Not sure if this is the right forum, but any help would be appreciated. I'm interested in composing, but don't really have any experience. I find that during practice sessions, sometimes I come up with little riffs/melodies, but I don't always write them down or remember them later.

What would be the easiest way to record these in sheet music format. Basically, I would like to play something on a keyboard and have it turned into sheet music. I'm thinking maybe a midi keyboard and some software would be good for this? Also, is there composing software out there that has some good quality sounds, instead of some cheesy midi fx?

Was just browsing online a bit...would Finale software work well for this? Maybe Finale Songwriter or PrintMusic?

You are considering two different things (if not three).

Generally speaking, you can record yourself EXACTLY through a simple, cheap sequencer, like Reaper, or Audacity, or the more expensive ones like Sonar, Cubase, Logic, Samplitude and so on.

But unless you are 100% right on your rhythm (and no human is, btw), then if you attempt to make this into a score it will turn into a nightmare. Think of a quantruplet, linked to a 32nd dotted notw on the next bar and stuff like that. The computer will attempt to take your every tiny small error into a coherent notation.

There are ways around this, like the automatic quantize (which brings everything right on beat, so your ok after that).

for proper scoring though, the problem is that sequencers are simply NOT meant for that. Nor notation software are meant for sequencing, incidently. So if you want just to keep notes, then a sequencer is fine, but if you want to make clean, perfect scores, then you also need a notation software, like Finale, Sibelius, or maybe Notion, and a few others I don't recall right now.

Keep in mind that most notation software will ALSO help you record yourself, while playing, so chances are that you might not need a sequencer, if you go that way. Problem is that you can get "free" sequencers (reaper, which is not "free", but it's got an unlimited, unrestricted trial version and it actually costs 60$ for the non commercial license), while you can't get that quality in notation software for free.

Finally, the sounds that you want them to be better than cheesy midi fx: Yes, it's quite "easy", but also can end up quite costly. You will need either a sample(r) or a synth(esiser). Midi does not contain any "audio" or "sound" information, just everything else, on how the note is played, velocity, tempo, dynamics, volumce, sustain and whatelse (a total of 128 parameters). You can then force the midi go through a sampler or a synth and get the sound coming from there, instead of windows. For piano there are many choices, like Ivory, Galaxy II, the Garritan Steinway, pianoteq, truepianos, QL Pianos and many many other. If you want more sounds, let me know and I'll provide more names for you to look up!

Anything else you want, we're all here to help!

The two big choices are Finale and Sibelius, both of which offer demo versions for their products. I'd download both and see how well they work for you.

The problems are many, as Nikolas has suggested. Put simply, notation software will not be able to do something you can't do yourself. It will simply allow you to make it more presentable. (For example, if you can't notate the rhythms and pitches you want, you won't be able to set up the score preferences or fix small mistakes in the MIDI transcriptions.)

But, if you're comfortable notating your own music and you want a piece of software that will make it more presentable - both visually and aurally, then Finale and Sibelius will do the trick nicely (albeit with a rather steep learning curve.)

Thanks for the detailed reply. It sounds like an inexpensive version of Finale might be the way to go. I don't really want to get too carried away just yet. I know you can use a mouse with most notation software, but that's pretty tedious, right? Any recommendations on a midi keyboard? I don't think I need anything too fancy at this point.

I always use a mouse, but that's mostly because I like to work at coffee shops. It gets lonely at home!

But for a simple controller, I have one like this and it works well:

http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/KeyRig49.html

Rather than trying to record directly to a notation program where it is difficult to get the note length right you may be want to consider using a MIDI recording program such as Cakewalk and record against a click track (the software will allow you to set a tempo and turn on a metronone). This will record the exact performance but the note lengths and start and end points will probably not be correct, you'll see notes 7/32 long instead of 1/4 and things like that.

The next step in creating a printable version is to quantize which converts every note to a multiple of 1/8 note or 1/16 note or some other value(you can choose what it's a multiple of). Then you will probably have to do some fixup of the note start points and end points. Cakewalk has a piano roll view which is ideal for doing this. After doing this switch to the view which shows the notation, see what else needs fixing and go back to the piano roll view.

If this all sounds like a lot of work it is at first but after a which you get better at playing in a way that the notes come out looking right so you don't need to do a lot of fixup. Playing non legato is the key to reducing the amount of tweaking. Also if there are too many places that need fixing up just re-record until it is reasonably clean. The main advantage of this approach is that you can record everything which the ideas are fresh and do the fixup later.

