Saturday, October 2, 2010

Great music programs

Hello!
Just thought I'd let any fellow composers in on a few tricks of the trade.
Several programs that are absolutely necessary for the serious music composer:
Either A. Sibelius or B. Finale.
Yes, they cost money.  They are not free.  You have to spend money to make money.  I personally use Sibelius, but Finale is just as good.  They both do basically the same thing--allow you to set up a professional-looking score with any instrument you can imagine.
Now, if you want to make your music SOUND professional, you have to spend much more money.
www.soundsonline.com
At this website, you can buy the best programs money can buy.  I strongly recommend buying either EWQLSO (an orchestra program) or Colossus.  These programs plug into Sibelius very easily, and allow you to put real sounds to your music.  They are absolutely wonderful.  For movie score composing, I highly suggest also buying other programs from the same site--at the moment, I own EWQLSO, EWQLSChoirs (very complicated, incredibly worth it), Ministry of Rock (for metal and rock), Voices of Passion and RA (both amazing for writing world music), Stormdrum (nearly essential for ANY type of music), and Dark Skies (a huge group of sound effects for horror movies).  To see how these sound in action, check out:
www.ilike.com/artist/Hamilton+Cleverdon
The sounds really are spectacular.  Happy composing!

16 comments:

  1. Certainly some of these programs ive never heard of before

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  2. I've tried a bit of composing in the past, I'll definitely try these programs out, cheers man!

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  3. Excellent post! Following you for sure!!!!

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  4. too bad i m too broke to buy stuff ;[

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  5. One of my friends had... is it monster, Mammoth, or Goliath? I dont remember, but the stuff that he did with that was movie ready stuff. It was amazing.

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  6. Friend of mine can use all of these.

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  7. I love orchestral music!!!
    can't wait to try out all these new ideas!!!

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  8. Will try to look up some of these programms :)
    sounds nice

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  9. Expensive, but you need quality eggs to make a quality omelet, huh?

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  10. stocald, I think it was Goliath, the older version of Colossus. Goliath was AWESOME, I used to have that one...
    Telia, yeah, learning to use one of them helps out with learning the rest. All the same engines and basic layouts, but background knowledge in music is what is vital for really knowing how to make them sound good.

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  11. I dunno how I missed this yesterday... You should also check out SmartScore Pro and maybe Photoscore. I use Smartscore when I need to transpose parts. You can scan them in and it will put it in a format that can be exported to Finale!!! It's another essential if you ask me.

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