In my creative life, I am first and foremost a composer. While for centuries that meant sitting at a piano, hunched over the keys, scrawling out notes longhand by candlelight, today we live in a world where the distance -- both physically and temporally -- from inspiration to creation is shorter than ever before. The technologies that allow for this are numerous and varied, despite how small a portion of the population actually creates music. (I mean, lets face it: nearly every man, woman, and child in this country at some point will write something and will therefore need some sort of word processor; the number of people who at any point in their lives will compose a piece of music and need notation software is a much smaller group of people.)
Despite that, there are a few tools I use on a regular basis. Realize this is by no means an exhaustive list:
Computer -- Again, this goes without saying, but I use the computer in every facet of my composing, from finding ideas to the actual putting down of the notes clear through the final stages of the publishing process. Should anything ever happen to my computer, it would be a minor catastrophe for me. To that end, I have some tools to help me prevent any problems, such as
Dropbox.com -- I love Dropbox. My sister first turned me on to it about two years ago, and I haven't looked back. For free, you can get a 2Gb account with them. You install a simple software app on your computer, which puts a special folder in your My Documents folder. Anything you put in to this Dropbox folder is automatically synced with their servers, meaning all your data is backed up somewhere else.
Here's the really cool thing: if you install the Dropbox software on any of your other computers and log in with the same account information, it will sync your files between all your computers, keeping everything current. I do occasionally work on music on more than one computer, so knowing I can open a file on my laptop, work on it for a bit, save it back in my Dropbox folder, then open that current version on my desktop with no effort ... it's a wonderful thing.
External hard drive -- Because I'm paranoid, I also have an external hard drive. About once a month or so, I plug this in to my computer and it backs up all of my data files for me. Since this has 750Gb of storage, it can hold much more than my Dropbox folder can, meaning all my audio files can be stored, not just my data files.
Notation software -- There are a couple of good notation products out there, but I've been a Finale man for the past decade or more, so I'm not likely to change now. The learning curve is quite steep (I know at one point the engraver for Beckenhorst Press was considering changing over to Finale, but I think he turned from the idea when he saw just how hard it is to get in to the program in the first place), but once you've reached the top of that hill, there is virtually no limit to what you can do with the program. You can record music real-time, or enter things note-by-note or chord-by-chord. Adding dynamics, markings, lyrics -- it's all easy.
There is also Sibelius, which does much the same thing as Finale but, from what I've heard, has an easier learning curve. I've not used the product myself, so anything I say about it will only be hearsay, but I know the folks who use it seem just as gung-ho about it as those of us who use Finale (when thinking of Finale users and Sibelius users, it helps to think of hardcore Mac users versus hardcore PC users -- it's that sort of thing). Personally, I don't feel like music printed in Sibelius has as elegant a look as that printed in Finale, but again, I've got over ten years of Finale Bias behind me, so that could just be me.
Finale is the single most important tool I have in my composing arsenal. Not only does it let me put the notes in, but it very easily plays it back to me so I can not only get a better idea of how the whole thing will sound, but I can also make sure I haven't put in a wrong note somewhere. The software lets me listen, print, edit -- it's a word processor for music.
To make entering the notes easier, I also use
Electronic keyboard -- I use a 6 1/2 octave Casio keyboard I've had for a decade, connected to my computer by a MIDI to USB device I got for about $20 at Radio Shack. (Newer keyboards now can connect via a simple USB cable, like the one between your printer and computer.) Once I've configured Finale correctly, I can either play my notes over in real time (which doesn't work very well for me -- I don't think at that speed), or else I can play a note or chord on the keyboard, then hit a number on the computer keyboard, and it inserts the note at the right pitch and length. Either way, once I gave my Casio a permanent place beside my computer about four years ago, my compositional output increased drastically.
I could go on for quite a while longer about the tech I use in composing music, but these are really the important bits. In just a few weeks, I'll be starting an in-depth series where I talk about my creative process when it comes to composing, from getting the first idea through writing the music down and all the way up to the final stages of publication. If you're interested in all the various technologies I use to make everything happen, you'll want to stay tuned for those posts, as you'll learn everything you ever wanted to know (and in most cases, probably more than you ever wanted to know) about how one composer creates his music.
Have any music-creation technology you use that I didn't talk about here? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below!
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