Music

I like music like most of the people. And I like playing. I started with a recorder as most of my fellows in junior high. Then came baglama (a traditional Turkish stringy instrument), then followed the guitar. This summer I started to work on piano from time to time and now I'm mostly working on flute. I mostly play classical with the guitar for the sake of its complexity, but generally I like contemporary music. Turkish folk, oldish pop-rock, recent pop-rock, foreign pop-rock and others. I always had difficulty to define the genres I like, and pretty much like what I like. I can't say I find classical music that entertaining, and probably to surprise most, I don't consider jazz and similar as music. Of course there are exceptions like some pieces in classical music, and some sub-genres of jazz like BuenaVista Social club performs. (Actually I was surprised to learn that it is considered jazz.) May be I need to learn more about them both, but nah it's boring.

Anyway, I am interested in playing or performing music similar to those Zülfü Livaneli, Yeni Türkü, Ezgi'nin Günlügü, Fikret Kizilok performs and compose soundtracks for visuals. For the latter purpose I might even use percussion dominated, or even jazzy music.

For group performances I need scores though. It is hard and time consuming to write down the scores for all the instruments playing in a song, so I try to reach the scores (original if possible) of the piece. Another method is frequency analysis, but it is tedious work as well. I'll try to reflect my experience about these two here, in case you find it helpful.

Scores

I found the following links to be usefull for finding scores, tabs, midis of mostly Turkish and some classical and foreign music.

http://www.akors.com/
http://mail.baskent.edu.tr/~20193272/
http://www.akorlar.net/index.php
http://www.alltabs.com/
http://aragez.sitemynet.com/
http://www.music-scores.com/
http://www.gitaristan.com/
http://www.garaj.org/nota.php
http://www.guitartabs.com/
http://tatlim04.sitemynet.com/midi.htm
http://www.yaygara.8k.com/
http://www.melodik.net/
http://www.musicaviva.com/
http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/piece-list.html
http://plato.acadiau.ca/courses/musi/callon/2273/scores.htm
http://www.tabworldonline.com/index.html
http://members.fortunecity.com/eakyuz/turkmidi.html
http://www.geocities.com/freewilltr/midi2.html
http://www.volkanarslan.com/

If you have midis, you can convert them to notation easily with most of the music programs like Sibellius and GuitarPro .

Composing-Audio Tools

• For composing purposes Sibellius seems quite good. But it doesn't mean it couldn't have more of possible features.
• Guitar Pro has some features but I didn't use it that much.
• For audio anlyzing and editing I personally liked Cool Edit Pro. But I wish it had features like amplitude filters for frequency spectrum which would naturally improve the quality of converting the Fourier Analysis data to MIDI data which actually is not there either. It has amplitude filter, but for the whole wave, not for the individual frequency modes in the wave. I think it would be much cooler to have it. You can cut, paste, clip, chop and do many tricks with this program. Not bad.
• Another analyzer-editor-mixer program is Cakewalk's Sonar 3 (Producer version). I didn't get the chance to play with it much but it seemed more equipped than Cool Edit Pro. Actually it has a built in Cool Edit Pro 2.0 I guess.
• TablEdit is another fine program. Not of extreme quality but you can input notes using the keyboard of the program. This kind of eliminates the need for an external MIDI keyboard for composing but of course less confortable than the programs which allows you to use the keyboard keys (bindings) instead of mouse clicking. :( You can use number keys to play on a certain string though.
• For entering MIDI without an external MIDI keyboard I found MidiKeys and Sweet Little Piano. Sweet Little Piano allows you to use the keyboard in 3 different configurations, while MidiKeys looks more equipped and has a better user interface. But I didn't get to use them much too.
• For converting audio to MIDI, Amazing MIDI, TS-AudioToMIDI, Intelliscore Polyphonic, and WIDI 2.7 are the ones I could get a chance to try. For monophonic music all of them kind of do their jobs, but I guess no computer program has reached the recognition capabilities of human ear yet. From my experience I can say that Intelliscore is not easy to use. You have to repeat a couple of steps and adjustments again and again in order to start feeling the improvement. You have to try different options and stuff, but optionality is a plus for this software over the others. Tall Stick's AudioToMidi has the nice feature to adjust harmonics amplitudes and change the sensitivity and treshold of the filters. Also it is simple and succesful for its simplicity. On the contrary Amazing Midi is the simplest and the one with least options, but works to an extend. Widi is fairly equipped and gives good results with little effort. But I plan to try it more.