Finale or Logic Score ??

Patrick

Take it from me there is nothing out there that can touch Logic for speed in preparing a score.Trust me ..I do a lot of scores.If you set up your key commands to your personal taste you can do very fast
entries of things like slurs etc...just rubber band the notes to slur & hit your key command for the slur...I have the slur key command set up as the "s" key.

I've tried them all...Sibelius & Finale...Finale in particular is a nightmare trying to remember all the "symbols" for different things.

In Logic I set up my audio & midi files,mix & master...then save a copy of the score as my notation
score and edit it to produce a full score and another for parts as adjustments have to be made in both.Then print score & parts to my printer or save as pdf's.

Nothing could be easier.

It will take you time to set up Logic the way you want to work and there is a learning curve...but it will be worth it.

And soon I am sure Apple will update the notation section & blow the competition out of the water
(in my opinion)

Rohan Stevenson may add some thing to this thread as he is very knowledgeable about Logic's score.

Cheers & hope this helps.

John

I'm a user of Sibelius, but I had high hopes for Logic's score editor... and it's good to have it I suppose, it makes it easy to change things from that point. But no, there's no comparison. If you're going to write that way, and I do, you owe it to yourself to get one of the big names in music scoring.

And I'm gonna suggest to you Sibelius. The reason is, Sibelius 5 allows for playing the same Audio Unit based virtual instruments that you are going to use in Logic later- well, let me be more clear. It'll play third party VI's- the ones in Logic won't show up. And when you go to export, Sibelius will ask if it is going to end up with the same instruments, and the articulations and rhythms will be very good, if not flawless when you do import it into Logic.

Finale is a great program and I'm not really very familiar with it, but its big thing at the moment is that you can record audio to it, which is very cool, but how hard is it to do some exporting of the audio into Logic and recording it there. And Finale does allow for Audio Units, but not all of them, as I understand it.

And this is not me bad mouthing Logic: if Sibelius decided all of a sudden it wanted to be a full range, pro level DAW with a lot of amazing instruments and great sounding effects, I doubt it could do that very quickly either. Logic's score is designed for printing up of MIDI work and some adjustments, and that's all you can expect.

Good luck- just some thoughts here. Hope they end up being helpful.

Logic's score program takes a bit of getting used to. But once you get used to it - it's great... One trick I picked up, to make scoring easier for some instruments is.. Create a duplicate 'dummy track' which is used for scoring only. Just copy the midi file from the real track to the 'display only track'. You can then 'message' that track so it displays better.

There is a book called "Logic Notation Guide" by Johannes Prischl.

http://prischl.net/LNG/

It is quite informative and worth the price.. It's 10 years old, but Logic's scoring section has not changed much since then.. it's still very helpful..

I like to use musiclab's RealGuitar and Realstrat. I created a custom staff-style which lets me see the chords in the treble clef, and the bass clef contains keyswitch data which activates mute, upstroke, downstroke, palm etc. So I can actually edit the strums of the guitar from the score page. Although this might not be a 'legit' score style, it's extremely helpful to me..

The one good thing about Logic's score program, is that although it is a bit esoteric, you can usually figure a work around for any given situation It beats going back and forth moving midi files, converting between Logic and and an external scoring program.

I would say 'stick with it for a while' and check out the Logic Notation Guide

The way I see it, Logic is a production program, Finale/Sibelius are notation programs. You won't use a sport car to drive off the road, it's not build for that. I use each program for what it does best and as far as creating cue notes and extracting parts, you can't expect Logic to do the same job as Sibelius (I'm sure Finale is great, I don't use it).

i came across this thread by chance as i am no where near my studio - but i really couldn't resist.

someone made an analogy with cars...well that holds but you would think of logic as an all-purpose all-terrain vehicle. in can be pretty sporty, but its real value is that it can be adapted for any purpose.

one day i am doing big orchestral scores/mock-ups. the next i might be doing some jazz or rock. the next i might be doing electronic based stuff, and the next i might be doing a combination of all of these, and some mixing and perhaps recording live players. we all moan about logic's short-comings, but in my opinion there really isn't a program out there that can match logic for versatility.

