While talk of notation is in the air, it’s worth noting that sheet music has a chance to make a comeback in the digital age. After all, passive musical consumption seems to have already peaked some time in the now-past 20th Century. The desire for fans to be able to play the music they love is strong as ever, evidenced by the popularity of the Rock Band and Guitar Hero phenomenon. If you really wanted to be optimistic, you could interpret the downturn in recorded music as a positive trend back to live music and personal performance – the very musical trends that had been eclipsed by recording in the first place.

As with digital music downloads, the hope in digital sheet music is, naturally, being able to connect fans with the growing variety of music they might want to play. Brick and mortar stores where you can buy sheet music have already largely gone the way of the dodo. Here in New York, the big victim this spring is the storied classical music supply around the corner from Carnegie Hall: Joseph Patelson Music House has gone online-only. Music recording can count on some sort of transition to new formats; music publishing has to find a way to rise from the ashes of a business that’s had to deal with the invention of the Internet and records.

Selling MP3s? Try Sheet Music, Too, Says TuneCore

Last week, the latest announcement on this frontier was a partnership between TuneCore and Musicnotes.com. That brings together two real success stories in this arena. TuneCore is an affordable, flat-fee service that distributes music across different online stores (iTunes, eMusic, Amazon MP3); they’ve worked with everyone from indie artists to Areha Franklin, Beck, Bjork, and Cirque du Soleil (among others). Talk long tail: they release more music per day than any single major does in a year.

Musicnotes is interesting in that their catalog of on-demand online sheet music, topping about 100,000 titles, has been accelerating in sales – even as the economic recession takes its toll on the rest of the industry. They also boast 100,000 daily visitors to their site, thanks in part to partnerships with big-name publishers like Alfred, Faber, Disney, and Universal.

So, how do you bridge downloadable tracks with scores?

To start out with, TuneCore is skimming the top of their long tail and turning their work into scores. That means any artist starting this month with more than 25,000 track sales in the last 90 days will get at least one of those songs scored by a pro and available for download, adding score royalties to track royalties. Artists eligible include various artists who might not get sheet music published by a traditional publisher – especially given the overhead conventionally associated with that. (Names as varied as Ziggy Marley, Boxer Rebellion, and MGMT count as “eligible,” though it’s not clear who will take them up on the offer.)

At the time of the announcement last week, Gavin Mikhail, William Fitzsimmons and Ingrid Michaelson had signed up. Michaelson’s pop singer-songwriter hit “The Way I Am” is one you may have already heard; as pictured here, that hit will be among the first offerings via the partnership. (The fact that you may have heard this tune via radio play – even if it’s via a college station – suggests that the old model may transition more gradually to a new model than hyped-up Internet pundits may suggest.)

The Online Notation Frontier

Notation has managed to survive centuries, so I suspect this could be just the beginning of a convergence in digital scoring. Since Sibelius announced a new release this morning, it’s worth noting that the company has long pushed online music with its Sibelius Scorch platform, which allows you to view and play scores as if you had a copy of the software used to create it. You can publish online directly from Sibelius’ software, and the platform is even used in sales. SheetMusicDirect (US site | worldwide) combines Scorch with a huge catalog of tunes. The company’s own Sibelius Music site, which can publish scores produced in Finale as well as Sibelius, just got a big update and has an active community. Some scores are free, but some are for sale – and anyone can open their own store.

In fact, given that, one question I have about the other stores is whether a dedicated sheet music score can have the success and brand loyalty an iTunes or even Amazon MP3 might, but we’ll see. (The other big question: will your Kindle soon display sheet music?)

For its part, musicnotes.com is happy to sell you tunes for Memorial Day or graduation, plus a free copy of Old Macdonald. (Yes, that’s the guy with the farm – that Old Macdonald.) Of course, Apple for their part seem to have dropped the ball on the whole idea; there’s been a lot of discussion about the fact that their GarageBand Lessons have been too few to make any real impact. But that shouldn’t stop other outlets from getting in on the act – and musicnotes.com sells lessons alongside sheet music, a key ingredient for selling sheet music being the ability to read it.

All this change is not without some wrinkles, as noted by Iowa City New Musical Resources blogger Peter GiIlette:

Sheet Music on the Web: Trends and Trials

He notes, for instance, the irony of the Web Library of 17th Century Music forbidding commercial performance of their online scores – you know, they just want a cut of all the money you’re making on … um … 17th Century musical performance.

At the same time, it’s telling that even G. Schirmer is getting in on its own on-demand delivery system.

So, my question to you is not to debate this in theory, but ask:

Have you found useful ways to sell or freely disseminate your own scores?

Have you bought a score online?

Is there a score you would buy online if an artist made it available, or if there were better stores available?

I’m curious what practical implications there may be.

And incidentally, these lead sheets and such are great, but I would absolutely buy alternative and strange experimental notation from electronic artists if they chose to deliver it.

