Greetings all. Great forum. Perused a pile of posts, perpetually perplexed. Long letter looms.

I do a good bit of live solo work here in deep southern New Zealand. With guitar, vocals, and sometimes piano. But it gets lonely (and some venues won't pay enough for another human to play along), so I thought I might bring along my Pismo 500Mhz PowerBook with Panther and 512MB ram for company. And if Bronze (that's his name) could go ahead and take care of playing some bass and drum parts while I flail away on my guitar, so much the better. But I'm clueless, and I don't know what I need.

When I write stuff with Finale 2004, and Finale plays it back, it uses either Quicktime musical instruments
or SmartMusic Softsynth playback . But neither of those produce bass or drum sounds I'd want to trot out through my P.A. in public - even if only the bartender is listening. Plus Finale strikes me as great for creating printable sheet music for when I play with other humans, but crummy for accompanying me.

I'm guessing I need some kinda sequencer to accompany me. And I'll bet there are better sounds out there too. I tried the PlugSound demo, but it no work with Finale, near as I can tell. Do I need to sample me or a buddy playing bass through some nice bass rig with some nice bass, for example? Or is there already some great sample of some great bass player with some great bass out there that I could (gulp) buy?

Finally, any thoughts on the best way to tell the sequencer what to play? For example, with Finale, I write it out, and I'm happy with that, because it doesn't require me to go buy a heap o' midi stuff (keyboard controller or guitar midi pickup, etc). I just tell the bass to play a G then a B-flat, etc., and I don't have to play those on a midi keyboard into the Mac. Folks on this forum have mentioned that some of the sequencers (PT, Logic, but not DP?) have notation. I presume that feature is there to let people write what they want the sequencer to play rather than play what they want the sequencer to play. Am I in the ballpark?

Thanks for any advice.

Hi from the deep south ala Queenstown.. another newbie like me..
grab a few demos to try out and see how you like them.. for something simple and not too confusing you might like to try Trackion or Live.. both are excellent software... if you just want bass and drums and dont want to get a keyboard to input the data then most software allows you to draw in with the pencil tool the notes you want.

Tracktion is $80 NZD and Live 4.01 is $499USD.
both are excellent products... .
now for sounds thats up to you but you could try some samples .. Live demo has reasonibe drum sounds and you can fire them through the onboard effects like reverb/echo chorus to get the sound you like.. not too sure how a 500mhz powerbook will handle this but should be ok with 1/2 a gig of ram as i cant imagine you are gonna get fancy.

I'm not real experienced with this yet, but it sounds like Live or Reason is what you want. You should be able to compose in Finale, expert a midi file, and import it into either of those programs. Reason is a soft synth so you can choose what sounds you want to use to play the midi instruments. I'm sure others know more, but hopefully this points you in a direction.

Thanks guys. Heard Queenstown is beautiful - moved to NZ a few months ago, and Dunedin's great.

So exporting MIDI from Finale? Hadn't thought of that - I'll try that. I downloaded the Live demo, and it looks good. I'll check out Reason also while I'm at it.

How did it work? Say hello to my NZ cousins for me. I'm in France.

http://www.musitek.com/

SmartScore music ocr 299$ for finale licensees - hum - a bit expensive!!

Try a search for music ocr on the web to find cheaper solutions (maybe).

I used Finale years ago and even a one octave usb midi keyboard would have been easier than sticking quavers and semiquavers on the number keys on my alphanumeric keyboard. Even if you've never touched a piano it shouldn't be difficult. Of course a 5 octave keyboard with lots of nice drums and bass sounds would be better, then it would even play your tracks back for you.

Can you still put a backbeat on Mozart with Finale?

This post has been edited by Presto: Sat 11 Sep 2004, 19:49

Still flailing away - thanks all for your replies. Perhaps the keyboard route is the next step...