Music Works Personal– Composition and Notation Made Easy (Tierramedia Music Works)

Name: nathanjh

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Product:	Tierramedia Music Works
Date:	16/08/00 (135 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use

Disadvantages: drumming notation

MusicWorks is a professional music writing program that utilises standard music notation in favour of the modern ‘sequencer’ layout adopted by today’s more basic music making packages.

Through careful navigation of the multitude of features that the programme boasts, you can create professional looking scores in a matter of minutes. Whether you add notes by dragging and dropping from a palette or by recording directly from a MIDI instrument, you will find that this windows based program is very easy to use.

Adding rests, dynamics, ornaments, repeats, guitar chords, titles, lyrics, key signatures and time signatures couldn’t be any simpler, as these can also be dragged and dropped from each of the available palettes. The opportunity to select different tracks is also included, enabling you to create entire arrangements with a minimum amount of fuss.

Another, helpful feature is the ability to change the colour of selected notes, making the piece even easier to follow. Also, there is the ability to listen to the notes as you drag them around, which makes composing a lot quicker. The speed of composing is made faster still as the program also recognises the usual cut, copy and paste commands.

A host of other tools are provided allowing for the easy manipulation of the score including transposing, quantising and replicating. An Auto-Layout tool is also provided, incorporating automatic note beams, ties, rests and accidentals basically at the click of a button.

You can also play back the composition utilising all the sounds that your sound card or MIDI instrument can produce. However, to fully benefit from this I recommend that you get a decent sound card, I’m using the SB Live 1024 and it sounds pretty well, if I say so myself!

For me, the only slight drawback that the programme does have is when you come around to doing drums. Sure, there are tons of percussion instruments to cho
ose from but you’ll have to slightly detract from the laws of traditional drum notation in order to generate the sound your after during playback. Other than this I can’t really fault it.

The CD package (which includes a tutorial) costs about forty quid and, as you’ve hopefully realised, it’s well worth it.

In summary, as it says on the box, ‘MusicWorks is the ideal tool for music students, aspiring composers, or anyone interested in music’.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

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