Music Technology...Week 1

This past week has been spent in the MITC lab trying to learn just the basics of Finale and the ACID program. In my opinion, the importance of being familiar with it cannot be underestimated, even if it feels like it would still be faster by hand. Regardless of our major, we will need to be able to navigate through these programs. If you are music ed, you will need it for obvious reasons (rescoring, transposing, etc.), but the rest of us will probably need to use a notation program for one thing or another at some point in our hopefully long and prosperous music careers. My dad has been strongly encouraging me for the last two years to become comfortable using Finale. I took a Finale class with him about four or five years ago, but the program has changed drastically and very little of that knowledge applies to this newer version. I did make Finale a small part of my music independent study last year so that I could arrange a piece for our horn section, but that is really the extent that I have used it recently. I have never really had the time to sit down and figure it out, so I am very glad that we are getting the opportunity to learn it now.
Although we have only used it for one day so far, the ACID program seems really fun to work with also. I am by no means an avid composer, so perhaps this is just the tool that I need to get me to do even a little bit of it. Again, my dad has always encouraged me to compose, but I have never really taken an interest in it, but perhaps after using this program, I’ll give it another shot. I do know that I am very happy that we are being exposed to these programs now though because the technology is changing so rapidly and I usually don’t have the time to figure these programs out through trial and error. It is nice to have somebody explain the basics to us and let us continue to explore if we want to on our own.