L'attirail

Just a few years ago the only way to record music was to use a professional recording studio.  They were large multi-roomed facilities that employed an array of sound engineers to operate a vast collection of equipment.  You had to pay for studio time, maybe studio musicians, studio engineers, and the like.

The next step in music recording was project studios.  These were smaller studios with professional sound engineers that were often tailored to specific music genres or set up as personal recording studios by individual musicians or bands.  Since thousands of dollars of equipment and years of schooling were once required to produce professional sounding recordings, only well-off music aspirants could afford their own recording studio.

Next came the home recording studio.  These were originally set up by amateur musicians with some money and a little technical experience.  Unfortunately, the sound quality produced during these sessions was a far cry from what was produced in the professional recording studios.

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Technology has progressed in leaps and bounds in the past few years and had put a new face on music recording.  Today, the commercial recording studio has actually become an endangered species, falling prey to the more personalized project studios.  In addition, today’s home recording studios are more economical and turn out the same sound quality that a few years ago required a commercial studio.  Read more...

Sheet music began as musical notations written on clay tablets by ancient Babylonians. It was used by the ancient Greeks, survived the Dark Ages, and became an important musical force during the Renaissance Period. With the advent of the printing press, printed sheet music affected the music industry in ways unimaginable by past generations. Yes, the history of sheet music is a long one, at least four thousand years, and it has been a story of evolution and growing dissemination. Yet if all those ancient musicians could see the form that sheet music has taken today, they would find it impossible to fathom. In modern times, sheet music has, like most other forms of communication, joined the digital age.

Beginning in the end of the 20th century, there was a great deal of interest in representing sheet music in a computer-readable format, as well as downloadable files. Software that can “read” scanned sheet music, called music optical character recognition (music OCR), has existed since 1991. Needless to say, this software created a completely new manner of dissemination for sheet music which, in this format, was referred to as virtual sheet music.

Further progress was made in 1998 when virtual sheet music became digital sheet music. The difference between the two is that digital sheet music, for the first time, allows copyrighted sheet music to be purchased via the internet. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, digital sheet music files can be manipulated and altered as their virtual and hardcopy counterparts never could. Such an attribute makes digital sheet music ideal for instrument changes, transposition, and even musical instrument digital interface, or “midi,” playback. Digital sheet music is the musical notation of the 21st century.  Read more...