Music Notation Apps Reviewed and Why You Need One - PHH 263

What if playing the harp felt easier the way you thought it would be? Not because you practiced more, but because you finally understood what was getting in your way. I'm Anne Sullivan, and welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness. Here we tackle the real challenges harpists struggle with: the sticky passages, the tricky fingerings, prepping for performance, and all the ingredients that go into making music sound the way you want it to. I've studied with world-class harpists, taught at a top conservatory for 20 years, and I love playing the harp. But what I love just as much is breaking down the real challenges harpists face and turning them into clear step-by-step solutions—the same ones I teach my students and use myself. So if you're ready to play the music you love with more confidence, clarity, and joy, you are in the right place. So let's get started.

Welcome to the show. There are plenty of things that make me feel old. For instance, when I remember that I used to have to go to the library to do research, or that I didn't know who was calling me before I answered the phone. Here's another one that makes me feel positively ancient, and I promise you I'm not that old. I remember my mother handwriting music that my teacher wanted me to learn but was out of print. We didn't have easy access to a copier, although sometimes my dad could make a copy at his work. So if I needed a piece of music, one that wasn't very long, my mother wrote it out for me. That feels practically Stone Age now. When I started arranging music and publishing it back in the 1990s, there were two programs that most composers had to choose between: Finale and Sibelius. Now, I chose Sibelius on the recommendation of one of my teaching colleagues at Curtis, and I still use it today. It had a pretty steep learning curve when I first started, and it is still a powerful program, that takes a little while to figure out, probably too long for a casual user. In the years— oh, well, okay, decades— since then, many more music notation programs and apps have come along, some of them as powerful or nearly so as the flagship programs, and for the most part, much simpler to use. This has meant that anybody with a modicum of patience for things technical can produce a professional-looking copy of a piece of music. That definitely means progress for composers and arrangers. It also means progress for any of us, even those of us who just want to learn to play the harp better. That's because these apps aren't just for writing down music you've composed. They can also be useful practice tools. So on today's show, I'm going to give you my take on 3 of the most popular and pretty user-friendly friendly music notation apps, explaining the best features and the potential deal-breakers of each. I'll also share some strategies to use these tools to help you in your harp playing, whether you're interested in composing, arranging, or maybe just a little curious. Now, if you're a My Harp Mastery member, you will remember that just a few weeks ago, one of our members, Bob Dexter, gave us a terrific presentation on how to use MuseScore. And you might also remember that as part of that call, or in preparation for it, I got into MuseScore and learned to work my way around that program a little bit. So we will talk about MuseScore today, although I know that Bob covered the, the topic in depth, and I've put a link to Bob's call in the show notes. Now, heads up, that link won't work for you unless you are a My Heart Mastery member, but I just wanted to make that easy for our members to access. Now, if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, I have two things I'd like to tell you. First of all, you're welcome to join us, and I certainly hope that you will be inspired to do that, not necessarily just from today's call, but from all the other things that are part of My Heart Mastery membership, including this. You might know that for the past couple years I've been doing Monday warmups live every Monday or most Mondays anyway, in the Heart Mastery Hub and also simultaneously live on YouTube. Well, those warmups are now going to become part of the My Heart Mastery membership. I realized I was doing so much teaching on those calls and frankly, our members pay for that kind of teaching. So I really wanted to make this a member benefit. So we are discontinuing the live Monday warmups for our non-members. So they won't be in the hub anymore. They won't be on YouTube, but My Heart Mastery members will still be able to access them. But because I know this is a change, I did want to offer those of you who love the live Monday warmups, and I know there are a bunch of you because we get a lot of people on those calls. So If you still want to access the live Monday warmups, you can use the link that I have put in today's show notes. Now this show is going live on Monday, May 25th. If you use the link in the show notes, you can get a discount to join My Heart Mastery so that you don't miss out on those Monday warmups. And you can do that at a discount. The discount, however, is only available until June 1st. So it's only available for a week. So please take advantage of that. If you love those Monday warmups, this is the way for you to be able to continue to access them. Now remember, if you're a My Heart Mastery member, no worries, we've got you covered