Making your lyrics conform to note positions is simple. You can even extract
chord symbols and put them on the printout. Speaking of printing, you can
print out an entire score, individual parts, or even just a small bit of something
from your screen (as we have done frequently for the figures in this book).
In short, these computer applications are very sophisticated music notation
processors, much as Microsoft Word is a sophisticated word processor. An
expert with Finale can pretty much type his or her music into the computer.
Using these programs means you don’t have to carry around a ream of sheet
music, or even a notebook, for making notes about ongoing compositions.
(Instead, you may be carrying a laptop computer.) With music notation soft-
ware, the music you play on your instrument has already been automatically
notated, from the barest melody line to the rhythm track you beat out during
warmup.
You can erase the things you don’t want to use, of course, but the little
unfinished gems that come to you while fooling around can now be saved,
instantly, for use in the future. A good rule of thumb is if you’re in doubt,
save it.
Having a large cache of little musical bits to listen to and draw on for inspira-
tion is so much better than having no unfinished music at all. Besides, you
never know when someone will want ten seconds of music from you for tele-
vision filler music, a videogame sound effect, or even a ringtone.
Computer versus Paper and Pencil .............................................................
Of course, even in the computer age there is still no replacement for an
actual printed copy of your work. Print everything and keep a file folder of
the printed paper copies of any of your work that actually gets recorded or
performed. With the speed at which technology advances there is no telling
what sort of computer applications and storage media we will be using in five
or ten years. Retrieving data from the sorts of media we use today could
become difficult in the future. It has already become difficult in many cases to
retrieve work that was saved on floppy disk, ADAT, and DAT tapes. And have
you noticed that good quality audio cassette players are becoming scarce?
Despite the overwhelming advance of computer technology into the world of
music composition, there are still advantages to working with pencil and
paper. Pencil and paper are cheap and can be taken anywhere. At the beach
or in a kayak are not great places for computers. And they don’t need to be
plugged in or charged up. If you are skilled at transcribing the music in your
Chapter 3: Musical Scrapbooks: Writing on Paper and Screen ..................................
