House of Drumming.com

I need a drum notation program. I want to give my students professional looking exercises. What is the best and simplest to use? Finale seems like the best?

Sibelius by far.

Guitar Pro is working great for my transcriptions. Sibelius and Finale are great too though.

I use Sibelius.. took awhille to learn..

There used to be a stripped down version called g7 for guitarists..
I'm not sure if they still have it but it had drum notation built in as well..

Finale if you are a geek, sibelius otherwise

I've always felt Sibelius is even geekier than Finale because it has ALL the music notation you can think of. All kinds of note heads, accents, articulations, etc. It takes a while getting used to how it works, but I make all my serious charting on it and it ends up being really fast.

Yeah.

Sibelius is as easy to use as Word for basic use, but if you go deep it can do pretty much anything.

Matus wrote:I've always felt Sibelius is even geekier than Finale because it has ALL the music notation you can think of. All kinds of note heads, accents, articulations, etc. It takes a while getting used to how it works, but I make all my serious charting on it and it ends up being really fast.

Finale is geekier because it has all that too, but no one knows how to get to it.

Finale is better if you're into design. I've used it to do notation for several books. (http://www.amazon.com/Ukulele-Guitar-Players-Book-Package/dp/B003VTBPBA)
It's much harder to use, but has some features that sibelius doesn't. If I was doing a modern chamber percussion piece with all kinds of weird notation, finale would be the one.

Sibelius is better if you want to get your charts done and have them look nice, especially if you're emailing pdfs.

I grew up on finale, so I lean towards it, but I was forced to take a sibelius class in college and was pretty impressed.

Another consideration, sibelius is cheaper.

I still say there's a nice niche market out there for some niche programmer who can come up with drum set-specific notation software. At this point, I'd say it could even be done on a tablet as a mobile app.

Gaddabout wrote:I still say there's a nice niche market out there for some niche programmer who can come up with drum set-specific notation software. At this point, I'd say it could even be done on a tablet as a mobile app.

DUDE - i was just talking to a buddy of mine about it. i have an easier time reading ensemble figures than writing them. so if they had an app where all you had to do was tap out the rythmic figure to a preset metronome w/ different time signatures, it would automatically spit that out for you. is there such a thing?