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rrayner
04-18-2010, 06:12 PM
In early February of 2009, my wife Cynthia and I were enjoying a fire in the fireplace and I got out my old Song Flute. This was my first instrument -- a straight, black ebonite flute with a range of an octave and a step and a fingering system very similar to that of a saxophone. Cynthia, who had no musical training at all, asked to try it. She did, and was able to play a C Major scale and worked her way through the first part of Do-Re-Mi and a couple of other basic tunes. She loved it and told me if I were willing to teach her, she would try to learn to read music. We started. About 5 weeks later, she started transitioning to a soprano recorder. Cynthia is an ardent student -- she has not missed a day of practice in all this time.

Cynthia has become quite accomplished over this time and has almost 150 songs in her repertoire. I have used Notation Composer to provide her with printed music and exercises for her book. Also, she has been given several music books and plays a number of songs from them. Some that she wants to play, are not in a good range for her recorder, so I suggested she learn the rudiments of Notation Composer to enter and transpose these songs. Last night was her first introduction to Notation Composer. She entered Unchained Melody, transposed and printed it with very little difficulty. It was a very short learning experience for her, as she found the data entry to be quite intuitive and straight-forward. Score one for Notation Composer and its "ease of use."

Ralph Rayner

herbert
04-19-2010, 09:19 AM
Hi Ralph,

Thank you for posting yours and Cynthia’s experience. It has removed “Herbert has no Heart …” from the front page of the forum, where it was embarrassingly much too long.

Your experience reminds me of my experience and the experience with my wife Margaret.

Many Years ago before we were married, I suggested to Margaret to take up singing. I have a soft spot for signers. She took my suggestion serious and studied singing first in Zurich then in Rome and later in Sydney. She turned out to be a very gifted singer and is a very profound source of musical knowledge. Music is important to us.

My interest in computer based music helps to provide backing tracks for rehearsals and for concerts for Margaret and for our many musician friends.


Best wishes to you and Cynthia,

Herbert

NotationUser
10-17-2010, 11:35 AM
Nice to read your stories. I guess everyone has a very personal story with music and the nice thing is if you like it it will follow you all your life even you have some longer breaks in music making.

I've just purchased Notation Composer too. It is a very useful program.

My story is somewhere between folk music and interest for keyboard instruments of any kind from organs to synthesizers. I had not much traditional music education either and learned most by doing, from friends or own studies. I know this is not the easiest way and makes finding tools and instruments you find useful or helpful not easier.

The cool thing about Composer is it is a midi sequencer and a really usable scoring solution in one. It's also very affordable now. It fills the gap between highly professional scoring solutions and sequencers. But Notation Software is even more to me - it's like a tuition in scoring. I knew already some about score but the Composer manual alone is a big asset. It's also a learning tool I can see and hear new music I want to learn or work with. And it can manage midi and karaoke files and is by far a better companion for any keyboard player than the many tiny midi tools addressing this or that task but have no allover concept and sum up to by far higher total expense.

Notation Software is around for long and I hope they will continue to do some more good work in future.