[archagon]

If you're an artist of sound and musical texture, then sure — a powerful DAW can't be replaced. But if you want to specifically focus on composition — harmony, melody, counterpoint — then a DAW becomes a looming, impenetrable fortress. In my experience, musical creativity thrives when you're able to iterate on your ideas in a rapid loop, adding and removing notes almost as quickly as you think of them. There is plenty of room in the music software landscape for tools that focus entirely on placing notes instead of generating production-quality sound.

In other words, your favorite Markdown editor doesn't replace Microsoft Word — but that's hardly the goal!

[jdietrich]

>There is plenty of room in the music software landscape for tools that focus entirely on placing notes instead of generating production-quality sound.

There's already an industry standard for that - Avid Sibelius. If you're composing in a traditional manner, a DAW probably isn't the right tool.

http://www.avid.com/sibelius

[archagon]

I've used Sibelius (and Finale) back in the day. For classical music, maybe it's indeed the right tool to use. But if you're writing modern music, with all its syncopation and irregularity, it's simply painful. Rests, dotted notes, and ties everywhere. Massive, piece-wide refactoring pains with even the smallest changes. Key signature horror. Obscure notation. Lack of true support for pitch bending and non-standard tunings. It's like trying to translate technical writing into a foreign language.

Classical notation was fantastic for use with pen & paper when music was much more conservative and on-the-beat. But we have computers now. We can come up with something better — whether it's software like StaffPad[1] as a first step or something even farther removed from classical paradigms.

I've also written a bit about this in my blog[2]. Frustration with classical notation was one of the reasons why I worked on my own "anti-DAW" music app. (Though it's a somewhat less ambitious project than Helio.)

[1]: http://staffpad.net

[2]: http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2016/02/05/composers-sketchpad...

[jdietrich]

As a Sibelius user and jazz musician who writes avant-garde music, I humbly disagree. Classical notation is my native language. It's an odd and idiosyncratic language, but it works. If you need musicians to understand what you've written, it's your only option. I can't read piano roll at tempo and I don't know anyone who can.

Sibelius has fairly good support for swing, shuffle and irregular meter. It has natively supported quartertones since version 6; plugins provide good support for alternative tunings and microtonal composition. Classical notation can get clumsy if you're doing really weird things, but "really weird" is a higher bar than you'd expect.

If you're using timbre as a fundamental expressive element, then a DAW is probably the right tool. At present, we have no useful system for notating synthetic timbres.

[stfnfhrmnn]

Sibelius and Finale used to be the industry standard, but there is a new kid on the block for music notation: Steinberg Dorico

Other new tools like Staffpad are amazing, but they serve a somewhat different market.

[jdietrich]

Dorico is clearly the future given Avid's shabby treatment of Sibelius users, but I'm not sure it's the present. It might just be inertia or switching costs, but Dorico hasn't been adopted by many composers yet. I haven't yet used the v1.1 update, but v1.0 was missing a lot of important features.