Sibelius today gets the biggest upgrade I’ve seen from the tool in a long time, with major improvements to the way the notation package lays out musical objects on the score, and ReWire support so you can integrate it with your host of choice.

This is an especially meaningful upgrade to me, as I’ve spent a lot of time with Sibelius since its first Mac release about a decade ago, both composing and teaching with it. In case you missed it Friday, I just spoke about some tips that can help with working in both education and composing:

Five Sibelius 5 Notation Tips, for Education and Experimentation with Scores

A couple of the recent upgrades, while nice enough, were not necessarily “must-haves” – a natural part of any upgrade cycle. But this to me looks different.

Here’s what’s new in Sibelius 6:

• Magnetic Layout: Sibelius has always been “magnetic” in that it automatically reflows objects and page layout to keep everything looking “tidy” as its English creators would say. It’s also always been fast at the task. The problem is, a lot of objects have still required lots of manual tweaking. Sibelius users, you know what I’m talking about: hours spent fine-tuning dynamics and text indications, rehearsal marks, and the like. Basically, all the objects that we’ren’t magnetic now are. (see above)
• Magnetic Layout implementation: In addition to the more intelligent objects and space optimization, you’ll see clever collision avoidance, and red-colored collision highlighting when a collision is unavoidable. It also looks like there are nice new guides for, say, making a forte, piano, and hairpin descrescendo all line up, something that required painful manual tweaks previously.
• Versions and comments: Scores now track and manage revisions, and you can create comments on the score. Theoretically, this is for collaboration and teaching, though I imagine it’ll be useful even to a solo composer as a score is developed – enough so that you may start to haul your laptop to rehearsals instead of just paper.
• ReWire: Sibelius will now act as a ReWire client, so you can record the output of the notation software itself (see the new instruments), or simply sync Sibelius to an existing project. Avid is naturally talking all about Pro Tools, but because the integration is with ReWire and not just Pro Tools, Ableton Live, SONAR, Logic, DP, and the like all become possible, too. I’ve never much liked the notation facilities in standard DAWs, so that’s good news – and this should be huge for the composer just wanting to record a quick mock-up with virtual instruments as well as someone doing film score.
• Notation improvements: Slurs have always been reasonably elegant and automatic in Sibelius, but when it comes to manually overriding those controls, they’ve been more challenging. Sibelius 6 includes (appropriately enough) six handles for controlling slurs. There are also optional stemlets when beaming across rests (hugely helpful for people who write complex, cough, rhythms in their music), automatic feathered beams (instead of the hack we’ve been using), and smarter articulation placement. There are new jazz repeat bars, and cautionary accidentals are finally added automatically. These are minor things, but quite frankly, it’s little details like that that often make the biggest day-to-day difference. (The cautionary accidentals alone might be worth an upgrade.)
• New integrated instruments: Profiting from Sibelius’ acquisition by Avid (formerly its Digidesign unit), Sibelius now acquires the lovely virtual instruments from the AIR team who have been doing soft synths for Pro Tools. There’s a new player, plus M-Audio’s General MIDI sound player. This replaces a previous player from Native Instruments. I love NI, but the NI player in Sibelius often wasn’t quite plug-and-play, and this promises to be an improvement. (See additional notes below.)

There are other features, as well. Keyboard and Fretboard windows provide visual feedback to those just learning musical notation. (The guitar fretboard is handy, too, for keyboardists like me who need to think through what a guitarist would do with our music – it was an early feature of Sibelius’ entry-level guitar product G7.) Classroom Control allows educators to monitor students, send and receive scores, and monitor changes, which could help with file exchange or even administering exams in Sibelius.

One feature may be especially revolutionary for certain user applications. Live Tempo finally allows you to tap in a conductor track so you can control tempo fluctuations manually. This is more sophisticated than the (useful) similar feature in Finale – it integrates with Sibelius’ existing fluid tempo functionality, allows subdivision of beats and other musical possibilities, and can be recorded and played back and edited by section.

All in all, this is a very significant upgrade. I’m still disappointed that Sibelius – and mainstream notation in general – remains so inflexible for lots of alternative notations, and that seems not to improve in this release. But as I noted in my tips from last week, there are workarounds, and for sheer usability and saving time, these improvements all look welcome. I’m also pleased with the subtle notation changes – these are little things, but I think it refines the quality of score you can produce and saves time. We expect review copies soon, so stay tuned.

Q&A on Slurs, New Instruments

CDM asked Daniel Spreadbury of Sibelius to talk to us about some of the specifics of the new instruments from AIR and the slurs.

CDM: As I understand it, the sounds have been ported to the new instrument engine, built by AIR. What does this mean for bringing scores you’ve produced in earlier versions of Sibelius into Sibelius 6 for playback?

D S: When you open a score that was created in Sibelius 5 that used the old version of Sibelius Sounds Essentials played back by Kontakt Player 2, Sibelius 6 will silently update the score to use the new version of Sibelius Sounds Essentials played back by the Sibelius Player.