and you'll have all the instructions for logging onto the, uh, the Live Monday Warmups, as well as our Practice Labs. Uh, you'll have all of those in your email and in our special website. So you'll have all the information you need to join them. But if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, this might just be the little nudge that you've been wanting to join. And I certainly would love to see you inside the membership. So just a few things to think about there. And now how about if we dig into some of those music notation programs? Now let me tell you what I was looking for in the programs that I tested, even the ones that I chose to look at. Remember, I use Sibelius, and although I love it, it is very feature-heavy. And so it's not a program I generally recommend to people who are just getting into this. It's not a starter program. It's not an easy starter program. Granted, it's a lot more user-friendly than it used to be, but I think there are better options. And Sibelius is an expensive program and there are free options out there. So why wouldn't you take advantage of that? So that was actually one of the criteria that I used. It had to be free or there had to be a free version of it that was available. And it had to be pretty easy to figure out, um, so that you weren't trying to figure out a lot of, of stuff while you were trying to learn the program, because that's really frustrating. It also had to look like it was going to be sensible, like most people were going to be able to approach it and feel like they were going to be able to jump right in and use it. Now, that's not a really easy thing for most music notation programs. I mean, think about how complex this is. So It's a tough order, but it's a lot easier to fill than it used to be. So the 3 programs that I looked at, I did look at MuseScore because this was what our member Bob introduced me to for the call that he gave. And so I thought, well, you know, I know something about that and I liked the program. So that's something that I want to be able to explore a little bit today and recommend to you. I also looked at NoteFlight because NoteFlight is pretty common. It's pretty available for all the different platforms, whatever you're gonna— whatever device you wanna use it on. And, uh, so it was pretty, pretty popular in the rankings. So I chose that and I chose Dorico. Dorico, um, it's spelled D-O-R-I-C-O and it is a very, um, sophisticated music notation program, but they have a free version. And so I wanted to test that out for you as well. So let's think about what you might want to use a music notation program for. Now I have actually 5 things that I've identified that have nothing to do with writing music or arranging music or composing music, and we'll get to those. But, um, I, I wanted to start with, well, you know, what if you have an idea and you want to write it down? Well, you could write it down by hand the way my mom did, but it's so nice to be able to use your computer or your tablet to write a piece of music that looks nice and neat and polished and professional so that you can read it the next day, or anybody else could read it. It's easy to store, easy to access from different devices, easy to export as a PDF. So for all those reasons, a music notation program is a step up from just handwriting it. So this is why you might want to consider that if you want to do any kind of writing music at all. So let's start with that aspect of, uh, music notation. We're going to be writing music down for whatever reason you want. We're going to be writing music down and we'll explore the programs from that standpoint. And then you'll know what kind of feels best or like a good fit for you. And then I'll give you 5 or maybe 6 reasons that you might want to use a music notation program even if you don't intend to compose or arrange music, because there are some very good reasons to do that. So these are some of the factors that I considered. Easy note entry. It had to be easy to put notes in. You had to be able to figure that out, or how easy was it to do that? I also considered the playback. What was your music going to sound like? Um, whether or not there was harp notation that you could use, how easy it was to print your music or to share it with somebody else. I thought about cloud access versus on your device and how easy it might be to collaborate with somebody else. Just some things to consider. And all of the programs are stronger in some, not as strong in others. So just something to think about, and I'll tell you exactly what I think. But I also needed there to be a pretty low— I'll call it a frustration factor. I don't like when it takes me a long time to get into a program. You know, you, you finally decide you want a program, and then, you know, how long does it take you to actually start and start using it. And going along with that is how quickly are you gonna be able to write your music and feel like you're using the program the way you wanted to? That I thought was very important. I wanted this to be able to encourage you to be creative and to use this tool creatively. I didn't want you to be intimidated or frustrated by it. After all, the best software in the world isn't gonna be any good to you if you can't use it. So the best app isn't necessarily the most powerful one. It's the one you'll actually use and keep using. So that was my baseline. So let's take a look at