Software for Your Musical Instruments?

kko asks: "After looking for tuning software for my newly-acquired violin, I stumbled upon Tutor, which is an nifty violin tuner that also helps in developing your intonation and quick reading skills. What software have you used to aid your instrument practice, and how has it helped (or hindered) you? If you are an instructor, what do you think of instrument software in your student's learning process?"

Re:Cubase!

[Poppler]

I couldn't agree more. In case he's running Linux, I'd like to point out some software he could use.
Audacity [sourceforge.net] - simple audio recording
Rosegarden [rosegardenmusic.com] - audio editor/sequencer
Ardour [ardour.org] - digital audio workstation (think pro tools)

Possibly...

[Mozk]

Auralia [sibelius.com] can help with ear training (intervals and such), and Musition [sibelius.com] can help with learning music theory. I have used them both once to try them but never fully used them. Their normal use is for teachers to have students use to record their progress, but you can use it solo. When I took a music theory class we used a program called Finale to compose music, however it won't very much help with learning how to play an instrument.

I play guitar and for the most part I do not use software to aid in practice. I have tuner software (Enable Encore) that I can plug into which I occasionally use, and music composing software (Guitar Pro 5, G7, and Finale).

When beginning with an instrument it's best just to practice reading music manually. In the case of guitars, that would mainly be tabs. Guitarists much prefer tabs (finger positions on six lines for the six strings) when learning music as chords can contain many double notes and would look messy on a staff.

Anyway, with violin, you'll be reading staves. I'm not sure how much you know so I'll to to help a little: violins use the G clef, so the lines on the staff from bottom up are E, G, B, D, and F; and the spaces are F, A, C, and E. The strings on the violin from biggest to smallest are G, D, A, and E. Practice by saying a note and playing it, then move onto reading simple songs and playing them. I'm not used to fretless instruments so I have no idea how hard that is. :P

I doubt my advice there helped, but as for the software part: There isn't much that will help you learn how to play an instrument. It's best just to read music and practice playing it until you get the muscle memory that will assist you in both playing faster and playing with less thought.

low tech approach

[gEvil (beta)]

If you are just beginning to learn an instrument, take the low tech approach and don't mix the computer into it at all. It will only distract you and waste your time when you could actually be learning the instrument. Or if you feel that you must use software to help develop your tuning and intonation skills, then break it up into "with computer" and "without computer" sessions. Honestly, the way to learn an instrument is to become intimately familiar with it, and you won't get that by fiddling with a computer.

Re:From a Guitar player...

[Haggador Sparticus]

From another guitar player, actually bass: Guitar Pro has been quite possibly the most essential tool to learn not only songs by tabs, but also teaches you to read the corresponding music notation. It features a tuner for an instrument plugged in by way of Line-in or mic. The Guitar Pro files can be manipulated in many ways, annotated extensively, and stretched out and timed slower for one to learn the piece. Each file also contains usually multiple tracks (guitar, bass, keys, drums). It is possible to mute and isolate certain tracks to assist in learning, too. The database at http://mysongbook.com/ [mysongbook.com] has entries for tons of assorted musicians and songs. Very very good. Actually, they are about to release a MacOS X version in May, last I checked. Very effective to go with Logic Express or Garage Band. Haggador Sparticus

Re:From a Guitar player...

[The Wooden Badger]

With guitar you are so right. You can get started very quickly and easily. And then I can't say it enough: PRACTICE. It isn't too hard to learn a few chords and strum chords with a prescribed rythm, but to really get going it takes some practice. I remember reading a Steve Vai interview a long time ago where he talked about his structured practice in his early days. There were three three hour blocks. It was one hour each of scales, I think arppegios, and something else that escapes me. He repeated this three times and then spent an hour jamming. Someone elsewhere mentions jamming for ten hours and really making a lot of progress at the end of the session. Now Vai is insanely talented. I know most mere mortals can barely spare an hour to practice an instrument, but you can still get pretty good and have a lot of fun with that much regular practice. Apart from that I think the software would kind of get in the way when it comes to learning. But if it was the violin we were talking about here, I think that software would be exceptionally helpful without a competent teacher.