99 times out of 100 this will be an improvement on the playback you heard inSibelius 5. Although the updated Essentials library excludes a set of GM sounds (now provided by a separate virtual GM module, which can nevertheless be used simultaneously with the Sibelius Player if desired), and some sounds from old providers (e.g. recorder, handbells, piano, harp) have been replaced with alternatives from Garritan, Tapspace or AIR, there are many new and improved sounds that better complement each other than the sounds with Sibelius 5. For example, Essentials for Sibelius 5 contained only a solo violin sound from GPO and the other solo strings came from the GM set, so ensembles like e.g. string quartets didn’t sound great. In Sibelius 6, we have licensed further solo string sounds from GPO, so a string quartet will sound substantially better. And we’ve tried to do this across the board, for all the common genres of music.

For that one time in 100 when the original library would sound better, provided users still have Sibelius 5 installed, they will be able to choose to use the Kontakt Player 2 version of the library by choosing ‘Sibelius Essentials (32 sounds, Kontakt)’ from the Configuration menu in Play > Playback Devices.

CDM: Slurs with more manual control handles are something we had seen previously in Sibelius’ rival, Finale. Can you describe what’s different about Sibelius’ implementation?

Sibelius’s slurs have a number of advantages, including the power to copy and paste a tweaked slur and have its tweaks reliably reproduced when pasted elsewhere, the ability to tweak multiple selected slurs simultaneously via the Properties window, reliable keyboard editing of the position of each handle and control point, and so on. Sibelius 6 also implements the standard slur positioning rules (i.e. slur below when all stems point up, but slur above if any stem points down; in two voices, slurs go above stem up notes and below stem down notes, etc.) but retains the ability to simply flip slurs by hitting X. Slurs are also now properly editable on both sides of a system or page break.

Sibelius’s method of editing slurs (including multiple slurs simultaneously) and copying slurs while retaining these edits, together with the fact that creating, extending and retracting slurs is in general simpler in Sibelius, gives slurs inSibelius 6 the edge.

Ed. note: Based on my experience with previous releases of both programs, this sounds about right – now I just need to pick something to compose this summer so I can give Sibelius 6 a try! –PK

If you have more questions about the new release, ask them here, and we’ll have a look as the new release comes out or pass along technical specifics to the folks at Sibelius.

Creating digital music is about more than audio. Notation remains an essential way to communicate among musicians. Notation is deep and complex, so there’s plenty to talk about. As a long-time Sibelius user, though I want to discuss some core techniques that I find open up a lot of other possibilities, techniques to which I continually return. I happen to be sharing this at a discussion at the City University of New York Graduate Center today, so the timing seems right.

Teachers and experimental, avant-garde composers have something in common: you often need to convince notation software to behave in a way that’s contrary to the expected norm.

To save you time, notation software generally assumes that all music has bars, and that those bars go from left to right with everything visible. This is especially true in Sibelius, which is able to perform as quickly as it does because everything you see on a score is relative to a position in a bar, rather than being set up arbitrarily as you would in a page layout program.

That works much of the time, but what if you have music that isn’t in a time signature? What if you’re transcribing early music or world music that doesn’t operate in 4/4? What if you’re making a quiz in which you don’t need bars, or want to have a blank space for students to fill in answers?

Updated: Just days after this feature, Sibelius announces Sibelius 6. Relevant to this story, this means at least some of the manual hacks for things like beaming across bars and feathered beams will now be automatic! Neat! I’ll have to do new tips for Sibelius 6 when it arrives.

Technique 1: Staves and Instrument Types

Oddly enough, the answer to all of these questions is basically the same: change the way the staff is displayed. You’ll still need to account for bars behind the scenes, but once you learn how to handle Sibelius’ staff options, this isn’t so difficult. This step is a bit confusing for those of us (hand raised) who have been using Sibelius since 1.0, as Sibelius 5 changed the name of this option from Staff Type Change to Instrument Change. (The latter makes more sense in conventional music, even though the former will make more sense for this tip.) But the technique is basically the same.

To insert a new instrument type, right-click (or ctrl-click on Mac, or choose Create) and select Other > Instrument Change.

Select Choose from > All Instruments and Family > Others (for the most generic type).

You’ll see some useful options already. In addition to choosing different numbers of lines, there’s an option that entirely hides a staff — “No instrument(hidden)” – and options that show just barlines or just bar rests.

Try selecting the “No instrument (bar rests shown)” option, then click in the score where you want the change to happen. You’ll see a blue rectangle around the barline at which the change is inserted. Clicking this barline in the center will allow you to select the change itself. Once selected, you can drag it left and right to change the point at which the change occurs, or press Delete to remove it. (That’s important for hiding portions of staves, as you’ll need to be able to select them even when hidden!)

