Studio Upgrade Part 1: Sibelius

The sudden death of the PC that was at the center of my home recording studio led to a dilemma: was it time to move into the Macintosh world for recording? The Mac is the Pro standard.

So, I got myself a new MacBook Pro and along with it, ProTools, which is the standard for recording, and Sibelius, which — along with Finale — is the standard for composing and scoring.

Getting the MacBook set up was a piece of cake. As with all Apple stuff, it just works. Adjusting to OSX is taking very little (but still some) adjustment.

I still have a long long battle ahead to get Protools working right, but after about 10 days of tutorials and trial & error, have gotten Sibelius working with my other studio gear and I am making progress in learning to use it.

No doubt it is super-powerful and puts the scoring capabilities of my prior PC-based software to shame.

Here is the first result of my work in Sibelius — a little tune called “First Experiment”.  The first link is the the lead sheet generated by Sibelius. I think it looks pretty good:  First Experiment – Tune.

This second link is a recording as it plays in Sibelius: http://home.comcast.net/~drahcir.nilknarf/music/FirstExperiment.mp3. Note that this is all straight midi — no live performed tracks or anything — so it is a bit stiff.

Still, I’m overall pretty happy with how this is going.