the 3 programs I looked at, and I'm gonna start with NoteFlight. Now this is N-O-T-E-F-L-I-G-H-T, NoteFlight. And you can find that easily online. It's an interesting app because it's totally cloud-based. What I like about a cloud-based app or a program is that you don't have anything you have to download or install. And NoteFlight works on just about every kind of device. It's very easy to log in. It's very quick to get started. Um, it's also very good for learners because you can share your scores really easily. You can collaborate on arrangements. So that's kind of nice. The interface is, I mean, you know, like, how does it look when you look at it? I liked it. And what I liked about it is that I could use the keystrokes that I was used to. You know, the things I've learned from Sibelius also worked over here. So for me, it was easy to enter things in NoteFlight just using my keyboard. So you don't have to have a piano keyboard to do it. You don't have to have a MIDI device, although you can do that with NoteFlight, but you can just, you know, kind of write in the notes and say, oh, I want this. Oh, I want this. Oh, I want this. Now NoteFlight is available in a free version, which is what I got. It, uh, the free version meant I didn't get a harp sound with it, or at least not one that I could find. So I'm writing and it sounds like a piano. Okay, I can deal with that. It also means that in the free version— and once again, maybe I just didn't find it, so, you know, your experience might be different— but in the free version, I did not see any specific harp notation. So I wasn't able to put in, you know, pedal markings or anything like that automatically. I had to, you know, sort of create them and put them in. There were some other limitations, things that I was going to —have to work around. It was easy to put in a metronome marking, for instance, but I wanted to put in a tempo marking, um, you know, like adagio, and I couldn't exactly figure out how to do that. Obviously there's a way to do that, but I'll tell you what I did. Having worked with MuseScore, I did, uh, you know, an actual piece that I wrote out in MuseScore, and I thought, well, for the other programs I was testing, I would take the first line or or so of that piece and see how long it took me to enter everything from that first line of music. And, uh, NoteFlight took me just a little bit longer, not significantly, but there were those things that I couldn't do. I couldn't figure out how to get italics where I wanted them in the subtitle. I couldn't find a place to get, um, an, an E with an accent. I couldn't figure out how to get that tempo text in there. I'm sure there are ways to do that, but I had a limited amount of time. You know, I set a time limit so that I wouldn't be spending an hour trying to do something that I didn't think should take me an hour. And I just couldn't find everything I needed. Once again, this was my first foray into this program, so there might be more. The premium version might be something you want to pay for if NoteFlight works out and, you know, you look at it, you say, oh, okay, this is really great. You can purchase the premium version, which says it's got a lot more stuff in it, and I'm sure it does. But it's the way with premium versions, right? Sometimes those free versions don't have everything because if they did, then you wouldn't buy the paid version. So with NoteFlight, you can buy the premium version for $7.95 a month or $49 a year. So it's quite inexpensive and you'll really, I think, get a lot more value from that paid version. NoteFlight as an app is very simple. You don't have to install it. It's all cloud-based. So everything is there. Stuff saves very easily. You can share it. You can collaborate if you want. All that's very easy, but it can be kind of basic. I mean, you might, if you're going to do a lot of composing or arranging, you will probably outgrow it because there are some things that you certainly can't do, at least, or especially in the basic version. So it's not— it's a little bit more educational in its focus than it is composer-oriented. So there are some finer points that you might not be able to, to do if you want to with NoteFlight, but it's easier to use than just about anything. Now let's go on to MuseScore, which Bob did such a great job presenting to our members. Now let me make one thing really clear. MuseScore is also a music sheet music hub where you can purchase sheet music. You can be a member. You can upload your sheet music there. That's musescore.com. The music writing software, the notation program, is at musescore.org. So this is MuseScore, M-U-S-E s-c-o-r-e dot o-r-g dot org. That's where you will find the music notation program and you can download it. And, uh, it's very simple to download, to get started. It's— I had no problem installing it and getting it in there. It was so quick and very, very simple. I found it also very easy to use. This program has a lot of features and it's free. It's free. It's so nice. You can do a lot with it. Remember I told you with NoteFlight I had trouble putting in that tempo indication? No trouble at all in MuseScore. It did exactly what I needed it to do. Italics when I wanted it and, and no problem with that. This really works well if you are sort of at a level above first learning a notation program. Now, if you have already used NoteFlight, you'll be able to make the transition to