You can imagine lots of possibilities for using this simple technique. For quizzes, for instance, you might simply hide the portion in which you want a student to fill in an answer. Or you can use those hidden bars to help space out a quiz. Or you can use some hidden bars to provide space for a graphical notation in a contemporary / experimental score.

For all of those applications, though, you may need some different variations.

To create your own instrument type, choose House Style > Edit Instruments.

Choose Ensembles > All Instruments, then Families in ensemble > Others to get the generic types.

Let’s try creating a staff type that looks like a normal treble staff, but hides the barlines. Select “Unnamed (treble staff)” and choose New Instrument… to create a new instrument that will be based on that existing instrument. Sibelius will ask if you’re sure. (It can smell uncertainty. You’re sure.)

Under “Name in dialogs,” choose a useful name, like “Treble staff (barlines hidden).”

There are actually lots of powerful options here, but skip straight to “Edit Staff Type.”

Under General, you can choose the number of staff lines and what objects are shown.

Uncheck Initial barline and Barlines, and you’ll have a staff with hidden barlines.

Also make sure to uncheck “Used as default staff.”

Bar rests won’t make much sense if you don’t have bars, so click the Notes and Rests tab, and uncheck “Bar rests.” You’ll want to leave the Rhythms options, because you probably do want rhythms in this case, just not the barlines and bar rests. (Unchecking Rhythms could be useful, though, for things like plainchant.)

Again, to insert, you’ll right click, choose Other > Instrument Change, and use the blue arrow to click where you want the change to go. Here’s our result:

And yes, this can be handy for printing out blank notation paper if you’ve run out / forgot your manuscript notebook. (Been there.)

One last note: you may have noticed that you still have bar numbers. Check House Style > Engraving Rules > Bar Numbers. Other global score settings are found here, so you should get in the habit of a trip to the Engraving Rules any time you’re creating a new score or developing a new template.

Technique 2: Noteheads

Just about anything you can’t do with staff types, you can do with noteheads.

The most useful notehead, of course, is a dead notehead.

Okay, that sounded like some sort of anti-notehead bitterness. But seriously, by hiding noteheads, again, you can create all sorts of alternative notations, and because stems are still visible, musicians can more easily see where beats are. You’ll also need noteheads for percussion notations and the like.

To change notehead types, make sure the floating Properties window is visible (Window > Properties). This is useful for changing other settings, too, so it’s well worth exploring. In the dropdown, you’ll see headless noteheads (position 7).

You can also edit your own Notehead types, just as with instruments and staff types, by selecting House Style > Edit Noteheads.

One other neat trick using the Notes panel is that you can turn on and off tuplet brackets. That allows a little hack that gives you feathered beams. You’ll find instructions under Feathered beams in the manual (p. 79 in my edition).

Technique 3: Locking Layout

The problem with just hiding barlines and such is that you still have bars underneath, and they’ll continue to automatically flow as Sibelius adjusts the layout. With most scores, that’s a good thing, but with ametrical scores or quizzes or short example snippets you want to export, that’s obviously a bad thing.

The solution? It’s time to learn the keyboard shortcuts for locking your layout in place.

System breaks: Click a barline and hit the enter key. You can insert forced system breaks just like carriage returns (line breaks) in a word processor. You’ll see an icon above the score both in the line with the break, and the line immediately following.

Page breaks: Ctrl-Return / Cmd-Return breaks the page.

Special breaks: You’ll find other options in Properties > Bars, including a Special Page Break that inserts a blank page. Click a barline first, then choose from the drop-down menu in Bars.

Indentation: You can move a line left or right by clicking the left-hand side of a stave, then moving it right with the left and right arrow keys. Hold down ctrl (PC) or cmd (Mac) to move by larger increments.

Expand or contract bars: Invariably, you’ll find some of the automatic spacing doesn’t look quite right – especially in these special cases. Click a bar, then press shift-alt (shift-opt) and the left and right arrow keys to make a bar wider or narrower.

If you ever get lost with any of these steps, Layout > Reset Position restores the default.

Technique 4: Exporting Score Snippets

At a certain point, as a composer or a teacher, you don’t always want to do all of your page layout in Sibelius. Likewise, I’m surprised that people don’t more often use little snippets of scores to communicate ideas, whether it’s highlighting a specific comment on a bigger score, or using notation software to quickly communicate short bits of music. Obviously, this is useful for musical examples in essays and the like, too.

When you’re ready to export parts of a score, you have several methods in Sibelius:

The graphics-copying way. Choose Edit > Select > Select Graphic (Alt-G), and Sibelius gives you a bounding box that allows you to select a portion of your score. (If you select your bars before choosing this option, it will attempt to snap to the right area, from which you can adjust it further if you like.)

Once you have the area selected the way you like, use the standard copy shortcut (ctrl-C / cmd-C), then choose your word processing or layout app and paste. To cancel out of this mode, hit Esc.