i know patrick has had some difficulties having seen some of his other posts - and some of which are limitations of the program, some are bugs, and some are pilot errors. but if you were doing purely orchestral stuff with no other stuff layered over, then you really don't need the flexibility of logic, you want a dedicated notation editor.

i know loads of people who use both...export midi files from logic to sibelius for the final touch ups. frankly, the one thing logic has over dedicated editors is speed, as someone esle touched upon. problem is logic will take you 90% opf the way faster than any other program but you lose that a lot of the advatange trying to work around the limitations at the end. but even then, i am often smashing out a hastily written score and parts an hour before the taxi is due to take me to the session and logic is by far the best tool for jobs like that.

to say that we are overdue for enhancements to the score editor is an understatement. don't know when we will get them and i too am getting a bit frustrated with the lack of progress in this area. i am looking to have a look at getting into this:

http://www.notionmusic.com/products/notion/

and just starting to have a look around in general. it's one of the reasons i went to the musikmesse. i think in reality for what i do, logic is still the only game in time.

in direct answer to patrick, cutting up the regions on a track is precisely what i like about the logic scoring paradigm and what makes it a superior workflow to the other notating programmes. some of the other thing he mentions are quirky and could work a bit better but are by no means dealbreakers.

patrick, i would suggest you look at real quantization, fix quantization, and note force legato (or other legato settings) to get the score looking right. again, for those who play their stuff in, logic is famously strong in this area, yet it is frustrating you. how about posting specific questions and seeing if there are not workflows that might suit you out there?

For a long time my attitude was: Logic's score editor ***** and I´m much faster writing my stuff out by hand. But that was a prejudice due to my lack of understanding the possibilities offered by Logic and maybe also a bit of nostalgia. Then I really got into it and learned my way through it and nowadays I'm quite happy with it and even write more complex contemporary music with it (it used to take me ages to write out a quintole or septole until I understood and practised the easy principle of n-toles).

The dummy-track principle mentioned in this thread sometimes really helps - e.g. if you have shuffeld non quantized eight notes which you want to print out as straight eigth notes. But most of the time stuff I write for printing is dedicated to be played by musicians anyway so I don't care so much how it actually sounds in Logic as long as it looks right.

I have Both. Finale' and logic. I first thought finale' is a dedicated program for notation, so I stepped out of the way and learned it. Took a Year. I Composed with it also. The E-magic Team back then informed me that you can use the logic notation just as well. i told them Well... finale' is a dedicated notation program, so as time went on. One finds out that the notation programs have a stiffness to them that cannot be taken out. unless transfered to logic. After transferring one piece of music my stomach was sickened. It can take weeks sometimes to get the score right. Surprise ! And still then you have two programs to content with. Which will cross your eyes and make you wear glasses. Different Key Commands, A completely different approach in programing from one program to the other. Bi-lingual burnout ! So I then learned logic completely and used its score. Took about a year. And you find out that, you're on your own, in setting up your score or Autoload templates to conform your studio, or your method of writing. After you understand that process, then you begin to use logic with a one step approach and produce score and CD and parts. Write with a quick key command or keyboard inputing. Or playing and diffusing to score. The vast different use for logic is numerous and unequal to any other program, not just Notation programs. If you're a lifer in this business. You will learn logic for everyday use. And also have one of the other notation programs at hand. Just in-case. ( Scanning ...ect ). I have produced CD and Score in one sitting from day to day Composition using logic. There is no other way to write and produce without a heep of mess, as they say. Now what the **** is the problem with the stem adjustments ? Those sort of things keep one on their toes. And you learn not to upgrade until you are finished with your project. Keep the logic 7 app. for those pesky bugs, like the current stem adjustments of logic 8.01 . the stem adjustments was infrequent for the grace notes from the past. Now all the stem adjustments caught the Flu bug. Hello apple ! Stem Adjustments ! Are you gonna make the notation programs make fun of you ?