MusEdit
Features - Details
MusEdit provides fourteen different line types
to meet all your music notation needs:
Seven "Standard" Line Types: - Treble,
Bass, Keyboard (Treble+Bass pairs), Tablature (guitar and bass)Chord, and
Rhythm lines with all the musical symbols needed to reproduce virtually
any style of music. And text lines can be entered using any of the fonts
available on your system.
and...
Seven "Advanced" Line Types: Alto, Tenor, 8va Treble, 8vb Treble, Drum Kit, "No Clef", and Percussion lines. These line types also accept any kind of musical symbols, and most can be translated to other types of lines.
Unlike other notation software, MusEdit allows you to mix line types with great flexibility, allowing you to create a score with Text, Tab, Treble, Chords, and any other kinds of lines, in any combination. This makes MusEdit easy to use and ideal for creating scores in precisely the style you prefer, or for preparing lessons, exercises, books, and other special purposes.
Use the "Symbols Toolbox":
or the "Alternate Symbols Toolbox:
to insert many different kinds of musical symbols:
Most of these symbols (including note values) can also be inserted on Tab lines too.
Use the "Extended Objects" toolbar: 
to insert symbols such as triplets, long ties, phrase lines, and text phrases:
plus other kinds of things:
(NOTE: Printouts are very sharp compared to the jagged screen
pixels shown here)
Notes and symbols can be positioned and entered with the mouse cursor; or they can be positioned with the keyboard (with arrow keys, for example) and then entered by clicking on a toolbox full of symbols; or they can be both positioned and entered using only the keyboard. They can also be entered by clicking on the virtual fretboard and/or keyboard, or by connecting a Midi keyboard or pickup to your computer and playing your instrument. Using the mouse makes entering music easy and intuitive, but as you gain experience, entering with the keyboard can be much faster and more efficient.
Symbols can be selected from two general-purpose toolboxes: the Standard Symbols Toolbox or the Alternate Symbols Toolbox, or more specific toolboxes can be used for entering just a sub-set of the full symbol set.
Auto- options can help to speed up music entry by automatically taking care of entering bars, joining notes into quarter note clusters, entering up or down stem notes depending on position on the staff, and wrapping music from line to line when a staff becomes full. When it is necessary to have more control over how music is entered these options can be toggled off at any time, and their default on/off status can be set via Preferences.
Tailed notes (8th, 16th, etc) can be joined together while entering the notes, or groups of notes can be selected and joined after they've all been entered, or they can be automatically joined into quarter note clusters (eg. two 8th notes, or four 16th notes) if Auto-Join is on. Beamed tails are automatically corrected as notes are added and removed. Notes can be un-joined just as easily.
It's easy to make rectangular selections within several lines so you can, for example, select a single measure in a pair of musical staff and tab lines. Multi-line selections can then be pasted into groups of lines in a natural and intuitive way. Also, all lines except treble and bass can be selected, copied, and then pasted into a text document and they will appear in text format with as much information as simple text can convey.
Insertion Shortcuts - Keyboard shortcuts make it easy to insert a previous chord, bar, or cluster of beamed notes. This feature makes entering music much more speedy and efficient.
Movable Symbols - The position of all (non-note) symbols can be finely adjusted, both horizontally and vertically so the score looks exactly as you intend. Also, symbols, notes, chords, note clusters and words can be slid horizontally and vertically without moving other score elements. This makes it easy to re-use similar parts of the score which can be copied, pasted, then corrected slightly. Being able to slide words helps in lining lyric words up with correct musical phrasing. Also, pressing Shift+Tab in a lyric line will automatically line words up with notes in a treble line.
Line Groups - Automatically enter associated
groups of lines, such as. a set of lines consisting of treble, lyrics,
and tablature. Up to ten lines can be associated with one group, allowing
for quite complicated
musical scores. It's easy to group or ungroup lines, even after they've
been entered.
(Use this toolbar
to select which lines you want to see)
View Note Stems
on Tab - Tablature usually sacrifices most information about the
duration of notes -usually, only the fingering is shown. With MusEdit you
have the option to show both the fingering and the
note duration in a clear and simple manner.
MIDI Play Follows Repeats Indicators - MIDI Play (and saving as MIDI file) will repeat sections between left and right repeat bars, and by using "staff line text" (extended text) you can specify how many times each section should be repeated -including "nested" repeats. MusEdit does not follow more complicated directives such as alternate endings and expressions such as "D.S. al Coda" however.
Drum Tracks - Using MusEdit's "drum line" notation, combined with key codes for 47 different MIDI drum sounds, drum lines can be played as "drum machine" type sounds, as in this example:
Where D=Bass Drum, etc. (See Drum Notation Examples)
Saved MIDI Files - Any score which can be played as MIDI can also be saved as a standard .mid (MIDI) file. Such a MIDI file can then be played by or used in multi-media players (ie. MusEdit is not needed to play these files), posted on web sites, and edited by specialized MIDI programs. Examples: Barbara Allen, Yesterday
MIDI Instrument
Assignments / Loudness - Any of General MIDI's 127 standard instruments
can be assigned to to score lines either according to their type (treble,
bass, or tab) or according to any user label you assign to any lines.