Most of the time, this is really all you need to do, unless you’re concerned about higher-quality output. In that case…

The export way. If you need to fine-tune output options and DPI, you should instead use File > Export > Export Graphics. Here, you can select the format you like. OpenOffice isn’t listed, but choosing the Sun StarOffice(TIFF) method is your best bet. For Word, choose the explicit Word EPS setting for the highest-quality output.

The PDF way. If you’re on a Mac or have Adobe Acrobat Professional (or another PDF generator) installed, there’s an additional way, which is to export to PDF. I find that inserting PDFs is the best way to go for inserting later to software like InDesign. The default PDF creator on Mac is pretty good, but a full version of Acrobat is often preferable to other options.

Screencast: Sibelius has a screencast of these techniques, which you’ll find from the opening screen.

Technique 5: Making Teaching Materials

The other techniques all work for teachers and composers alike, but when you do need to teach…

Does all of this seem like a lot of work? Still not sure how you combine the layout techniques above to make something look like a quiz, flash cards, or the like? Need to teach something and running short on time?

A recent feature in Sibelius is a comprehensive, shared set of teaching materials. (If you want to share and share alike, you can also publish your own materials to the site and spread the love.)

You’ll find the site itself at:

http://www.sibeliuseducation.com/

When you open the program or choose File > Worksheet Creator, you can tap into these resources.

Choose Template, and you’ll find a number of blank templates set up by activity (manuscript paper, worksheets and handouts, matching different materials, and flashcards).

If you want still additional help, ideas, and starters, choose Type of Material > Teaching and learning materials. You’ll want to limit your search, or loading the possibilities will take a long time. But from there, you can find all kinds of additional examples. Many of these come from the UK, so be prepared for English terminology and even UK-specific projects, but they’re still quite useful even if you’re American and tend not to call things “breves.”

Pick a category, and you’ll find other layouts that can be the basis of your own work, as well as some relatively generic materials that are useful to everyone.

Here’s what you’ll see as you dig into worksheets:

Pull up an example, and you’ll find something that you may be able to use as-is, or at least a template that could be useful for adapting to your own coursework.

There’s even a Circle of Fifths ready to go. (The only change you might need to make, depending on the part of the world in which you live, is to call it the Circle of Fourths!)

Other ideas?

This is a bit of a departure for CDM, but I know lots of you out there are producing notation for various reasons. I hope this was helpful, and if anyone wants to do a similar story for Finale or another tool, I’m happy to have it. Let us know what other tips you like or if you have additional questions.

Addendum

Having just done this workshop, it’s worth noting a couple of things I discovered.

First, Sibelius I see now has an option in Preferences to account for laptops that don’t have numeric keypads, making entry much easier (though I still prefer the numeric keypad layout):

Next, I was reminded that a lot of tricks use the Beam line type, which you’ll find in the Line dialog. Any old line will do, but this will look like your other beams. This way, you can manually draw in notations that the software itself may not recognize.

And it’s worth noting that a lot of beaming tricks can be accessed in one of two places:

1. Beam display in the Staff Type House Style (there’s a checkbox buried in there for forcing “horizontal beams,” alongside the options for hiding rests and such above)

2. Beam groups and beaming rules (including the ability to beam across rests) in the Time Signature dialog.

For Finale users, most of these basic strategies will translate to your notation tool of choice. Generally, Sibelius lets you select objects directly, whereas Finale uses specialized tools, selected by toolbar icons, for each job. That also means that when you’re using Finale, you may need to select the tool before you’re presented with variables related to that type of object, whereas Sibelius consolidates those settings under House Styles.

For instance, Finale edits the staff types via an item, accessed from its staff tool, called Define Staff Types. That dialog is very similar to the Staff Type and Instrument dialog above.

Ultimately, in fact, both Sibelius and Finale have a lot of the same strengths and shortcomings once you learn them, because fundamentally they do treat scores according to regular bars and barlines. Interestingly, Finale has the abilty to have independent time signatures on different staves, but it’s almost useless, because it still puts the barlines in the same place. (That is, both tools are limited in this respect.)

I know some people were wondering about this – it’s now official. Digidesign reports Pro Tools 8 is actually shipping now, with the integrated MIDI edit window, score notation editor (via recently-acquired Sibelius) right in the DAW, bundled instruments and synths, some amp simulation, “Elastic Pitch,” and additional insert slots.

None of this is huge news to users of competitive products, with the notable exception of Sibelius notation integration. I’m very keen to hear how people actually use that, because the score facilities in tools like Logic aren’t competitive with favored tools like Sibelius and Finale, in my experience. On the other hand, many people are perfectly happy keeping their scoring and audio editing workflows separate from one another – particularly if you’re using Pro Tools for audio editing and Sibelius to write that new string quartet. So as this ships, do let us know how you’re using it, or if it’s a non-starter.

So, what does it cost to upgrade?

Pro Tools HD 8 Upgrade: $249 US
Pro Tools LE/M-Powered Upgrade: $149 US
Pro Tools M-Powered Full Version: $299 US (for use with M-Audio audio interfaces)

If you bought Pro Tools systems or upgrades since October 3, the new release is (rightfully) free.