MuseScore really easily because a lot of the way you do things is very similar. But at the same time, I found MuseScore to be much more professional. You know, there was a lot more that was available to me. The playback was good. There was good stuff for harp writing. You could do pedal diagrams, you could put in glissandos and all different kinds of things. So it was very, very good that way. I didn't have to make do with a piano sound if I didn't want to. And then of course, there is that entire library of other scores. If you want to belong to the MuseScore Hub, you can upload and share your scores there and have access to other members. You don't have to do that. You can just use this on your own without the MuseHub, and which is how I would suggest you do it unless you're ready to share everything. And so, you know, that's kind of a nice thing. It's not just browser-based, which means that unlike NoteFlight, which is all cloud-based, right? You can use MuseScore when you're not connected to the internet. So that I found very helpful, but it was really easy to work with, very quick to download, and I had really no trouble. I thought the learning curve was pretty, pretty easy. Now there are some Profiles, the profiles menu was something that was a little interesting for me. I hadn't really thought about that before because their profiles menu has a lot of the stuff you want to access. So that was pretty good. But you can pretty much just get through everything you want to do with MuseScore without, you know, without having to— you don't have to read a manual. You can really pretty much just figure it out. And that, I think, is terrific. So I'm not at all surprised that Bob, who likes to have the music that he arranges all look the same, you know, I think his word for it was homogeneous. So, you know, he enters his music arrangements that he writes in MuseScore and gets something that's very printable, very polished looking, and very uniform. So, you know, he's not distracted by music that, you know, this copy looks messy, this copy looks neat. So that's one of the reasons that he uses it. And frankly, I thought it was really a really great, great program to use. You do have to download it, but I found that very simple, downloaded really, really quickly, and it was very easy for me to use. I had, I told you I used it for writing the piece that we used in My Heart Mastery for one of our calls. I also used it to write a workshop document for my Gold Circle students and all of that I found was really very easy. So it's great for writing things down. It's great for harp notation. You do have that whole library and community. If you do want to share, it's got plenty of features there. It's a little bit more intimidating perhaps than Notes Lite. Um, and because the formatting options are so rich, you can sort of, you know, go down the rabbit hole with them. And, and if you, if you're not paying attention, you can start tweaking more than you really need to tweak. Um, but I found it easy to use and a really great program. I highly recommend MuseScore for most purposes, but that didn't stop me from investigating Dorico. Now, I first heard about Dorico at, um, an American Harp Society conference, and I thought, wow, it was being touted as a really low-cost option. The price has gone up since then, but there still is a free version that you can use. Uh, so it's not inexpensive as a program if you buy it, but I didn't want to buy it because I wanted to test the free version for you. As I said, I'd been intrigued about Dorico because I know a lot of composers switched to it, particularly when Finale was discontinued. So I know a lot of, you know, real professional composers who switched to Dorico, and so I was a little bit curious. Didn't want to abandon Sibelius, had some loyalty and some investment in having learned that ecosystem. So I, you know, wasn't quite ready to switch, but I was really glad to have this excuse to take a look at Dorico. I, you have to download it. And I have to say, I'm, I'm pretty tech savvy. And I realized that this might not be everyone's experience, but I had trouble with the download and I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but I had to download it 3 times in order to figure out what was going on. I had to, and this is just the free version, but it, you know, there was an application, there was an installer, there was an activator or something. And then I had to make sure I had the program in the right place. Now this might not be an issue. I was doing this for Windows. If I, it may not be an issue on a Mac machine. I don't know. And it might just have been me. So, you know, it might not be a problem for anybody else, But it took me a while to figure it out. And so right there, my initial frustration level was running a little bit high. Um, so I apologize to, uh, Steinberg who makes the program Dorico, and if it's not a typical experience and, and I'm apologizing in case it's coloring my review of the software a little bit. I know it's a powerful program. I know I was only downloading the free version, but I wasn't quite to gnashing the teeth stage, but I was getting close. So I finally downloaded the program and was really anxious to finally get in there and start working. So I did. And once again, this might just be me, But I was a little bit frustrated. I hate to admit that because I, you know, I, I can find my way around most