The Advantages of Writing Score Sheets over DAW Production

If you have been following me for a while, you might know that my entire work flow almost always starts with writing a score sheet. 

When I started out writing music for orchestra, sample libraries were incredibly expensive and computers way too weak to run those libraries properly, at least when you were a student back in school as I was. So producing orchestral music in a DAW was no real option for me as the technical possibilities that were available to me back then were simply not adequate to produce anything halfway decent sounding. On top of this, DAW software was way too expensive as well. However, I had a halfway decent sound card with General Midi sounds that were at least okay sounding. 

So the first music software that I was able to afford was a limited function score writer. A little later on I got my hands on an "evaluation copy" (cough) of Sibelius 1.4 and from there things started to develop.

So my entire learning process as well as the first small projects I did were realized in Sibelius as I simply didn't have anything else. I got my hands on a few DAW softwares a while after that but still the technical limit of my computer system put some pretty hard boundaries on what was possible for me, so I kept working in Sibelius.

Fast forward a few years and I was able to afford hard- and software that could handle these things a little better but all my attempts at writing music in a DAW always ended up much worse than the works that I first wrote in Sibelius. Also, at that time I had built up a small reputation doing notation/orchestration work so my main paying work was tied to Sibelius anyway.

Over the years my skills in Sibelius as well as several DAWs got better but being fortunate enough to record my music with real musicians from a quite young age spoilt me in regards of mock-up work. I developed a passionate hate against doing mockup work in a DAW as I always had the feeling that no matter how much time you spend on it, it will never even get close to the real deal. This was also mainly due to the fact that only in the last couple of years technical possibilities have advanced enough to create mockups that are halfway convicing. Just about 10 years ago, the sample market was very small and you needed to cut corners everywhere to make things work.

Nevertheless, even with me becoming more content with what I can create "in the can" over the years, I realized that I simply don't want to transition to writing music in a DAW. There are of course big disadvantages for that, the biggest one that I often need to insert the step of Mockup creation to showcase something to a client before recording but even with this, for me personally the advantages of writing score sheets first outweigh the disadvantages by miles:

Vertical Overview

THE biggest advantage for me in writing a score is that I can much easier get a vertical overview than in a DAW. I can quickly see what note is missing in a chord, I can see who's doubling what, how things are distributed in the section etc. Even being able to see in an overview WHO is playing what makes things so much more controlled. Of course, you can open a piano roll in a DAW showing several or even all tracks at once but between dozens or hunderds of tracks where you simply double or layer things and even with elaborate colour codings and visibility shortcuts you will often just be able to actively focus on one track or maybe a few surrounding tracks. 

But simply even needing to scroll through the tracks to check what one other instrument 200 tracks further down is doing and needing to scroll back up afterwards just makes it so much trickier and cumbersome to keep track. Unless you have a brilliant memory and remember exactly what you did where, you will most likely rely mainly on your ears which of course is generally a good thing to do but in an unmixed session where balances are way off can be heavily deceiving. 

Additionally, with this method you lack a cognitive validation of problems. You hear that something in this voicing is not super great but can't be bothered to go hunt for the problem, as in worst case scenarios where you can't figure out which instrument it is it could be anywhere in dozens of tracks. In a score sheet you can with a bit of experience quickly spot the issue and link the "problematic sound" in your head with a clear property that you can put your finger on and avoid next time.

Even though a big score sheet of 40 or more staves can look incredibly intimidating to get lost in, it is still soo much easier to find your way around it than in a DAW session of the same piece.

Focus on the Music

One thing I love about writing score sheets is that it completely detaches you from the production side of things. With modern score writers and things like Noteperformer, you can simply write music and even get a halfway decent playback that halfway realistically interprets what you have written there. In a DAW you constantly are tempted to adjust the midi programming while you're writing music. You constantly need to mentally switch between the creative and the technical task which doesn't seem like much of a problem when you grew up doing nothing else, but I'm sure that detaching these two processes from each other and actually staying in the creative flow of just writing music is way more pleasant and effective.

Avoid writing for Samples

This is one of the biggest issues I see with learning composers these days. Some playing techniques are way easier to mockup than others and some samples sound way more convincing than others. In a DAW environment, you might be tempted to favor the better sounding samples and techniques. If this is the only way you learn things, this will limit your expressive vocabulary tremendously. The millions of pieces with staccato strings and brass chord swells on top simply only exist because they work great with samples. And this is totally understandable. In a DAW, especially with lacking real musician experience, you would of course go for the things that sound good and create a whole set of learning experiences just through this. But in most cases, this is just a fraction of what you could do with these instruments. And this limit will also limit your musical expression. 

With score writers where everything sounds equally bad in playback, it is easier to allow yourself to be more adventurous.

