Yesterday on another blog that I write I told a story about a song my daddy used to sing to me when I was little. A music teacher friend of mine asked me about the tune of the song because I had decided to only type the lyrics..
I wanted to answer her well, so I thought about using finale. I typed the song in and then searched out the procedure for saving my file as a pdf or a jpeg file. After reading the instructions and giving it a try I realized that my version of finale is either not new enough, or not substantial enough to have that feature…… so, I decided to look online for some help.
I came across noteflight.
Noteflight is a cloud based music notation service. There is a free membership that allows 25 songs to be stored on the site, or you can pay a monthly membership fee and have access to more storage space.
There are memberships available for classrooms, schools and districts. I’m hoping that perhaps somewhere down the road my district will provide a subscription for us to use in our classrooms because I think it would be quite handy.
I found the interface to be somewhat intuitive, but not as responsive as I would have liked. For example, I was asked right away if I was going to use an anacrusis. I checked “yes” and then expected the notation to begin on the pick-up note. Instead, there is almost an entire measure of rests before the song begins. There may be a way to change that, but not one that I could find in the time I had.
THEN – here is the big flaw! When I changed the meter, it gave me the 6/8 measures that I requested, but it did so without changing the 4/4 graphic at the beginning of the piece. When you click on the 4/4 it lights up as if you can edit it. Then the box appears and it says 6/8. So I have a functional 6/8 song with an erroneous 4/4 label…… weird! Again, there may be a way to change that, but I couldn’t find it in the time that I had.
In any case, noteflight offers a reasonable option for the sharing of simple musical notation, which is quite handy!
Here is the song that I notated. Even though there are flaws, it didn’t take very long. If you know this song, or who wrote it originally, please let me know…. I would love to give credit for good work.
Here is the link to the page containing information about noteflight classroom I hope that you find it helpful!