Also, the realtive loudness of each line can be assigned.
Chord Designer - Use MusEdit's Chord Designer to create your own chord diagrams, including chords for alternate tunings; 2 - 8 string chords; chords diagrams with up to 7 frets; and fingering information.
Scan for New Chords - You can choose to have MusEdit scan all newly opened documents for new user-designed chords which don't yet exist in your own chord dictionary. MusEdit will present diagrams of all the new chords and then you can click on those which you want to add to your own dictionary. This provides a fast way to build up chord dictionaries -especially in alternate tunings- since you'll be able to download MusEdit documents created by other musicians with a special interest in alternate tunings and unique chords.
Auto-Translate Chords Between Tunings - If you are working in an alternate tuning MusEdit will translate the chords in its dictionary (built-in and user designed) into chords for the new tuning.
Translating Between Line Types - Instead of using "on the fly" translation as described above, you can translate whole lines from one style to another after they've been entered. Also, it's possible to translate text versions of tablature (downloaded off the net, for example) into MusEdit's graphical format. This includes both text-tab to treble, and text-tab to bass (or any tuning you specify, actually) and text to chord diagrams. Once that translation is done you can then use MusEdit to translate the new tab lines into graphical musical staff...
Scrolling - The score can scroll automatically (like a teleprompter) for reading while you are playing your instrument. You can adjust the number of lines to scroll and the delay between each scroll. Also, by splitting the window pane in two (using the splitter bar in the scroll bars) you can display a fixed chorus in the top pane while lyrics scroll in the bottom pane.
Audio Samples - Because MusEdit supports OLE (object linking and embedding) audio samples can be embedded or linked into a document. You can actually have a short sample of the music right next to its notation! Any other OLE object (such as a picture) can also be embedded.
Alternate Guitar Tunings - Many different common guitar tunings can be used on a tab line, or you can create your own tuning. When a tab line with a non-standard tuning is translated to musical staff the tuning is taken into account. Alternate tunings include 4,5, or 6 string bass guitar tunings also! MusEdit can translate between different tunings, even among instruments with different numbers of strings (eg. Guitar to Mandolin).
Transposition - Tab, treble, and even chord lines can be easily transposed into different keys. Transposed chord diagrams are chosen to use the most common shapes, rather than simply sliding bar chords up the fretboard. MusEdit also allows transposition by a full octave (either up or down).
Alternate
Note Styles - Eight note styles are available: normal (oval shape),
strum (diagonal slash), muted (X shape), harmonic (diamond shape), mini
(for grace notes, alternate voices, etc.), triangluar, square, and X'd
circle (mostly used for drum notation). These note styles can be used in
tab, treble, or rhythm lines:
Keyboard to Tab/Treble Staff Translation - MusEdit can translate (merge) Treble+Bass "Keyboard" staff into a single treble or tab staff. All notes from the bass staff are given "down stem" notes and added to the existing treble staff notes (which are given "up stems" as needed), and for those bass notes which are outside of the guitar's range you can select whether MusEdit should ignore them or else raise the notes by an octave or two as necessary so the full bass line can be played within the range of a guitar's tuning (with alternate tunings such as "Drop D" taken into account).
Shift Fret Position - You can select a portion of a Tab staff which is played in one fret position and shift it to a different fret position. The tones of the notes will be kept the same, but fingering will shift to different strings and fret positions as needed to accomodate the new playing position.
- You can also easily shift a single tab digit from one string to another while
keeping the tone the same (the fingering digit will adjust as needed to maintain
the same tone)
Powerful Print preview - MusEdit has a full-featured print preview, showing you exactly how your document will appear on the printed page. The breaks between pages are shown accurately, and you can zoom in, zoom out, and go forward and backward to view every page in your document.
Margins, Page Breaks, Page Numbering - You have full control over the size of top, bottom, left and right margins, where page breaks should occur (you can insert "hard" (forced) page breaks), and what style of page numbering should be used, where it should be located, and what font to use for page numbering.
Print Alert-
You can be alerted if your document is slightly too wide to fit on a single
page width, and then you will be presented with the option to automatically
scale the print size to fit onto a page in either "portrait" or "landscape"
orientation.
Auto-translate text-tab - You can choose to have MusEdit automatically translate "text-tab" to graphical tab when a text-tab file is opened. MusEdit will either leave the original text-tab in the file, or the text-tab lines can be automatically removed after the translation if you prefer.
Translate chord names into diagrams
- MusEdit can scan text lines for chord names and create a "chord line"
with the appropriate chord diagrams for each chord.
Finally, all of MusEdit's features are thoroughly explained in a well illustrated 284 page manual which is included with the program!
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Yowza Software, P.O. Box 4275, Berkeley CA 94704 USA |
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