Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Beg for Software Pointers

One way to learn something is to try to teach it. If you have a fuzzy knowledge of something, it has to be sharpened in order for you to teach it. And, as part of my How To Not Suck series, I need to get into talking about music. There's words for it, but there's also a written language, which I have a very fuzzy knowledge of. I want to sharpen it, and having to think things through and write about it will sharpen it.

So, I will want to be able to make images of staff notation. Unless there's a way to write it in HTML. So, please, are there good Free or Open or even just free ways I can write out something in musical staff? I'll more than likely be doing it on my work laptop (don't tell anyone) so XP-friendly choices are preferred, but not required.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Finale has a free version called NotePad, http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/

Haven't used it myself, but know folks who use it. Supposed to be very no-frills, just basic notation kinda stuff. No guitar tabs, I don't think. But, sounds like you just want notation.

If you check it out and download it, let me know how it works.

IG

Dave Jacob said...

Tried it. It does what I need. I may need to use GIMP for the image extraction, but that's OK.

So, thanks!

Pribek said...

Hey, what's GIMP, Dave?

Dave Jacob said...

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Think of it as Photoshop, except you don't have to feel guilty about stiffing Adobe when you download it and run it.

Pribek said...

Would this be something I could use to take, say, a Word document and turn it into some type of photo document?
Maybe, this will make more sense. I have a way to write tabs, in Word but, it seems like a big hassle to get them to appear right in WordPress. If I could get them to .jpeg or something like that, I would upload them as photos. I don't have space here in the Winnebago to set up the scanner or, I would just do it that way.
There are times when I would like to show a little musical example here and there but, I've been avoiding it.
Please forgive my lack of tech. savvy

Dave Jacob said...

You can easily grab a window and make an image of it with the GIMP. Easy as pi.

Pribek said...

pi are round, cobbler are square

Thanks, Dave; going to download GIMP

Anonymous said...

If you play tabs, then you should already have the awesome Guitar Pro. You can create musical notation and tabs, and also play it back. You acn either write out the tab and it will automatically create the notation, or you can write the notation and it will create the tab... but of course, when doing the notation, it doesn't always pick the string/fret you intended, but it's all pretty easy to edit.