programs, but this was a pretty serious program. And I had trouble. Here you go again. I wanted a dotted note and it was not as intuitive for me. I clicked on the dotted note and then I, clicked on where I wanted the note to go and it put it in a slightly different place and it did it with a tie instead of a dot. And that was definitely user error. That was not a fault of the program. That was just that I hadn't figured it out. But clearly I was working with a program that was meant for pretty serious work. There's a learning curve to Dorico. I would be, I would have to work with the program for a few days, you know, off and on, obviously not, you know, not for hours and hours, but I would have to spend some time working with the program to really learn the easiest ways to work with it. And perhaps the thing that should have alerted me that this might be the case early on was that one of the things that had me download with a pretty hefty user guide. It's a pretty big document. Now for NoteFlight, they probably have a user guide. I don't know. I never looked at it. I just got right into the program. Same for MuseScore. I got right into the program. Dorico, I got right into the program, but I found myself saying, well, okay, so where is this and where is this and how do I work with that? Took me a little while to figure out. And so if you are serious about, about your composing or arranging and you want to have a powerful program, I know that this is a great one for that. You get— you can get some really beautiful engraving things. The free version didn't seem to have all the harp stuff I wanted. It took me a little bit to find where the harp was, but I did get that. So I don't know that it has everything, but it might, and I might just not have found it. So it's a lovely program. It's very elegant. You're gonna get beautiful looking arrangements. You're gonna be able to do all kinds of stuff. There are some limitations to the free version, obviously. It is still a very powerful program. But if you have to be willing to invest a little bit of time to learn about it, I think it is, you know, I, I'm not going to say it's a terrible program because I know it's not. But it's not for the beginner either. So even though it's free, the download gave me some problems. And once again, that might've been user error. And then the program took me a while to get in. I did manage to put in everything I wanted to put into it, but it took me a little bit to figure out. So my quick summary is this. If you're just getting into this and you want something that is really pretty user-friendly, perhaps even user-seductive to use, you know, it'll pull you in pretty easily, that would be NoteFlight. It's less feature-rich for sure than the other programs, But it's, I think, just about the easiest to use. Dorico, on the other end, is the most difficult of the options. If you want to pay for Dorico, you're going to get even more features. But I wouldn't do that at first. If you're interested in working with that kind of powerful program, I would suggest that you work with the free version and get your feet wet there and then upgrade to the paid version. Notes Flight, you might find everything you need in the basic version. Yeah, it doesn't have a harp sound, at least not one I could find in the free version. But, um, I was okay with that. It didn't bother me for what I was doing, you know, when I used it. And then it's not a very heavy lift in terms of, uh, the premium version, paid version either, at just, you know, $8 a month. Not a big deal. So I thought, um, you know, NoteFlight at one end, uh, Dorico at the other end, but MuseScore, I thought was definitely a terrific program. And no wonder Bob chose it because it really has the most features, I think, for the free version. I mean, it's free, right? And there you are with a free version and it's got a lot of features, very feature-rich. Pretty easy to use. And I thought that it was really a terrific program. So I would definitely recommend that for people who are, you know, a little bit, uh, want a little bit more sophistication in their music writing, a little bit more than NoteFlight, but don't want to be hampered by a program that has really more in it than they can use, which is what I found in Dorico. Okay, but what if you don't want to write music? What good will a music notation program do you? Well, I, I have 5 things here that I want to offer to you, and one of them I think is really important because it's something that I discovered when I started my studies at Curtis, at the Curtis Institute of Music, right? I was going there for college, my music conservatory, and there were some things I hadn't done, and in particular, One of them was do a lot of music writing. What I discovered was that I needed to learn how to write music because when I learned how it was written, I learned so much more about what it meant. There's a quote from the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, and he said, "The best way to become acquainted with the subject is to write about it. And this is kind of the way I feel about music writing. When you start working with one of these programs, it will teach you something that maybe you haven't thought of. Did you know that when you're writing music, the first thing you write on a staff is the clef? The next thing you do is you write the key, and the next thing you do is you write the meter. They're