Pyware's Music Writer review
By James Zappia
Copyright (c) 1991 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit
That timeless mnemonic, uttered over the years through the lips of many a young student of Music, takes on new meaning in our highly technological age, especially with the latest crop of computer hardware and software. Yes, "Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit". In our case, the fruit is, of course, our favourite computer, the Apple //. And, these days, the Apple is playing a big part in bringing musical creativity to fruition.
Pyware Music Writer for the Apple //GS is at the forefront of state-of-the-art music software. This is a superb music-notation program packed with all the features you're likely to need to produce quality hardcopy of the music you create, and, because it is designed for the GS, Music Writer naturally uses the GS's Ensoniq sound chip to enable you to immediately hear your creations as well as see them on the screen.
The strength of Music Writer lies in its ability to produce good quality printouts of music. However, although it does have sequencing capabilities, I would hesitate to recommend it if all you really want is a MIDI sequencer. There are some minor weaknesses which make it less suited to that purpose.
The program comes in three levels. The differences between them are the number of staves (also called tracks) that can be worked on simultaneously and printed out as a score. There is Level 1 (Limited Edition) with 3 staves, Level 2 (Special Edition) with 6 staves, and Level 3 (Professional Edition), which I used for this review, which allows up to 32 staves. They are priced at $155.21, $365.81 and $724.79 respectively. While the Professional Edition may be priced out of the range of ordinary home use, the lower priced editions certainly present viable alternatives.
Music Writer is very easy to use. The work screen provides a WYSIWYG environment, similar in layout to typical paint and wordprocessing applications, with the familiar menu bar across the top, and a palette down the lefthand side for the specialised music symbols. Your compositions can be put together directly on the screen using the keyboard and mouse, but you get even greater flexibility by connecting a MIDI synthesizer for both input and output. The program supports the Apple External MIDI Box, the Passport MIDI Interface, and the Audio Animator. I tried two of these - the Apple MIDI Box and the Audio Animator. Both worked equally well for MIDI connection. The Audio Animator has the added feature of allowing you to hook the GS up to your HiFi system for playback in true stereo.
Let's now look at Music Writer in terms of these four elements of the creative process: WRITING, EDITING, PLAYING and PRINTING.
I set out to write an arrangement of "O Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison. The final product was a five-part arrangement for Vocal (lyric sheet), Piano, Bass, Guitar and Drums. Since the Piano part requires two staves (treble and bass), the overall number of staves was six.
WRITING:
When you first load Music Writer, the main screen displays two blank staves. Your first task would ordinarily be to add a clef, a key signature and a time signature before going ahead and entering music either from the keyboard or via MIDI. You'll find the necessary symbols in one of the eight "symbols palettes". There is a full range of symbols to cover the various clefs, key signatures and time signatures as well as the note values from whole note to sixtyforth note, accidentals, articulation markings, dynamics, ornaments and performance markings such as crescendo, tie and slur.
If you use the computer keyboard for input, as you continue to add music, you can manually add bar lines or use the Auto Bar feature which calculates the bars according to the chosen time signature. Other features include special facilities for placing text and lyrics in the work. Music Writer makes adding lyrics even easier by automatically matching each syllable to a note on the staff.
MIDI Input:
There are two types of MIDI input available - STEP record and REAL TIME record. In Step record, you select a note value from the symbol palette and press keys on the MIDI instrument to give the pitch. On the other hand, Real Time record
involves actually playing the MIDI instrument in the normal way. In both cases, the program stores the recording in the Clipboard. It can then be pasted or merged anywhere in the file.
Real Time record has two particularly handy features. One, called Quantisation, automatically compensates for minute discrepancies of tempo in your playing - after all, no-one plays perfectly in time! Another feature is the ability to record on both the treble and bass clefs of a grand staff simultaneously. However, I found that to use this feature effectively, your playing has to be deadly accurate (which mine wasn't).
