "tongued". I would say more but there isn't many other things you use often. Except maybe accented notes which I'm not sure you can do in Anvil. I guess you would just increase the volume of the note you want accented.

[eric22222]

Well, staccato isn't necessarily louder, just really short. I found you can make staccato notes by right clicking on a note, and moving down to one of the first options.

Apparently, you can add alot of notation, but it won't actually play it. You can have the program draw crescendos every which way, but it'll only draw them on the sheet...

[durnurd]

I think Voyetra Record Producer is a very good option here.  It allows all of these things very easy.  It doesn't use standard music notation to draw notes, but it does make composing very easy (for me at least).  All of these things are standard, and you can place any note anywhere you want and make it any length.  You can also change volume within a single note, or introduce panning, modulation, or pitch bending very easily.