always in that order: clef, key, meter. I don't know if you knew that. It, it was one of those things that I had to learn. It was like, oh yeah, okay. It looked right when I did it that way. It looked wrong when I did it another way. But this is my point. There's so much that you learn about music when you have to start writing it down. And a music notation app will teach you a lot about music. So something to consider. It's really valuable. But what might you want to write down? Well, you might want to simplify your music. You have a piece that's a little too hard and you want to white out a lot of notes and you want to cut out this and you want to change that. Well, you know what a paper copy looks like, or even a copy in Fourscore or something looks like after you've done a lot of editing to it. It kind of has that Frankenstein look. You can type yourself a clean copy in MuseScore or NoteFlight and have it look beautiful. So much easier to play. So if you've, you know, made a lot of changes to a piece of music, rewriting it into that program is going to give you a clean copy and it will help you so much. So you also might want to rewrite your music just to make it larger if you have vision problems. You can only enlarge music so much on a copier. If you wanted to make it really big, you could put one measure on a line if you wanted, because a music writing program will let you do that, where just a regular music program or a copier won't let you do it quite as easily or the same way. You won't have to do any cut and pasting, you know, literally either, like with scissors and Scotch tape. You'll just be able to write it the way you want it. You could rewrite your music to fix page turns. If a page turn was in an awkward spot, you could just rewrite those couple of pages and change where the page turn came. You could use it if you wanted to transpose a piece. Somebody has given you Happy Birthday in B-flat, but you want to play it in F. Well, all you have to do is copy it in B-flat. Into the music notation program, then tell it what key you want to transpose it into, and it will do it just like that. Very simple to do. Of course, you might learn a lot by transposing it on your own when you put it in there, but you will have it written in the right key for you. Nice, right? And here's an advanced technique. If you are memorizing a piece, You could actually try to write your piece down from memory. It's one thing to play it. It's another thing to write it down. This is one of those things that Benjamin Franklin used to do. You know, for him to really learn how to write, one of the— he taught himself, and one of the ways he taught himself was by taking articles in the Spectator magazine, cutting them apart, putting them back together, and You could do the same thing with music that you have memorized. All you need to do is sit down with your music notation program, see how much of it you could write down. A fabulous exercise in really seeing if you know a piece of music. So there are, you know, a few short ways that a music notation program could be of use to you, whether you are a composer or arranger or not. Absolutely a great idea. And the most powerful one of those for me is just learning how to write music. You learn so much about reading music from having to write it. I highly recommend it for that. And just get your free version of NoteFlight and see what it does, or your free version of MuseScore and and see how you do with it. You'll learn a lot. I promise. I know that was a lot of information, and I hope that you are inspired to give one of these programs a try. Now, on next week's show, we're going to be talking to a dear friend of mine, a colleague I've been working with for 40— that is like 4-0— 40 years. My flutist friend, Joan Anne Sullivan and Anne Marsh. We are, uh, going to be talking about what a duo collaboration is like. So if you have, uh, an ensemble, whether you're playing with another instrumentalist or with a singer, or maybe it's a harp group, maybe it's, uh, more than 2 of you, maybe it's a few of you, but we're going to be talking about how to make collaboration work. How to have an ensemble, whether it's a duo or trio, that can last through all those decades. Um, if you want to know the secrets for a long-lasting musical partnership, we're going to be talking about how we've made ours work. And so that's going to be the topic on next week's show. I certainly hope that you'll join me for that. It's going to be a fun show. Also remember, we have that special discounted offer to join My Harp Mastery. The link to that special offer is in the show notes for today. You'll, you can find them in your podcast app or just go over to heartmastery.com. Look at the podcast where episode 263, and you'll get that link because if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, you'll be missing the live Monday warmups from now on. So they start up in the My Heart Mastery membership, um, as opposed to being free in the hub and on YouTube, they start just in the My Heart Mastery membership as of next Monday, June 1st. So I hope you'll take advantage of that because I'd love to see you on those warmups. And of course there's so much more inside the My Heart Mastery community. So until I talk to you next week, remember that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. Enjoyed today's episode?

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