Which brings me straight to the next point:

Train your inner ear

As much as I hated that awful Midi sound that I had during my first years of writing music, it was an invaluable learning experience as I could only use it to validate whether something was fundamentally wrong in the piece. But anything else, I had to imagine. I had to imagine that these horrible saw wave sounds would become noble sounding trumpets later on. In spite of score writer playback having improved a lot, they are still currently at a state where you need imagination. I can safely say that these years of painful Midi torture have forced me to develop an inner ear that I can really trust now. I hardly ever run into any situation where something sounds in a way that I hadn't anticipated.

More score sheet study

The fact that I was writing score sheets on my own made me generally more curious to study score sheets by others. Having a look at how the masters notated things but also how they wrote were wonderful learning experiences. The simple fact that I needed to adapt certain notation and layout standards in my scores forced me to dive deeper into other scores. With doing DAW work, this need is hardly ever present. Unless you consciously decide to look at other scores and study them, you will not need to deal with this. This whole situation, unless you are consciously aware of this, will keep you from one of the most important and effective ways to learn the craft. Looking at score sheets, analyzing them, trying to recreate them is a great way to learn from the masters. The DAW equivalent is much harder to come by as you get your hands on DAW sessions by others only in rare cases. In comparison with imslp and more "inofficial" sources, the access to score sheets is so much easier.

So the probability to stay in your own "realm" feeding off your own ideas and limitations over and over again is very real when only working in a DAW. In extreme cases, the only way to learn in such cases is to use your ears. Figuring out what others are doing just by ear is of course another very valuable learning tool but the lack of cross validating whether you are right in your assumption of what they are doing slows down the learning curve.

More Variety

With a proper articulation management in a DAW you can come very close to this but of course in a score sheet it is very easy to use a wide variety of articulations and switch back and forth therefore creating more musical and varied ideas. The more cumbersome something is to achieve the more likely we will be too lazy to actually go for it. In a score sheet, it's not much of a difference whether you place a staccato dot on a note or put it under a legato slur. The threshold is similar. In DAW, introducing a new playing technique could mean in worst case digging through your librabries, loading up a new Kontakt instance, assigning a new track and then adding the notes in question. This is a huge threshold for our general lazyness to overcome and even with people who are generally not shy of doing extra work, the sum of several of such micro decisions might result in your music not being the best it could be if you were working in an enviroment that would not pose different difficulties on such tasks.

Of course, writing scores doesn't equalise this completely, too as some tasks are also very tricky to do but in the fundamental work process of getting your ideas "on paper" the work needed for different tasks is way more equal than it is in a DAW.

Piano (Skill) Limitations

The main method by most people of inputting music into a DAW is by playing the parts in on a keyboard. There are also a few who click all events one by one into the session but I would say they are a small minority. However relying on your own piano skills can become quite limiting in your musical expression if your skills are not that great. Being limited in your playing also often limits you in your way of thinking and imaging what could be possible. 

With score writers, I think the most common input method is step input using a MIDI keyboard to input the pitches but advancing stepwise in rhythmic values. As this is of course very far away from actual keyboard playing your limits are not as much of a problem in this work process. You can quickly enter that super tricky 32nd note run and try if it works without sweating it into a DAW over several trials and errors or slowing the recording tempo down or laborously clicking it into the track event.

Another issue is the simple physiological limitation of the human hands. In a DAW you will probably avoid string voicings that you would need three hands for while in a score writer due to the often different nature of inputting, this is not so much an issue. 

Thinking about music

I personally feel that writing score sheets forces you to be more deliberate in the choice of what you input. No matter whether you actually write on paper or in a score writer, bringing that note down on (virtual) paper has a more definitive feeling than noodling around in a DAW and forces you to make more consicous decisions.

There are several more things that I could mention here, for instance having a clear overview over dynamics in a score sheet where in a DAW you often need to decipher different CC curves first to figure out what is going on dynamically or how holding your well notated good looking score sheet in your hand actually feels way more like you created something that in a way is materialized which is way more satisfying than saving that DAW session.

Personally, I feel that writing score sheets connects you way closer to the creation of music and gives you way more control over so many more parameters than you could ever have in a DAW. I can imagine though, that making the switch from DAW to score writing can be horrible and very frustrating at first and everybody has to weigh whether they see the actual benefit in doing so. But from my personal experience, I can safely say that this will stay my way of writing music.

Of course there are several reasons that speak for DAW over score writing, particuarly when it comes to certain creative functions to manipulate notes and compose things that in notation would probably take 10 times as much work to manipulate but as I said at the beginning, these are in my opinion small compared to the reasons that speak for score sheet writing.

My personal hope is that Dorico (as it is most likely that this will be the first score writer to do this) will employ more DAW functions or integrate with Cubase. They are on a very promising trajectory with they newly introduced articulation system and the dedicated Play mode. My prediction is that in a few years from now, it should be just as easy to create proper mockups in a score writer like this as it is in a DAW now, just that the principal input surface will differ.