From a teacher...

[clarinetn]

I give individual clarinet lessons to a large number of students and i am continually looking for new material and methods in order to give them the best and most interesting experiences.
If you go into a music store, you'll notice that there are a great deal of 'playalong' cds included with books at the moment - although playing with a cd isn't what i would call learning to be a musician.

Why?
I come across a lot of students who can't *read* music. When it comes down to it, learning to read music notation correctly can give you the most enjoyment in the long term. Sure, it might be hard work - but if you ever want to play in an ensemble it will be very useful. It also opens up a whole new world of music available to play.

That said, technology certainly has its place and the cd's are really very useful in the situation where i can teach the student *how* to use them for maximum benefit. If you haven't got a teacher - get one! But then i would say that wouldn't I?

As some other posters have mentioned, the ability to record is brilliant. I take my notebook to all lessons and where appropriate i'll record my students playing and let them critique their own performance. Being a musician is as much about listening as playing. This also means I can collate their best performances over a longer period and burn a cd for them to take away.

I'm also working with a company in Australia who are developing instrumental teaching software and it is taking some old ideas to new levels. The cd playalong concept is at work here, although now we are in front of an everyday pc seeing music notation, hearing a band, orchestra or piano accompanist and actually playing inside the ensemble. On top of that, the software is calibrated to listen to your playing and let you know how well every note is played. Are you in time? Is your intonation good? Feedback that is genuinely useful to a musician of any level.

Just in case you didn't see it the first time - I work for this company, so make what you will of it. Or you could just try it out for yourself: http://inthechair.com [inthechair.com]

Oh, and to the poster that was advocating the quantity for quality technique. I'm wary of playing for long periods of time purely for the sake of doing lots of practice. If you are going to be the best you need to learn how to do the most practice in the leanest time. Playing for hours on end is sometimes fun, usually painful and often plain stupid.

Basic composition tools

[bender647]

I've been a amateur drummer for 25 years, and have tried a few software packages, but here are the ones I actually find useful.

Under Windows, for overdubbing wav and midi I mostly use Cakewalk [cakewalk.com] (warning: link contains annoying self-playing music). I use the cheaper Home Studio. They have a real product differentiation problem as Sonar is the expensive product, and then they market or bundle cheaper versions that may cover your needs just fine (its hard to tell from the product descriptions which features are grayed out). I use Cakewalk because the Windows drivers can be used in a very low-latency mode, and I always have a Windows laptop kicking around. I have not liked the scoring side of Cakewalk.

Also under Windows, I have used Sibelius [sibelius.com] (version 3 and 4). It is a phenominal scoring program that produces great looking sheet music. This is the only thing I do with a PC that I think is really better than without the PC. If you score with a program that plays back what you've written via midi, you can correct many mistakes on the fly. Sibelius is unfortuately still phenominally expensive for my uses, and I've never purchased it (nor has anyone I know).

Under linux, the equivalent of Cakewalk is Rosegarden [rosegardenmusic.com]. It is very impressive at the moment. Building it is a royal pain for me. It doesn't use your standard autotools driven make, it uses Scons [scons.org] (not in my distribution). Scons requires a Python module that's not available in the stable version of Python. Hey, people writing free software can use whatever they want, its just a shame some people won't try their product because of the barrier to entry. I've had latency issues with Rosegarden + JACK [sourceforge.net] which I think can be sorted out but I have to decide if I want to run the tools as root or pull in the whole SELinux overhead + realtime module (no different than Cakewalk in Windows -- it does not work well as non-admin). Rosegarden's scoring is coming along but not quite there for me.

For scoring under Linux, I'm using Lilypond [lilypond.org]. Lilypond is phenominal, but many won't like it because its markup-based (like writing Latex). You have to go through the compile cycle to view what you've written, and dump midi to hear it. Fortunately for me, rythym section music is very repetitive. The quality of printed music it can produce is unmatched. I'm sure more programs will start using Lilypond as a processing back-end.