Eeep... normally when I want to transcribe or copy music, I just do it by hand. Generally, I've only needed to do this for myself... and so, I'm quite fond of doing it by hand. I find it quite comforting, and despite being a tech nerd in many respects, I'm a bit old-fashioned when it comes to music (I still use dead paper scores for instance!).

However, things that I write for myself... well, I'm a touch messy... idiosyncratic, I guess would be the polite way to put it! I write things so that they make sense to me, and if that means that it is a little bit coded for the way that I like to read and understand things, then that is the way it is!

But... I have just been put in charge of a youth orchestra, and we have a surplus of violins coming up from a lower orchestra... which means that I have put them in as 3rd violins to support the viola section. That means that they need to have all the parts rewritten into treble clef that modern violins use from the alto clef that is the normal clef for the violas. And I'm pretty damn sure that none of them will appreciate the hand-written beauty of my personal transcriptions!

So... a music transcription software it is. I've tried using these things in the past, and I'm not that great at them. Mostly, it is because I don't really use them that often, and then I just avoid using them in favour of pen and paper, and then I just don't get better at it! Sibelius is the best paid one to use, but I don't want to stump up for a transcription software that I'm not likely to be using that often.... and so, I've gone with the almost equally fully featured version of Musescore. Looks good enough, like the Audacity of transcription software!

There appeared to be the manual keyboard and mouse input, which probably would be fast enough if I had some experience under my belt and a good grasp of the keyboard shortcuts... but sadly, time is against me in this case.

Then there was the pleasant looking option of pdf conversion, where you upload a pdf scan of the music that you want transcribed and the computer software would recognise and transcribe the music. That seemed like the best option... except when I scanned in a page of the music. Well, let's say that janky and crap would be extremely polite ways to describe the output. So, nope... this was not the way forward!

Which left the last option... MIDI to USB input from an electric keyboard. This ended up working pretty damn well, and the best thing was that I could just play the music on the keyboard and just have the software directly notate the music! Well, as a musician, this is the easiest and best way to enter in the music... but it does require that I play in metronomic time, a bit like a robot. But thankfully, that is a small price to pay to just get the bloody thing written out!

... and the magic is done by this 30 dollar interface. A little cable that changes the MIDI output of the keyboard into a USB input for the computer. Crazily simple and a real game changer as far as how I view the transcription idea! Of course, I don't think that it will work for everything that I want... for instance, I often want to write scordatura parts for the viola d'amore and I'm not sure that this will work. However, I might just investigate what sorts of plug-ins that people have designed for the open-source MuseScore, and perhaps... just perhaps, there is an unlikely chance that a music nerd somewhere, sometime... has written a thing that will fit the bill perfectly!

Hey... and it looks like it works perfectly with this first test piece. One that just had lots of slow moving tied semibreves. Tomorrow, I will do the more complicated pieces of Rossini and Haydn. I'm quite optimistic about it now, I'm pretty sure that I've got the rudimentary ideas down... and I'm a competent pianist as well, so it should go relatively smoothly! Famous last words...

I can also be found cross-posting at:
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