Of course, that still means you might still be tempted to just go buy one of the cheaper Mbox products with Pro Tools LE included. There are also upgrades for the Music and DV bundles.

Note compatibility: Vista SP1 (32-bit only, still no 64-bit) is supported, as is Mac OS X 10.5.5. 10.5.6 isn’t ready yet, and Vista requires Business or Ultimate, which as I said in the past I still find pretty odd given that Home Premium is basically identical from a support standpoint. (Digi’s choosing to be a bit literal with that.) On the other hand, only Leopard support is available, whereas on Windows XP Home and Professional remain supported with XP SP3.

Once this arrives, I’ll be curious to hear about you. I’m happy doing my work in SONAR and Live at the moment, so I don’t think I’d be a fair judge, but someone who uses Pro Tools daily would be. Be in touch.

Pro Tools 8 Shipping [News @ Digidesign.com]

Pro Tools 8 is up on Digidesign’s website. Rather than copy and paste their features, I’ll let you read. This may not shake you from your music making tool of choice, but it looks like it could be, at long last, the substantial refresh for Pro Tools users of that platform have been waiting for. I can quickly sum up the strategy (“strategies” and “tactics” being on the American political mind lately):

• Get all the instruments and effects in the box: Apple’s Logic Studio set the bar for this by first bundling lots of soundmakers,then cutting the price. Digidesign has been busy with their talented AIR group designing some very nice stuff, so this is a no-brainer. Updated: as readers note, you still don’t get a sampler as with EXS24 in Logic and now Dimension Pro in SONAR. Then again, you could add on your on own; is that really a deal breaker for folks?
• Fix the UI (conservatively): Without rocking the boat, obviously Pro Tools was long overdue for a fresh coat of paint and some enhancement.
• Beef up MIDI: This was long Pro Tools’ weak spot, perhaps because of its lineage as an originally audio-only product (the opposite of most of its rivals); MIDI seems to be better integrated with existing paradigms for editing
• Edit pitch more fluidly: AutoTune and the magical note-editing Melodyne are probably safe, but more fluid editing of audio pitches is making its way into audio software in general
• Integrate scoring: The fruits of Digi’s Sibelius acquisition, real, modern music notation is finally in a major DAW (not the dated, clunky implementations elsewhere). My only concern: I hope Sibelius continues to make progress as a dedicated notation tool, because having myself spent long hours over scores, a lot of composition happens outside software like Pro Tools for other reasons.

The notation feature, to me, is probably the biggest story. As a long-time Sibelius user and with some interesting composer contacts, I expect to look at how this works in some depth. Congratulations to Sibelius and Digidesign for pulling this off; I’ll be in touch.

Actually, let’s do better. I’m through really reviewing DAWs. You know why? If I used every DAW, I’d never get any music made. And, oddly, the process of even trying to review something as broad as a tool like Pro Tools just about short circuits any music logic anyway. So I’d rather build a network of gurus in each, and talk about actual music production rather than feature lists – the latter is the developer’s job, anyway. If you’re game and consider yourself an advanced user, get in touch. I’ll have more on organizing this soon.

In the meantime, Digi has posted some videos; free registration on their site required.

Pro Tools 8 Announcement + Demo Videos

Update: keep the comments coming. To me, the challenge all these tools face is that people are (naturally) entrenched in what they’re using. So, yes, it’s possible to say Pro Tools is playing “catch up,” but to play devil’s advocate, you could easily say the same about its competition. My preference remains for “native” hosts with their more flexible hardware and software support, and because personally I’m more creative in an Ableton Live or SONAR (or tracker!); that’s me. Digidesign sent out an open letter about promising interoperability. I’ll be interested to see what they mean, as I don’t immediately see that addressed in any way here. But certainly, I respect the utility of each of these tools to someone. The loyalty of those user bases is part of why progress tends to be incremental, not revolutionary. You have to serve their needs first.

What does music look like? With new sounds and new technologies, the question is more apt than ever. Tom of Music thing points, via his Twitter feed, to this interesting post regarding Ligeti’s Artikulation:

Visualizing Artikulation [Bad Assembly]

Music notation takes on a different meaning in the age of computers. After all, the essential divide in notation – between sound representation and realization – is blurred in the digital domain, in which we move between visual and sonic information seamlessly and a sound can be reproduced exactly. But, perhaps in that fluid context and without the musical conventions that grew up with notation, the importance of notation becomes that much clearer.

In this case, the classic experimental electronic composition Artikulation by composer György Ligeti has already had a visual score associated with it. Rainer Wehinger created the visuals above after the fact as an “aural score,” intending visuals to present a visible “reading” of the sounds of the piece. That makes the score itself closer to the digital visualizations we see as motion graphics works all over the Web (and on our sister site Create Digital Motion). The point isn’t to create a set of instructions by which you can perform a piece, but a visual counterpart that allows you to (presumably) hear it differently.

