MIDI Interface/Notation Software/Recording...

[maestoso43]

Dear Friends,

I'm new here, and am very grateful for this "newbie" board. I appreciate your patience with my simple questions.

I have a Yamaha P85 digital piano.

I want to:

(1) Get a good Midi Interface cable. I'm considering the Yamaha UX16. What do you recommend?

(2) Get some good notation software that will allow me to play on the piano and that will automatically and simultaneously "write" or notate my music. (Having to manually write each note is so tedious and inefficient.) Is that even possible? What software would you recommend?

(3) Make simple recordings onto my computer. As it is already a digital piano, I can't imagine this would be too complicated, but I don't even know where to start. What software or additional equipment do I need?

Thanks for all your help!

 

[Washburn100]

For notation software, I always hear about Sibelius. Here is a link:
http://www.sibelius.com/home/index_flash.html
I don't use it, but as I said, a lot of the forums recommend it.

Getting your piano to the computer is relativrly easy, but I would start by reading this especially the parts on midi etc. It is a wealth of information.
http://tweakheadz.com/guide.htm

For recording software, you have a lot of hard choices. One thing is that if you get a midi interface, it will probably come with a lite version of some recording software that will get you started. You can also try Reaper which is very inexpensive for what you get.
http://www.reaper.fm/

Oh and welcome to the forum!

 

[dintymoore]

I use Cubase (currently Cubase 4) and it has pretty extensive music transcribing capabilities. Some of the cheaper versions of Cubase have less features.

I never took the time to learn how to write charts on Cubase as I've been doing them by hand for so long that I actually like hand written charts better. Recently I got some chart writing gigs and I've been tempted to try Cubase but end up writing them by hand. The way Cubase does it, it looks beautiful though, but there's always tons of stuff wrong with it that would take (I think) a long time to fix.

As far as interfaces - do a search for "interface" in the menu up top.