Lon Price wrote: [snip]>
I'm surprised at the attitudes taken by some people who have responded to this thread. Virtually all of the music that I do on my computer is directly related to getting a group of real live human beings to play primarily acoustic instruments. I don't really know why someone would need a notation program like Finale if he does not intend to have his music played by others.
[snip]
For many people, notation is how we learned to represent music on paper, so it is second nature for us to create compositions and then have a program like Finale perform them for us, either to use as a demo or simply so that we can hear it. Many people write music knowing it won't ever get a live performance -- who can afford to hire their own orchestra to perform their latest symphony or concerto or overture? And it is next to impossible to get new works performed by existing orchestras, not when they feel safe and require little rehearsal time when they play the DEWM literature from the 1700s and 1800s. So the likelihood of a new symphony ever being performed by live musicians ranges from slim to none.
That doesn't remove the need some have for composing such grand works, though, so a program like Finale is perfect for them. Sequencers don't cut it for many of us because they require perfect keyboard skills to enter all the various parts, and I find them very hard to work with while I find notation very easy to work with.
So while for many, the use of Finale is to create printed music that humans will perform from, for many others, the use is purely personal, and that is why things like GPO or other high-quality playback engines are such a god-send, allowing for much better playback than the old FM synthesizers in the early soundcards.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
