A Noteflight Review

A

Review

As a Massachusetts music educator, I was already familiar with noteflight - a Boston based company who has had a fairly large presence at our Massachusetts Music Educator's Association All State Conferences for the last several years. Despite my familiarity however this:



... was by far the most complex score I had ever created using the system, having only really used it to demonstrate composing a simple melody line with my classes previously. I was happily surprised at the ease of use once I got into things. After my initial disappointment at not being able to use the MIDI keyboard I had purchased for use in this class unless I paid for a premium membership I quickly learned the keyboard shortcuts making entry using the QWERTY keyboard on my laptop a breeze. Adding different types of texts (lyrics, instrument titles, tempo marking, chord symbols) was intuitive and easy and I especially appreciated the ability to nudge things in any direction I wanted to really customize the look.

When using the software with my students, I love that you can't over or underfill a measure. Since my general music students are not expertly musically literate, they still sometimes struggle putting the proper number of beats in a measure when writing out their compositions. Since noteflight will automatically fill the remaining beats of the measure with rests, and prevents you from adding too many beats, it becomes mistake-proof (making sure stems are going in the right directions and note heads are appropriately sized are also big wins in my classroom). I appreciate the level of confidence my students gain from this and find that they more willingly will write out their compositions in noteflight than they want to tackle writing it out by hand. Especially when dealing with the population of students that feel less skilled with the technical aspects of music, I like to give them tools that make their successes come easily.

In completing this assignment, I am actually excited at the possibilities I see for uses in my classroom! The ease of embedding the score into this blog post makes me think of sharing parts for students to practice with at home. (No more making rehearsal CDs? I don't dare dream!) An expanded composition project for my students is also floating around in my head, especially if I am able to convince my administration of the value of a premium membership for my classroom. I do appreciate that they kept the subscription service relatively affordable.

Noteflight is a powerful notation software, with a serviceable free version (other than the lack of MIDI functionality there were no real problems, not being able to add a "vocal" line was easily worked around by adding a violin line and renaming) that will serve both novice and professional musicians. While power users would clearly rather use something more robust like Finale, for the everyday needs of the typical educator I think noteflight fills the bill nicely.