back to list

[MMM] Re: What do you use?

🔗rick@...

5/30/2002 12:14:55 PM

Joel wrote...

> That's odd, My information is that Finale has excellent support
> for microtonality, including notation & MIDI playback of same.
> Brian McLaren posted this a long time ago. It's been a feature
> since Finale 97, I think.

The notation stuff they provide in Finale is mind boggling and really
poorly documented with no real examples, etc. I looked at the documentation
and gave up on it very quickly.

Besides, for me, I can make the eye/hand connection between piano key and
note on page for standard common music notation, and I don't want to
struggle with a notation that doesn't match my 35+ years of experience with
that connection, learned in childhood.

There is no "standard" microtonal notation that can handle all the various
tuning systems and still allows one to make the simple eye/hand connection
that is taught universally in our musical culture. Until there is such,
various microtonal notations won't be worth learning -- at least that's my
opinion for my own purposes.

I use something that works for me during composition, and nobody has to
read it or reproduce it because I do exclusively electronic work performed
by the machine direct do disk. And if anyone ever does want to look at it
or reproduce it on another setup, they could use a standard keyboard and
the standard learned-in-childhood eye/hand coordination suffices.

That's my rationale,

Rick