Before all of you get excited, the “OS X” in the title doesn't mean I'm finally becoming a mac user. I just happen to be working on a professor's computer, moving files from his old system to the new one. Since it's telling me that I still have OVER AN HOUR left and I'm not in the mood (or near enough to coffee) to compose, I thought, hey, blog posting time.
So my copy of Sibelius 7 (and the 800-page user manual) finally came in today, and I immediately installed it on my laptop. I played with the demo earlier, and knew what to expect, with most of the changes making sense. It's cleaner, the tabbed interface works better than control-tabbing through open scores, and I've been a fan of the Microsoft Office-style ribbon. However, it's slow. The 7.0.2 update fixes this somewhat, but loading the built-in Sibelius sounds takes forever. And at this time my Garritan sounds don't work (yet). And I think the program icon is silly. I'll be interested to see what my desktop does with it later. Overall, I think it's an improvement.
Meanwhile, composing continues to be adventuresome. The orchestra piece is “orchestrated” (which is to say, I think I know what everyone's going to play, but it's not in the computer yet), and hopefully that will be a project for this weekend. With electronic composing, I've started making a list of the things I want to accomplish by the end of this year (which will be greatly accelerated after this orchestra piece gets off my desk). They are, in no particular order:
I think all of those would be fun, I'd learn a lot, and maybe I'd integrate some of those techniques into my own writing. We'll see.
Oh yeah. I also won my first ASCAPLUS Award this year. Yay!
