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Hey guys,

Can anyone recommend me free/relatively cheap notation software which would be suitable for jazz music?

Thanks

check out noteflight for notation from your web browser. Free, pretty neat, but no support for midi.

Rosegarden is absolutely wonderful. Free. But only runs on Linux. I installed Linux in a VM on my Mac just so I could use Rosegarden.

There's finale notepad, but I personally cannot stand it.

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Check out the composer's lounge postings, which list several freebies. I downloaded MuseScore.

Harmony Assistant from Myriad Music,
It's quite cheap ($85), with a slightly wonky interface, but it works really well. Great support too.
http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/harmony.htm

For many jazz players, producing/transposing a leadsheet is the most used function of notation software - the 'big' names in music software are expensive overkill for most things that jazz players do.

For me, the easiest to use, and cheapest is PG music's 'Band in a Box'. As well as the simple melody, chords and perhaps lyrics leadsheets that it so easily will produce, if you play in a full solo piano piece, or use the 'import midi file' command to import into the program one that you have recorded as midi, and ask it to split piano track into Left / Right hand, it will produce a reasonably playable piano score.

All of the 150 plus jazz videos, (free to download) on my website -
http://www.bushgrafts.com/jazz/
have been notated with either Band in a Box, or the PG music 'sister' program, PowerTracks Pro Audio. I have had to do a fair bit of editing to make the transcriptions more accurately match the video of my hands on the piano - but most of the difficult work has been done.

Doug

Do any of these programs have playback functions with swing?

What's wrong with regular software? You mean you can't find any software for music notation?

Why say jazz? Jazz is a style of music and as far as I know, there are no notation programs for just Jazz. You need to look at music, and get regular software...


You need to study JAZZ to create jazz, not the instruments used to create jazz. Jazz is not about instruments, its about style.

I said jazz because I was looking for software which does chord symbols and has a playback feature which can swing (not just play straight 8s as that would be of little help!!)

I am using PrintMusic by Finale to do my charts (which runs at about $70)
. I am not sure if this is the most efficient program out there but it gets the job done. Adding the chord symbols is not always easy if the harmonic rhythm does not jive with the melody line. Then you have a few steps add to the process.