Memory seems to be a critical factor in the overall performance of the program. The minimum requirement to run Music Writer is 768K. However, this will only allow you to enter very short phrases with MIDI, and work on very small files. The recommended memory configuration is 1.25M
EDITING:
As you'd expect, Music Writer comes with a full range of editing features. Horizontal and vertical scroll bars let you find your way around the file quickly, but you can also place rehearsal markers throughout the composition and use the "Jump to" function. Present are the usual wordprocessor-type functions such as Insert, Delete, Copy, Cut and Paste. Then there are the specialised music editing functions that allow you to perform such tasks as changing the stem direction of notes, increasing or reducing note values, beaming (joining eighth notes, etc), and transposing or shifting the pitch. In each case, you select the music to be edited by highlighting a range of notes. Selection can be narrowed right down to a particular voice on one staff. This ability to narrow or extend the selection range is useful for putting together composite instrumental parts on the one staff, eg. two trumpet or flute parts or even a drum part, each with its own notational style, stem direction and beaming.
Because of the inherent flexibility of Music Writer, you don't really have to make any major decisions at the start regarding the overall format of your composition. You can add or remove staves as necessary. Each staff can be given a label to identify the instrument for which it is written. The format also includes the song title as well as a header and footer. Any GS system font may be used for text, lyrics, titles and footers. Once you have established a format that suits you, it can be saved for later use with other songs.
PLAYING:
The real plus in Music Writer is the fact that you don't need to own a MIDI keyboard to hear the music you create. The program directly accesses the Ensoniq sound chip in the GS. You can control the tempo and select any range of music to be played. An instrument library lets you assign different timbres (sounds) to each track. There is a separate program by Pyware, called "Instrument Designer", that enables you to create your own collection of timbres. This program may even be a necessity because the instrument library that comes with Music Writer doesn't really offer the best sounds that the GS is capable of producing. In fact, when I first tried the program, I pulled out my old copy of The Music Studio, hoping to use its sound libraries with Music Writer. Unfortunately, they are not compatible.
MIDI Output:
A unique feature of MIDI, in general, is the ability to use different channels to send MIDI data along the connecting lines. In this way, one MIDI instrument can control a number of other MIDI instruments. There are usually 16 channels available to a MIDI system. By assigning it a different channel number, each instrument can be set to play a specific track with a specific timbre. Music Writer lets you assign any channel, 1-16, to any track in your composition, enabling you to send the output to any MIDI instrument.
Actually, I found the playback function of Music Writer a little disappointing, considering the wide-ranging scope of the program. For example, there is a minor, but curious, problem when playing back with MIDI. The very first note is somehow skipped, and playing starts from the second note in a song. I got over this by placing a dummy note (which must be a pitched note, not a rest) at the beginning of the composition. This can overcome the problem, as long as you remember to delete the note when you go to print out.
Another problem was that, when the song was finished, I could not get it to simultaneously play all the tracks right through. Playback would continue until
a certain spot in the music, and then just die out. I had the recommended 1.25M of memory, but, since the problem did appear to be memory-related, I expected to rectify it by installing a borrowed 2M card. However, I got exactly the same result - the playback stopped at the same point as before. It would appear that Music Writer does not make effective use of all available memory, and suggests that, as more and more staves are added, this would increasingly limit the overall length of a composition (my arrangement of "O Pretty Woman" was about 80 bars long).
PRINTING:
Printing music is what Music Writer is all about. The program supports both the LaserWriter and ImageWriter printers. The quality of the printout that I got from my ImageWriter // was excellent, and certainly good enough to give to musician to read and play. By selecting the desired range of music, you can print anything from a few bars to the full score plus the individual parts of the composition.
Printing can be in draft or better text mode, with two sizes, normal and condensed (condensed is probably the more useful). The program formats pages automatically, but one very important function that is missing is the ability to manually force a new page when you want it.
Just a word of warning! Don't expect to be able to load up Music Writer, whip up an arrangement, feed it through the printer in a flash and, hey presto, start handing out the charts. Give yourself a lot of time to produce your hardcopy. Using condensed size and better text mode, the 4-page Piano part alone for "O Pretty Woman" took one hour to print. Each of the other 2-page, single-staff parts took half an hour. That all added up to 3 hours of printing at an average of 15 minutes per page!!
Music Writer has many capabilities that are not immediately apparent, and to really appreciate the power of the program you have to spend time simply toying with it. The user manual does not give much away except to list the various functions and features and point out how to select them. Music Writer Level 1 comes with a basic music theory guide, but what would really be useful for all the editions is some kind of tutorial on actually using the program.
On the whole, Music Writer's flexible environment, in-built sound capabilities and its ability to produce top-quality printed output make it a "must have" for both the professional and amateur musician.

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