Writing Music on the Computer

by Grace W.

Hi,
I'm a 12 year old homeschooled girl, and I love singing and playing piano, fiddle , and guitar. I found your site last week , and I LOVE it. I play by ear, (picking out melodies and adding chords), and I was wondering if you make your music with a computer program or if you find it somewhere online. If you make it, what program do you use?
Thank you!
Grace .W.

Dana:

Hello, Grace, I have several homeschooled students like you, who sing and play multiple instruments and love to compose their own music!

To answer your question, I do use a software program to make my music look nice -- long gone are the days of only writing music out by hand. The program I use is Finale; I have had it for many years without updating it and it still works great. You might go check their website to see if they have a scaled-down FREE version of music-writing software; they USED TO, and it was called Notepad. But I think they charge for it now, about $20. I'm not sure.

If you check around various music blogs, some of those other teachers may recommend something different. Susan Paradis (see the link on my piano pages) writes music for her students & sticks all kinds of cute graphics on the pages somehow... I have avoided that myself because of the price of ink; since I'm a teacher, I do a lot of printing!

Thanks for writing, and maybe you'll be writing your own music, eh?

Dana

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