Software...

The trouble with using computers for creative stuff is that it's easy to convince yourself that it's the best way of doing things when quite often it just isn't. We make this mistake because:

• it's generally a lot easier and quicker to get good results quickly for most creative tasks using a computer. For instance, it's easier to press "Transform > Mosaic" in Photoshop than to actually physically build a mosaic in your living room with loads of little bits of coloured stone.
• you can do all kinds of things on a computer that would be physically impossible in real life. For instance, in real life it would be nearly impossible to put twelve grand pianos at the bottom of a wishing well that was trapped inside a giant guitar amp, but you can do stuff like this with a few clicks in Logic.

We were trying to score out some parts on Sibelius 4 today. Sibelius touts itself as the friend of anyone who needs to work with actual written music notes, and is supposed to be the most intuitive and quickest way of putting together professional-looking scores and getting instant and great-sounding playback of your sketches. In their own words, Sibelius himself would have used this program.

It was not fun. First of all, we couldn't get any sound out of it. Then, once that had finally fixed itself, it refused to display the names of the instruments - everything was showing as [] instead. Not very helpful. Also, it was putting stupid video "hit points" all over the score - totally useless as we're not even scoring a film, and they were getting in the way. Total time taken before giving up on the bastard thing altogether: about 1 hour.

End result: get on the piano, grab the manuscript paper and a pencil, and get to work doing it the old-fashioned way. Total time taken for full score: about 15 minutes.

What's the conclusion? Well - in its defense - we will use Sibelius to score out the finished parts because it does some really useful things with transposing instruments and it looks nice and tidy compared to my hand-written scrawl.

But when it comes to instant inspiration and instant results, sometimes it's better to leave the mouse and keyboard alone and just pick up the damn pencil. Or paintbrush. Or guitar, or whatever.