Okay, after posting the WBJ Green Dolphin Street transcription, I received a couple of emails asking what software I used to transcribe the solo. In this post I'll give a quick rundown of what I use.
First off, my computer is an iMac and the notation software I use is Sibelius. It is the only notation software that I use. Before buying it I played with trial versions of both Finale and Sibelius. Finale was just too unintuitive and frustrating to use. Sibelius was easier overall to get in to and while some parts of it are counter intuitive, for the most part it is intuitive and you don't need to look at the manual. Finale required constant manual reference. I'm sure that once you get familiar with it, Finale is fine and easy to work with but out of the box Sibelius is easier to start writing decent manuscripts.
Slow down software is a different story. Remember that I am on the Mac so you Windows cats might have some additional software available to you that I haven't fooled with. I use two programs on the Mac to slow down the solos, Amazing Slow Downer by Roni Music and Transcribe! by Seventh String. Both programs are useful for me.
Amazing Slow Downer is straight forward, simple, and quick to use. The audio quality is better than Transcribe at really slow speeds like 35% or 25%. At 50% and faster both programs sound great and are pretty close. I mostly use Amazing Slow Downer to figure out random phrases or initially when I am trying to learn a solo and play along with it.
Transcribe is a little more cumbersome to use but is absolutely great when I actually get down to putting the solo down on paper. It has a graphic of the amplitude of the music so it is more visual than Amazing Slow Downer and whats more awesome is that you can mark measures, beats, and sections by tapping along to the music as it plays. After tapping in the info you can see your choruses, measures, and beat markers above the soundwave graphic for easy reference to what part of the song you are on. Of course you can zoom in or out to any scale. It makes it easy to figure out where difficult notes fall relative to the beat. Overall it makes it much easier to know where you are in the solo and also in getting the solo written down. Transcribe also tries to help you figure out what note is being played. If you highlight a small portion of the wave, it shows you what notes it thinks it hears. This sort of works okay but overtones show up as well to confuse matters. Try to transcribe organ and you see the notes of all of the stops pulled in the registration, so it thinks each note is like 4 or 5 notes. One other awesome feature of Transcribe is that it will also do video. If you have an avi of mp4 file you can open it up and slow it down just like an audio file. This is great for studying concert videos and stuff you download off youtube. If you have a DVD you do need to rip it and convert it to a video file for it to open up in Transcribe but it is a great feature to have even though I don't use it much. Amazing Slow Downer doesn't do video but Roni Music makes a program called Ultimate DVD Player which will slow down video. Now it only does DVDs, it won't open avi or mp4 files. The quality of the video slow down of Ultimate DVD Player is a bit better than what Transcribe will do, but Transcribe's handling of video files makes it much more convenient.
Of course both programs allow you to finely adjust the pitch and change the key of the tune and have equalizers and vocal removers. So the rest of the features are close. I use both about equally. On other thing about Amazing Slow Downer is that it is also available as an iPad/iPhone app. The app version doesn't have the sound quality of the full Mac OSX version due to the lack of horsepower in the iPhone and for the same reasons it doesn't go as slow, but overall it is pretty much the same program with the same features in a portable less expensive package. Now I actually use my iPad and the ASD app more than my MacBook with the ASD program since the iPad is always on, smaller and the battery lasts forever.
Finally, today I saw that there is a new program that I may get. Superscope, the guys that have been putting out adjustable speed cassette and CD players and recorders, now have put out a software program that works on Mac and Windows. It is called Elevation and there are two versions, the full version and the limited edition (LE) version. I found out about it after getting an email from Jamey Aebersold about his Superscope CD/digital hardware sale. I was curious about the hardware and wondered why people would spend $800 to $1000 for a hardware slow down device when you can get a $15 app or a $30 program for your laptop. After going to the Superscope site to see the features of the hardware, I discovered that they also have this Elevation program out. The LE version is $80, the full version is $150. The LE only does the slowdown type stuff whereas the full version is also an audio recorder and editor.
I downloaded the trial for the LE version and was blown away by the sound quality of the slow down. At 25% speed, it sounded so clean and pure, I was amazed. I thought that it might just be the CD so I tried it in Amazing Slow Downer and Transcribe and at 25% they both had that underwater/weird reverberation artifact that makes it difficult to really hear what is going on in the difficult passages that you have to go down to 25% to try to figure out. I really wasn't expecting Elevation to be that good. I may just have to get it for the difficult stuff. As far as features go, it is almost like a cross between the two programs mentioned above. It is quick and easy to use like ASD and it does show the amplitude waveform like Transcribe, however it doesn't let you mark beats and label the waveform like Transcribe. If I get it it would most likely replace Amazing Slow Downer as Transcribe is still great for helping you write the solo down after ou have it figured out. One negative thing about Elevation though is that it only does MP3s or CDs (it will rip CDs to MP3 if you want) it won't do Apple Lossless files, so you would have to burn them to CD or convert them first. Unfortunately almost all of my Jazz collection is ripped into iTunes using Apple Lossless so that I could maintain the high fidelity of the recordings. Also it only does audio, no video. But the sound quality is truly amazing and clear.
Anyway for those who asked, that is my take on the world of transcribing and notation software. If any of you have a hardware Superscope, I'd be curious to know how the sound quality compares to the Elevation software.
Peace,
Big D
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