JPF Home Page Forums Musician Gear and Techniques Music Theory and Education Does anyone write notation by hand anymore?

I do! I do!
I use a composition notebook and a sharp pencil while I sit at the piano and scribble down the gist of a new song. I'll never love music transcription, but I like that tactile sensation of pencil on paper.

Plus I've discovered it's a lot harder to hunch over the piano bench and try to balance my laptop somewhere on the upright while I try to click into Finale Notepad.

I also discovered that if I just compose the lead sheet/arrangement in Finale, I wind up with music that sounds good on playback but is impossible for most human fingers to PLAY.

I go to NotePad (freeware from Finale) after I've made my rough draft on paper. I'm not excellent at figuring out the notation, so the computer helps me fix my screw-ups into what they were supposed to be, because of the playback feature... such as when I thought I was using dotted quarters, but they're actually triplets, or something like that.

I also use Finale so I can translate my scribbles into something other people can make sense out of. *I* like to play from my scribbly notebook. I know how my own song goes and which parts to repeat. But it's a mess--a total nightmare--for anyone but me to read. I don't always start writing at the beginning. So I'll have one piece of the song at the top of the page. The next piece at the bottom of page two. The chorus somewhere inbetween. I should scan a page one of these days to show you what I'm talking about. It's kinda funny. My lyric notebook is the same way... some pages are upside down, some I write sideways... I try to label V1, V2, chorus, bridge at least, in case I come back and can't remember what the flip I was thinking.

If I'm away from my notebooks, say in the car, I'll scribble the lyric on a scrap of paper and make funny dash-marks above the words to indicate whether the melody goes up or down. Usually I remember the melody, if I can get the words written. I recorded a melody on the beach once using the videocam on my hubby's cell phone. That's probably the strangest method I ever used. But it worked.

Linda