thomas72

Ok, in order: @pateceramics Guess I need to learn how to tell note duration by ear. ad1. I'll try recording and listening from record. ad2. Got pitches figured out, as ABC notation. Drawing actual notes is hard for me, cause it's slow, and they're painfully hard to read for me atm. ad3+4. I've tried the leg tapping while whistling and put down a big dot over every note that gets the beat. I'll check out if that makes sensible metrum now. ad5 & @robinjessome: It's quite challenging to fiddle with durations once they are "in" the program - I either end up with lot of rests, or get notes at end deleted. Comes out as quite a mess. @Monojin: I'll check out the MuseScore 2.0, didn't try it before due to installation problems.

TL;DR; Looking for software that allows "free form" composition, without enforcing barlines. I've tried Finale, MuseScore, Sibelius, and it seems the measure lenght is holy in all of them. Long version: [it took me over hour to try and condense that. Sorry if it's still a gibberish] I'm just an amateur with some songs flying in my head. I want to put them on paper as proper musical notation, instead of singed/whistled mp3 parts. Thus I'm looking for a software to note the pitches, durations and basic dynamic (crescendo/decrescendo/staccato). Playback doesn't need to be accurate - just enough to make sense of what I'm doing. I want to expand the simple tunes into something more "grand", but don't have skill to actually play it, hence need to use the "midi orchestra" of my pc. I've toyed a bit with Finale, with moderate success. So far my methodology was to note the pitches in ABC notation by banging on the virtual piano (or whistling to the microphone), then put that into finale and try to adjust the note durations later. But I have little idea how to find metrum of my melody, nor the durations of notes, so I can only do it by trial and error. Sotware is not helpful here either, because of "fixed" measure paradigm - deleting my notes, inserting pauses etc. I would much more prefer to just have one long staff, adjust the durations/pauses as required, then put the bars in. I've even come down to writing a small program to read the "rhythm" of me tapping a key, so I could use that to punch the correct durations in. Maybe there's a software that could do that for me? So, anything there that lets me input music without bothering with metrum and measure lenghts? Background: Done some choir singing in school, but don't have any formal music education. Can play some basics on Recorder, and murdering digital piano lately (when no one's near). I'm past the "numbers", but still using the CDEF notation - learning to read notes is my goal for this year. Been told I have "good hearing", albeit I can no longer hear the 18Khz (and mosquitos) clearly. Still getting irritated by freezer across the house.