Jazz Marimba posted:

I can also look it over. Besides being a musician I’m also a professional music engraver (holdover term from when it was done on metal plates; we all use computers now) with experience from classical to modern pop and prog

weed cat posted:

I'd be willing to give it a glance and tell you how readable it is. I went to music school and, at least pre-covid, was a professional musician. honestly though a "make it sound like this" directive isn't bad to have as well, even if it's just a pop song where you're like, "can you make your keyboard sound kinda like this?" and if you're giving music to a guitarist, their sight-reading is even worse than mine!!

trilobite terror posted:

However, your experience making “theatrical” music with trumpets and violins will probably benefit most quickly if you take lessons—particularly keyboard and piano lessons. This will allow you to best take advantage of the plethora of synthesizers and synthesized instruments/sample packs/etc that exist. You don’t need to become a virtuoso keyboardist (though I’m sure it helps) but being able to bang out some scales and chords is going to pay dividends for your ability to write and record music.

There are lots of VSTs and synthesizer plug-ins, and built-in DAW features that will take the human voice/etc and turn it into midi, transcribe it to notes, etc.

Lead out in cuffs posted:

What's your budget? You mentioned a couple weeks of studio time plus session musicians... You could probably do that, but would probably want to hire a mix engineer too. And while I don't have a good sense of exact costs of all that, I'm fairly sure you're talking thousands of dollars at least.

People are suggesting free software, but you might want to look into taking a course in home recording (or at least looking into what that would cost) and then think about paying for high-priced VSTs, or whatever.

HaB posted:

Writing out an entire piece before you haven't actually played a note is kind of an unusual process. For people who want scores, they typically work with Sibellius or something that generates the score after the song is complete.

But I mean - you say you "already want the note lengths perfect" before you start messing with VSTs - but I mean - they are MIDI editors. Don't you want to be able to play with it on the fly? And you want to "listen to how they sound together musically" first - what do you do that on? Do you listen with just the old school default MIDI instruments?

At any rate - your thinking isn't dumb - it's just - not what anything was really designed for. I am trying to fully understand your process then maybe I can think of ways you can accomplish that with current tools.

Can you talk me through composing a song, from conception to "finished"?

Stoca Zola posted:

Stoca Zola posted:

I think you can get a lot of what you want, for free, using Reaper (and probably other DAWs too but Reaper is what I know best). So you can input midi into Reaper using step input, which will give you non-realtime, grid perfect note and rest entry, but Reaper does also have notation view if you prefer to do it that way. Using the DAW will let you get performance elements such as velocity/loud/softness, positional stuff with panning, and help you to get a more naturalistic sounding piece. You aren't stuck with General MIDI program voicings either. I think you could use your current workflow to get the notation exactly how you want, but then import into Reaper for rendering it into a demo. I hope you don't mind but I grabbed the midi of one of your pieces, Awake Dear Heart and chucked it into Reaper to see what I could come up with, with the free VSTs I have on hand. It really wasn't hard to import the midi tracks into Reaper (basically drag and drop, then they are all correctly titled for easy instrument selection). I had to delete your program change midi messages because they made Reaper crash, but then I used:

Guitars: Ample Guitar M II Lite, Sine Player some free nylon guitar sample
Strings, Horns, Trombone: Spitfire BBC Orchestra (I had to wait a while to get this but it was still free)
MT-PowerDrumKit 2 by MANDA

I adjusted the panning of some of the instruments, and changed the dynamics of the jazz guitar part so you could still hear it over the strings and in about 10 mins it sounded like this: https://www.sendspace.com/file/wfkm9o

So some comments I have about how to make it sound more naturalistic and not like just MIDI is to add more dynamics to the instruments. That might not be possible in your notation software but it's pretty easy in a DAW. For example here are your drums:

The bottom lane shows note velocity and you've got every part of the kit being hit with the exact same energy. You could accent the beats, or the syncopations, to make it sound closer to how a drum kit is played. There's tutorials on youtube for how to "program" drums when you aren't a drum player so that could help.


And this bit is the very simple edits I did to make the jazz guitar part louder or softer.
Because of the way the midi notes are written it was like the guitar was being muted per note which sounds very choppy and unnatural so I dragged the note lengths a little longer too.

I also fiddled with some of the note accents, but without knowing your intention for how the part is supposed to feel it's not for me to say whether one way or the other is better or worse.

I think you might be most of the way there to being able to get your demo tracks to sound how you want, you could probably benefit from listening to some tracks that are similar to the style that you want to achieve, and using those as a reference for how the instrument parts are actually performed and the instruments mixed. You will be able to do stuff in the DAW like adjust the EQ for the tracks to help the instruments not sound too muddy together, too. I don't think it has to cost you much money at all, if any.
Edit: I forgot to say, the advantage of entering notes with the midi keyboard is that you can get an approximation of the velocity you want at the time of note entry, rather than needing to manually adjust it later on. Or at minimum you can get loud/soft in to make it easier to see what you're doing when you do manually tweak it later.