Plus, unless one is musical hermit, one must deal with colleagues, and thus it pays to use what others use. The race does not always go to the swift, since few users with careers built on software will want to master more every few years neither do they want to abandon a body of work done in one format because it didn’t go the distance. There are other programs available, of course, but I would be leery of adopting upstarts, no matter how sexy the features, when there are veterans available. Composers, instructors, and arrangers, if you’re interested in helping me test out the Finale and Sibelius sounds on your actual scores and sharing the results, please email me.I am constantly asked for guidance in choosing which of the two preeminent music prep software packages to adopt.
Here’s where you come in: On paper, at least, this really levels the playing field between Sibelius and Finale as far as included sounds. The new sounds are scheduled to ship this month. As before, Sibelius also offers a “Gold” edition of the built-in Kontakt sounds included with Sibelius. The G7 guitar notation software will include a free selection of sounds for that market (guitars, of course, but also keyboards, vocals, and drums). Sibelius will also offer a Rock & Pop collection. As with Finale, Sibelius users can opt for a special edition of GPO. This week, Sibelius unveiled its own line of add-on sounds for Sibelius 3, 4, and G7, called (wait for it!) Sibelius Sounds. You can upgrade to the full NI Kontakt, and add on the full GPO orchestral library or a jazz & band collection.
Various add-on libraries are now available, as well like Sibelius, Finale integrates a copy of Native Instruments’ Kontakt sample player. Finale 2006 fully integrates Garritan Personal Orchestra. Now the good news: both Finale and Sibelius have added more robust, integrated sounds. As you’ll see from the tutorial, though, the integration was awfully tricky at the time. I wrote a tutorial a year ago for Keyboard Magazine (full article online) explaining how to integrate the superb Garritan Personal Orchestra with notation software. These options were an improvement, but they were still relatively limited. Sibelius 3 tried to address this problem with its Kontakt Silver and Gold sound libraries, followed by Finale adding support for SoundFonts (also supported natively on Mac OS X). Finale and Sibelius have both gotten a lot smarter about rendering a score in a way that sounds more musical, but the built-in sounds are pretty awful. You need to turn out a quick demo, or make a rehearsal CD for a singer, and that means turning to your notation software to produce the sounds. Sure, you’d like to be able to immediately hear every note you put down on a score played by real musicians, but it’s just not possible. Composers and arrangers, you know the problem.
0 kommentar(er)
