You input musical notes into PrintMusic in a variety of ways to suit yourself.

Method1:

Use the computer mouse, pick up notes from the toolbar and place them on the musical stave.  This method is extremely quick and easy, and is the method I use nearly all the time.  You don’t have to be able to play the music properly to copy something accurately, and you don’t have to be able to play in time, to produce an immaculate copy.  You can write using one, two, three or lots more staves.  You can add finger numbers, lyrics, musical directions, type in chord symbols, add guitar boxes, slurs, and dynamics – just about anything you could possibly want.

So imagine that you want to copy a piece out of a book which has 3 staves (piano, vocal and guitar music) and you want to simplify this by copying out just the tune, and adding chord symbols, so that you end up with a one stave copy.  PrintMusic will do this for you straight away.  Or you want to write a medley using tunes from lots of different books.  No more photocopying for you!  Just copy out the pieces from the different books, onto one or more sheets to suit you.  You can ‘fit’ the music to make a certain number of bars per stave, or all to fit onto one sheet, or to spread across two sheets, or whatever you want.  So you can get rid of nasty page-turns, and squash the music or stretch the music, to suit.  One of my more senior students uses his PrintMusic to copy out his current ‘piece’ in a much more ‘spaced-out’ manner than is printed in his book.  He finds it very difficult to read the original print, but is really happy when PrintMusic has made it so much more legible for him.

Method2:

Play your keyboard instrument which you have connected to your computer.I use this method occasionally.  I’ve got a great little MIDI keyboard with just a couple of basic sounds and small size keys which I use to input music.  The programme will ‘quantize’ your playing to place the notes where it thinks you really wanted them (rhythmically) because it is very difficult to play exactly on the beat.  This works extremely well.  Another of my students is always composing little tunes.  Some of them are really rather good.  He uses PrintMusic to score his songs, since he would find it very difficult indeed to write down the notation for what he’s actually playing.

Method3:

Sing or play an acoustic instrument via a microphone connected to the computer.  Also very good.

Method 4:

Scan in an already existing piece of music.  This really does work, provided the original is in good condition (a tatty old photocopy won’t work well).  The programme is very good indeed at copying a scan, though you will have to check it and edit a couple of things. It occasionally will miss a quaver rest, or a tie, which you’ll have to then insert afterwards.  Hardly a difficult thing to do.

Method 5:

Input a MIDI file.  PrintMusic will print exactly what’s on the file.  So you could play your keyboard instrument, make a MIDI file recording, and input that into the programme, to print your performance. Or you could download a MIDI file from the net, and print off the music to go along with it.  Beware though, the programme actually prints everything that’s on the file so you will end up with lots of notes which you will have to decipher.  It’s better than guessing though!

Once you have inputted your data, you might like to edit it.  You can alter anything at all, including the key signature.  One of the greatest things about PrintMusic is that you can input a piece of music in a nasty key (say 3 #’s) and, simply by pressing one button, you can change key (both of the notes and the chord symbols) to a nice one (say C Major).  So never again will you have to bypass that piece of music you wanted to play because you can’t cope with the black notes.  Just input it into PrintMusic and use the transpose facility.  Great!

Here are a couple of music examples which I have created using PrintMusic for you.  I’ve published them to a PDF file, which means they can be emailed anywhere, another great facility on PrintMusic. The first is the hymn Eternal Father. I’ve arranged this on two staves for electronic organ you can see the stems going down on the bass clef for the pedals and going up on the bass clef for the left hand.  I’ve included simple chord symbols if you want to play this without reading bass clef.  The second is written on treble clef with chord symbols, and will get you in the Christmas spirit (not long to go now!). It’s a medley of Christmas waltz tunes. See that I’ve fitted the music all onto one page, if you decide to print it off.  Notice that PrintMusic deals will key changes during a piece, and with titles and musical symbols throughout.  I could have made these pieces much more detailed, with slurs and expression marks, finger numbers and so on, but decided to keep it simple for today. I hope you enjoy playing these pieces.


Click the PDF icon above to download a copy of Eternal Father produced by Janet using Print Music


Click the icon to download a xmas medley produced by Janet using Print Music

PrintMusic belongs in the Finale family of score-writers.  You can spend much more money and go up to its big brother Allegro, or the daddy of them all Finale itself.  Personally I’ve never needed these, but if you were writing for orchestras, big bands, or were publishing music books yourself, you might like to explore them.

PrintMusic is currently priced at £77.99 plus p&p (sent by Special Delivery).

To order visit or call 0118 988 7444

You will require adobe reader to enable you to view PDF documents