Songwriting Software Express, Issue # 17 -- Music Writing Software

To help your songwriting with a focus on the benefits of innovative songwriting software, tools, resources and programs for your songwriting craft and career.

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1. Music Writing Software For Lead Sheets To Full Scores
2. This Month's Notable Quote

In last month's issue we discussed a fairly automated way to do your own demos with Band-in-a-Box. Carrying forward this month we'll take a look at how Band-in-a-Box and other programs can help you out with preparing written music for the times you may need or want live musicians.

There may be occasions where you'll want a musician to add a track to a song you're pretty much otherwise done with or when you need a full array of musicians to produce a demo for you or to perform live with you.

In some instances a simple lead sheet arrangement will do, just the chords written above your lyrics, and in some cases you'll need more sophisticated notation. We'll cover programs that can address both.

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Music writing software programs vary widely from the very simple lead sheet oriented programs to the very sophisticated compositional and scoring programs.

In this discussion I want to go from talking about the more simple programs that are focussed on mainly chord placement entries over lyrics, your typical lead sheet presentation, to the more elaborate programs that are designed to create full musical scores that depict every note and nuance of a musical arrangement.

If you're a typical pop songwriter then often programs that are oriented to lead sheet production are more than adequate to demonstrate the core arrangement of your song and are the norm for the various situations you'll encounter in song production and presentation.

If you're wanting to write compositions that are more precise and require writing a piano-vocal score for example like is typically the standard for presenting your work for musical theatre then that typically is addressed by much more sophisticated programs that I'll discuss below under Compositional Based Software.

Lead sheets serve the purpose of getting your song across to a demo producer and to other musicians if you're producing a demo or playing live and also simply serve for your own reference to practice and or self-produce your song.

However, lead sheets simply cover the harmony component of your song and this leaves the need to communicate the melody, rhythm and tempo of your song as well.

These other aspects along with the harmony are typically expressed by most songwriters by simply singing and playing the along with the song, if you play guitar or the piano, accompanying your vocal.

To make a recorded rendition of the all of these elements you'll typically record a sung and or played version, possibly accompanied by your guitar or keyboard, onto a cassette tape or into an mp3 recorder or even your computer to have an example rendition for reference.

In any event as a core representation of your song the lead sheet is the standard tool for illustrating your song in it's most basic form that other music players will be able to understand and play along to as they follow the melody, tempo and rhythm communicated by you the songwriter or whoever is leading the song.

A program that works well to address this approach is Lyricist which is primarily oriented towards lyric writing with provisions to automatically click in piano chords above your lyrics and to even automatically click in guitar templates that show exact fingering positions.

And as we discussed in the last issue a program that takes your chord progression and constructs an entire full band arrangement to any number of classical and contemporary styles is Band-in-a-Box.

For more sophisticated renditions of your songs, especially if you're needing to portray at least a melody line along with your arrangement then you'll typically be looking at programs that can literally take what you play and can plot the notes for you onto music staves with the notes placed precisely where you've played them.

You can also "write" the music in with your mouse or digital pen and this type of software will also allow the depiction of your chords with their particular voicings that you may want to be precisely indicated as well. In other words you may want the first FMaj7 chord of your song to be played with the root note on top and writing this out on musical staves clearly indicates this.

Writing music out to this extent is called notating your song simply referred to as the song's notation.

A lower cost program that has begun to offer a lot more in this regard is the Band-in-a-Box, mentioned above. Band-in-a-Box has notation capabilities that are starting to rival the capabilities of much more sophisticated programs and of course it has the added bonus of being designed to produce entire arrangements for you musically and all of it translates into proper notation formatted into sheet music.

To move in the direction of very sophisticated programming relative to notation specifically two programs lead the pack, Finale and Sibelius.

These two programs are designed to allow particularly the keyboard based player the ability to produce exacting sheet music renditions of the notes that are played in the time sequence they're played.

This of course is useful for the exact musical reproduction of the composers work by other musicians. These types of programs are used frequently by composers needing to produce written music for bands and or orchestras and also for musical theatre songwriters who need to produce a piano-vocal score as the essential rendition of their work.

Often early presentation of musical theatre works are presented with piano-vocal renditions and may be played by other pianists verses the composer so having a piano vocal score is essential.

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