You can print music from Cakewalk but it is pretty limited and the version I have does not even have repeat signs, so for a professional looking version I export the MIDI and import into Sibelius. If there was one piece of software which made it easy to edit MIDI and handled notation well and was not too expensive that would be a better solution but I don't think either Sibelius or Finale has anything as useful as the piano roll view in Cakewalk (Sonar). Sibelius One, the version I have certainly does not.

As for getting better sounds there are various ways to do this, if you have a synthesizer with MIDI in and a USB to MIDI port that is one way to do it (and the way I use) but a software synthesizer may be a better solution. I haven't worked with software synthesizers but if I did not already have the MIDI equipment and a Motif Rack which has digital outs which allow for analog free recording I would probably go the software synth route. There are people on the Digital Piano forum who can point you in the right direction.

In both Finale and Sibelius the norm way of input notes is with the keyboard (not the MIDI keyboard, the computer one). Of course you can also use your MIDI keyboard as well, but the computer keyboard is indispensible in the process. Inputting notes with the mouse (at least for Finale) seems obsolete to me.

Do put some thought over Notion, which will not produce the best possible score or the best possible recording, but it comes with its own sounds and samples which is a big plus.

Finale and Sibelius also provide a click track and quantization features.

There are now many local college classes, and private institutions teaching much of what you are seeking. Here in Cincinnati, one example of the private schools is (copy and paste into your browser)

http://www.thecenter4thearts.org/music-tech-lab.php

I would think any major city would have these kind of classes, again in both public and private schools. As the holder of a composition degree, I wish you good luck!

I have another idea, but I'm not quite sure how to go about doing it. Say I record a song on my piano, and save it as a wav/mp3 or whatever. I'd like to import this into a program on my PC and add tracks to it - strings, for example. Then, I'd like to save the finished product as an audio file. It would also be nice to be able to print or save the song in sheet music format, but I'm more interested in saving the audio.

I can see a couple ways to do this. First, I could just buy a keyboard and record the tracks that way. The other way seems to be the PC/software route (that some of you described above), which I'm leaning towards. I see that Finale 2010 has a feature to import audio into your score, and it also has high-quality instrument sounds, but it's also 500 bucks. At this point, that seems like a lot to spend for what I want to do. Is there a similar program out there that would meet my needs? Notion looks interesting, but can I import my own audio into it?

Again, I appreciate all the help!

You will need to seperate in your head the sheet music from audio. They are highly different, and although there is software to create a score from audio (or even dither polyphonic audio and render it into individual monophonic ones), this is far off and quite frankly in baby form yet.

What you need is a sequencer. Finaly 2010, Sibelius and less so Notion are mainly for notation. While they come with "great" sounds they are far off what a sequencer can do.

For sequencers google the following: "Cubase", "Sonar", "Amplitude", "Sequoia" (<-ok... most definately too much for what you want, since it costs 2500 euros), "Nuendo" (<-again tons expensive). For Mac go for "Logic", "Digital Performer".

For a very (extremely) cheap option I would recomend "reaper". It has everything you could wish for, it comes with an unlimited trial version (so just google it and download it), the license is 60$ (last time I checked) for non commercial use and in general it's very very good, especially for the price paid.

Finale comes with Garritan sounds, Notion comes with its own, Sibelius not sure. Thing is that in the market there are much better sounds than these packages. And this is where it gets complicated and busy and expensive. For a single piano you have plenty of options ("pianoteq", "Garritan Steinway", "QL Pianos", "Galaxy pianos", "The Grand", "VSL Imperial Grand", "Ivory" and the list goes on). IF you actually want orchestral sounds the list will last forever.

So in conlcusion:

You need:
1. Some way of recording your acoustic piano, or a digital piano (midi keyboard) connected to your computer. So you will need either a DP or mics and a preamp.
2. A sequencer.
3. Sounds

If you do start from midi (DP and midi, etc), then you also can export the score. IF you record your acoustic piano this option simply dissappears almost!

Hope this helps a bit... (although the googling is yours! :D)

Thanks! So it sounds like sequencer software is the way to go. I've been using an Olympus LS-10 to record my acoustic piano, which has worked well so far. It's pretty simple to transfer these recordings to my PC. I'll check out some of the software you mentioned and see how it goes.

At this point, honestly, your best bet is reaper (reaper.fm I think). It's tiny (around 3 MB large?) and "Free" (the trial I mentioned) so you should be ready to go in 10 minutes or so... I, personally use Cubase, but I'm using it commercially, so... :-/

Best of luck!

I'll try it out when I get home tonight. Does it include any decent built-in sounds?

I doubt it!

You can get some nice sounds out of free soundfonts! That's how I started, before I laid down the cash.

Theres a great collection at-> http://hammersound.com/cgi-bin/soundlink.pl