Week 4

This week we looked at music notation software. The main four we looked at were Musescore, Flat.io, Noteflight and Sibelius. I have had extensive experience in both Musescore and Sibelius, but I have never heard of or used Flat.io or Noteflight before. I think Muscore and Sibelius are both great programs and both offer great usability and functionality (I will continue using both of these throughout my career and also personal life). I liked Flat.io and Noteflight as they were both accessible through a browser, which is great. I personally prefer the layout the layout of Flat.io and would use this in a class over Noteflight. However, the publishing capabilities of Noteflight is fantastic for finding resources, and to also get around copy right issues. A very useful thing I learn in today's lesson was MusicXML, which means you can save a score you are working on, and open it in any score creating application. (I have attached my class notes to the bottom of this blog). I did intend to have more of a look at Flat.io and NoteFlight this week, but I ended up getting very distracted by the microphones James very kindly let me borrow from the con.

James lent me a pair of AKG pencil mics and a Zoom recorder to use as an audio interface. I had two things I wanted to do with these microphones:

1. Experiment with using them for my online bassoon lessons. My teacher is not enjoying teacher over zoom due to the audio quality of the program and our computer microphones. Hopefully these microphones can help make a bit of a difference, as they are good for acoustic instruments.

2. Practice using microphones and GarageBand. I have used GarageBand briefly before, but to a very limited extent. This is a good chance to test what I remember from our Week 2 lesson, and also hopefully get a little better at GarageBand.

3. I have set myself a little task over this online period of uni and am trying to teach myself the ukulele. I hope to record some kind of song onto GarageBand on the ukulele. I think knowing the basics of ukulele playing will be go great benefit to me as a music teacher.

I was super excited when I got the mics home from the con, so I set up immediately on my bedroom floor. Connecting the mics to the zoom with XLR cables was very easy. The zoom powered up once I connected it to my laptop via a USB cable, and by pressing the 1 and 2 buttons I was able to get sound picked up from the pencil mics rather than the zoom itself. It took a little bit of fiddling to get the signal from the zoom into my computer, but after that everything worked really well. Here is my initial set-up.

Today was the first day I ever picked up a ukulele, so I managed to teach myself the chords of Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah, and then got right into recording. The end result was so bad that I cannot put it up here, but here is a screenshot of the GarageBand screen. But hey, the mics picked up the Ukulele really well. I think my singing could be helped by use of a dynamic microphone.

After this, I managed to dig up an old tripod and a dynamic microphone! I then spent too long playing around with the different voice effects using the dynamic microphone :P

I then moved onto trying to actually record a song. I decided on Riptide by Vance Joy, as it used three simple ukulele chords. I used the pencil mics to record the ukulele and the dynamic microphone to record my voice. Since it is just the same three chords over and over again in the song, I used the loop function on GarageBand on the ukulele part.

I then wanted to add some more layers. I experimented for about half an hour trying to make my keyboard into a midi keyboard without a midi cable. I was unfortunately unsuccessful at this, so I ended up using the pencil mics to record the output of the keyboard's speakers. Through this and using the different voice functions on the keyboard, I recorded two piano parts, two bass parts and some trashy strings just for fun.

Overall, I think the recording worked out quite well considering the limited to zero experience I have on all instruments involved, microphones and GarageBand. It is not by any means good, but I am happy with it as one of my first attempts. Apart from the obvious lack of talent I possess on the instruments used, the other two main problems which I have not fixed yet is timing and back ground noise. I found it really hard to keep all parts in time when live recording. I also found it difficult to find the right position to trim the clips to when I need to (which also caused timing inconsistencies). I remember we briefly discussed using EQ in class to cut out background noise. I did play around with these settings a bit but was unsuccessful in making any real difference on the sound. I hope to try and record something else in the near future and start learning new things to fix these problems. I am also looking to see if I can get my hands on a midi chord somewhere!

Here is the recording:

I have also made my first twitter post! I have all of two followers so I don't think anyone has seen it, but I am slowly but surely getting into the twitter game.

I have not yet had a bassoon lesson while having this equipment, but I'll let you know how it goes! :)

Class notes:

Musescore

Intuitive set up of score, if you have it all planned out already. From personal experience, it is a good gateway into online notation software.Great sharing functions online, easy to find arrangements.Note entry is similar to finale and sibelius (key board shortcuts)Unsure if can plug in midi.Can highlight a section of music, and add for example staccatos for all the notes.Has drag and drop features.Difficult to change the sounds of the instruments, bad midi engine.Not great at playback. Use camera (copy and paste), to have a high res. Screen shot of musicClick on bar line and press return for a new system. Good for visualising for voice/ instrument ranges.Click upload cloud button, will up load to servers. Downloading a shared score, can open in MusicXML (a standard format which allows us to share music notation from one software to another), which means you can open it in whichever muse notation program you want. Multiple exporting capabilities.Using compressed MusicXML (there is an uncompressed option)

XML and in-browser notation apps - note flight and flat.io

Flat.io

Great set of opening instructions.Extremely easy to important MusicXML file.Very messy changing of time signatures. Can write chordal analysis Can easily change between full score and instrument sheets.

Note flight

Not very well organisedFew keyboard shortcuts Easy to add or remove instruments Can be used on chrome books (computers used at many schools, but basically just run through a browser).Has a market place, where you can sell and buy arrangements. The note flight market place is fully licences.You can’t performed arranged music (if you are changing parts to suit students). If you publish it on Noteflight and buy it off yourself, then you can perform it without being illegal.

Pro notation apps

Sibelius education features:

Graphics export

Alt+G then you can press copy and then paste onto word file The Worksheet Creator

File -> teaching -> worksheet creator. Can choose any different part of music, and it will create a worksheet for you and an answer sheet (great for a sub teacher).The ideas Hub

Panels -> ideas. Click and hold to hear loops. Can copy and paste into score.

Can add parts of score into ‘score’ under ideas, using shift+I, can allow students to use your compositions as ideas. You can rename the ideas. If you double click you can edit the idea.

TransformationsExporting video

Creative Commons is great for not copy righting, links on canvas.