To be honest, I’m not always certain what to make of these results. Does this score really help you hear the piece? I’m curious to hear different reactions. But I wonder if the real holy grail comes back to software and interface. Seeing a pre-composed score is already interesting. But make that score interactive, and, in short, you have music creation software. Perhaps we’ll get beyond simple sequencers and step sequencers and start to see a growing number of interactive software designs that play around with that concept. (See Tom’s other thoughts on that today as he looks to Audio Damage’s new Automaton plug-in.)

Side Note: Twittering

If you want to follow us music bloggers on Twitter, I’m (uncreatively) peterkirn; Tom Whitwell is tombola. FriendFeed for me is the same. I haven’t made a CDM Twitter account; if for some reason that interested you, let me know, but otherwise I’m inclined to think RSS is just fine.

And if you have Twitters/FriendFeeds you think I should follow, please do holler.

Enter MusicReader for Windows XP and Vista. It runs just US$69-99; bring your own laptop. Better yet, bring your own tablet PC and you have a form factor that fits naturally on a music stand and can be marked up with digital ink. Turn pages with a tap or foot pedal.

Sheet Music 2.0 [Wired.com, via the tablet lovers at GottaBeMobile.com]

With the ultra-thin machine on its way (witness new ultra-thin laptops from Apple and Lenovo, and upcoming low-power, tiny chips from Intel), the future looks even better. Here’s a video of the system in action, lest you think this would never appear in the real world (suggestion: you may want to mute the sound, as the background score is a bit …unnecessary):

Mac users, looks like you’re booting into Boot Camp for now. Too bad Apple still doesn’t think we want a tablet.

Reading notation is good fun, but what if you could write it, too? A little-noticed, open-source tool from researchers at Brown University does just that on Windows Tablet PCs, and even made a brief, official appearance as a Microsoft PowerToy. The recognition is surprisingly satisfying once you learn the shortcuts, which resemble Palm Graffiti strokes. Finally, in 2005 the developers added MIDI export, making this a potentially useful tool. If there’s someone out there with a newish Vista tablet, I’d be curious to know if this still works on modern machines.

To me, the ability to write as well as read makes things far more interesting. But for about a hundred bucks — well, plus whatever your tablet PC cost — you’ve got digital music paper right now.

Music Notepad for Tablet PC

Does any of this actually matter to you? Blogger Tom Whitwell asked that of his readers, and found the answer is, well, sorta:

Can Music Thing readers read music? [Music Thing]

Leonardo painting has coded ’soundtrack’: Musician interpreted symbolic Christian theology as musical clues

I have to admit, the result in itself is kind of cool and amazing, a weird form of composition involving extracting music from paintings, like seeing rabbits in clouds or Jesus in toast or watching static on your TV until you see the exact molecular composition of Gatorade. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Da Vinci, poor guy. (Wonder why no one is interested with all the ingenious stuff he did that was out in the open?) But it is nothing if not interesting.

Wait until you see how I’ve turned “Nude Descending a Staircase” into Sgt. Pepper.

With some software tools, less is more. When it comes to the complexity and breadth of music notation tools, though, more is often more, because everyone’s needs are different. If the “pro”, “high-end” tool happens to do exactly what you need to do efficiently and quickly, that’s the tool you’re most likely to use — even if your notation needs are “modest” in your own eyes. In other words, if you use only 10% of the capabilities of the tool, but everyone’s different 10% is included, you’ve got a winner. And that’s probably part of why two major rivals continue to dominate mindshare in notation, Finale and Sibelius. Finale is on an annual release schedule, compared to Sibelius’ semiannual appearances. 2007 is one of the years the two coincide, with releases shipping almost exactly simultaneously next month.

We took a first peek at what’s new in Sibelius 5: massive plug-in support, an ideas hub, and other enhancements. Here’s what’s doing in Finale 2008 (keeping in mind Finale spreads new features out across annual releases):

Audio recording: This is this year’s banner feature for Finale. You can now import audio and use that as a vocal track in playback or for transcriptions, something not present in any other dedicated notation tool. (Naturally, this is something you can do with a sequencer, but not a scoring-only app.) This wouldn’t be impossible in Sibelius, because Sibelius can import movie files, but Finale does show you the waveform on the score itself.

Single selection tool, better cut/copy/paste/insert: Finally, Finale does away with its confusing multiple selection tools, choosing instead a single selection tool that does everything, something Sibelius (and most other notation software) have always had. There’s also a new contextual menu that looks more like Sibelius’ classic menu, as well. Now, before you Finale fans start complaining, yes, I recognize Finale has some selection workflows that you may prefer to Sibelius. Sure enough, what Finale 2008 offers that Sibelius lacks is a new set of selection and pasteboard tools that makes it extremely easy to make selections from keyboard shortcuts and drop/adjust placement of inserted music. (See the selection and cut/copy/paste/insert overview.) Back when I did Sibelius trainings, this was a heavily-requested feature, and on first glance, I’d say Finale 2008 may have the superior implementation, though I’ll have to have a closer look. Given that moving notes around is really a big part of composing and arranging, this to me is far more important than plug-in support or audio recording. Sexy? No. Absolutely vital to your work? Probably.

