A BIG recommendation for fellow church musicians, songwriters and arrangers...

I was panicking a bit last year when Voyetra (scoundrels and brigands, all!) stopped making and supporting their music composition software.  My panic lasted all of the twenty or so minutes it took me to research affordable alternatives.  Then I found a great solution: Musescore.  It's easy to use, versatile, produces fabulous-looking, professional quality scores.  And the price is hard to beat (it's free!).  I found it at their website, http://musescore.org/.  Seriously worth a look if you are a composer or arranger and find Finale and its ilk to be prohibitively expensive.

I use it for arranging music for concerts and worship, and look forward to using it to begin transcribing both my songs and hymn lead sheets for guitarists!  Here's a version of "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" that I created on it. You can view it or download it as a pdf.  This was a rush job, but as you can see, it has a lot of functionality.

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www.noisetrade.com/tomfisher

"The Hymn Shop" - http://tomfishermusic.blogspot.com