Sibelius...

Greetings, Blahggers,

As I'm sure  many of you are fully aware, this country is smack dab in the middle of a HUGE health care reform. Known by many as "Obamacare", the Affordable Care Act affects almost everyone in America. One of the assets to the ACA is a website through which all those affected are required to purchase or sign up for health care. Unfortunately, it is glitching. This website was created by Kathleen Sibelius.

This blah will not talk about her or any of the aforementioned horror. I will instead be talking about music :)

Sibelius is a program that helps notate music. Honestly,  I don't know THAT much about it (other than that it works awesomely), but I would love to learn more in the future. So far, the only thing I have used it for was to notate music for a hymn and a piano piece that I wrote in Music Theory I last year.

Sibelius is named after a grumpy old composer. This guy:

Ok. Actually I don't know if he was grumpy or not, the picture just looks that way. At any rate, his first name was Jean, and he was a great composer. He wrote a lot of symphonies with relatively boring titles, such as "Symphony Number 5".

The program itself is a life saver for music students, or anyone else wishing to notate music. I've tried others, and they really just don't flow as easily as Sibelius does--although not surprisingly, these alternatives were free, whereas Sibelius is not. Sibelius also has a much better playback than the other programs. In other words, if you wrote music for a french horn and want to hear how it sounds, it actually sounds like a french horn instead of a muddled horn thingy.

I suppose this blah doesn't really have a point, except for me to talk a little about cool musical things, which I rarely ever get the chance to talk about anymore... That said, HAVE A MERRY CHRISTMAS!

And a Happy New Year, of course :D

Mandolin Smith

The Mad Musician