Styles: Document Styles combine templates with various other assets and engraving settings. It’s quite a lot like Sibelius’ Engraving Rules and templates (heck, the style selection dialog box even looks similar), but it does appear to be more comprehensive than what either program has done in the past.

Mo Playback Features: 2008 expands on the Garritan sound library, and adds expanded human playback support. That’s a far cry from Sibelius 5’s integrated plug-in support, but Finale has more extensive integration of the sounds it already has, as far as playback features and whatnot. The implementation in Finale really is very, very detailed, so you’re more likely to hear little details of your score on playback. There’s new implementation with tools like Garritan’s Stradivarius violin.

Merge multiple scores: If this works as advertised, this could be a huge timesaver — composers working on big projects know exactly what I mean.

Vista compatibility.

The tight race between these tools continues. I am a little disappointed that we’re past the point of real revolutionary tools in actually scoring — the emphasis in both programs has shifted to usability tweaks and playback. Both tools tend to be really weak when it comes to getting off the “grid” of bars and staves and free-handing notation, which is important not only to avant-garde notations, but any user who wants to shift to more of a page layout/illustration software method of working. But for what they are, both tools continue to improve. Composers, arrangers, educators — feel free to chime in.

Sibelius 5 is a big upgrade to the notation tool, now part of Avid. The biggest change of all: real VST and Audio Unit plug-in support on Mac and Windows. This merging of audio software and scoring software has been a long time coming. We saw limited support in Finale, but Sibelius actually fully supports racks of VST and AU instruments and effects to use on your scores, integrating with the Sibelius mixer for playback control, and merging into groups for control of sections of your orchestra/ensemble. There’s even MIDI control: the Sib site says “… if you have an M-Audio keyboard you can use its own faders and transport buttons to control Sibelius’s playback.” Wow, terrific! (Um, I’m guessing that will work for any MIDI keyboard once you assign the proper controllers, not just M-Audio hardware — but still good news.)

In case you want out-of-the-box instruments and not just plug-ins, Sibelius now includes 2 GB of orchestral, band, and other instruments from Garritan and others.

Also new in this version:

Ideas Hub: This is a really interesting idea, perhaps acknowledging that people now often compose directly into notation software. Ideas Hub is a scrapbook of musical ideas you can sort and paste at will. There are also 2000 ready-made ideas included … which is, honestly, a little strange to think about. Hopefully someone out there will create a really insane, avant-garde piece using nothing but those snippets, played at impossible tempi, etc. “Preset ideas” aside, this feature could be really interesting — though it may not make me throw away my manuscript paper Moleskin.

Continuous score viewing (“Panorama”): The ability to view a score continuously rather than in page layout has long been a feature of Finale; Sibelius’ developers actually resisted implementing something similar, but apparently they’ve found a way to do it with which they’re now happy. The UI design here looks very nice; it’ll be interesting to see if people prefer this to scrolling around a page.

Easy cues / instrument changes: ‘Bout time. I had actually been one of the people pushing for real instrument changes, and wrote a lengthy explanation of how I thought it should work to the folks on the product side. I imagine I wasn’t alone: usually when you get a whole bunch of people requesting a particular implementation is when it happens. And enough of this “automatic cue” nonsense — writing cues should be copy and paste. In Sib 5, it is: “Just copy the music you want to appear in the cue, and choose Paste As Cue. Sibelius 5 does the rest for you.” Yup. That’s what I wanted.

New layout options: This is far less comprehensive than I had hoped, but it’s a start: custom margin pages for different pages, and some other layout tweaks. There are also new, more flexible tools for numbering bars, rehearsal marks, and pages — things that previously required some nasty workarounds.

Copy lyrics from text files. Again, ’bout time.

Plug-in undo. Okay, “’bout time” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Plug-ins now look actually useful.

Cluster notation! … basically, lots of other new early music / new music / theory notations and other small tweaks.

Universal Binary and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard support.

I’ll be meeting up with the Sibelius people next month here in New York and will be getting my hands on the software soon, so expect more details. Notation is digital music, too, after all, in the age of computers. Looks like lots of little tweaks, but in notation, it’s often the small changes that make the difference — the stuff that you’ve had to live with while scoring. It might not make the glossiest marketing materials, but it’s those timesavers that really make difference. (Remember when Sibelius finally fixed its broken tuplet notation? I think I wrote twice as much scored music that year.)

Anyone wanting to have a Finale vs. Sibelius debate in comments, go ahead. I’ll try to stay out of it.

What’s new in Sibelius 5 [Sibelius.com]