music
music notation software for guitar
software for guitar
read music
read music notes
notes and chords
MusEdit
professional notation software
midi notation software
writing music on computer
write music on computer
staff notation software
Midi software
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MusEdit Music Notation SoftwareAn Interview with MusEdit Creator Doug Rogers:
MusEdit is an inexpensive but full-featured music notation software program which
runs on Windows. Recently upgraded to be optimized for Vista, MusEdit is a strong
competitor with the high-end programs for making very professional looking music scores and
charts. In December 2007, we (Jack and Frances from Guitar Vacation Retreats) had
an extended phone conversation with the creator of MusEdit, Doug Rogers. Doug is
a physicist by day, a computer programmer by night, a guitar player in his
spare time, and a unique character who has spent years living by himself in the desert
or traveling around the USA in his VW microbus accompanied by his computer and guitar.
MusEdit was originally conceived as a storage method for sheet music, to save space in
his van while travelling. Click
this
link for an intro to MusEdit.
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GVR: We wonder if you could tell us something about your musical background.
DR: Well, I've always just played guitar for myself. I've never even played in front of real people live. (laughs) My mother gave me a guitar in my adolescence, and I took lessons for a few months at one point. I started with classical. So, 'cuz I'm a scientist, I guess I liked the really analytical aspects of it all at first. It's funny, though, in a way it took me a long time to realize that it would have been better to just have not worried about the notes and all that, and just played chords with some friends, and you know... a long time to realize that that's a lot more fun. I used to love classical music when I was young, too. I had like four version of Beethovens 9th when I was about 13, but then when I discovered that in rock and roll and jazz a lot of people make it up as they go along, I totally admired that. I shifted from being really compulsive about reading notes and everything to getting more into trying to play along using chords and things like that. Ironically, I ended up writing notation software [laughs], but even if you don't care too much about the notes, it's still nice to be able to write out a score. I still like to be able to play the melodies. My natural ear for picking up a tune isn't that good. I still buy tablature books when I really want to learn a song. In these days, sadly, everyone has a computer, and they're like a jealous girlfriend, they kind of don't want you to do anything else. I ended up spending so much of my time on the darn computer that I only get a half an hour a day or whatever is left. I don't play guitar much anymore, but I have them both in front of me all the time, and then when I want a break after all that analytical computer oriented stuff, I just want to improvise. That's how I am, I'm much more of a computer nerd. 
GVR: What music do you enjoy playing now?
DR: Well, what I tend to mostly like to do, to tell you the truth, I like to noodle around and just play. You know, it's amazing once you know a bunch of chords and some fingerpicking. Then you can just sit there and noodle, and people are "Oh my god, what song is that?" and I'm just playing random chords... The thing I love to do is to play along with U2, Bob Dylan, music that I really like... rock and roll... Bob Dylan, and things like that. Creedence Clearwater, Beatles, of course, Dire Straits also, Mark Knoffler, Los Lobos and Chris Isaak. I love it when you can hear the guitar very clearly. I play some Nirvana and everything, too, but I do love it when you can really hear the notes of the guitar, and it's not washed away in huge distortion. |
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GVR: How do physics and music relate to each other in your life?
DR: Physics has helped me to have an overdeveloped, Arnold Schwarzenegger-like left brain. Music is my break from that, my right brain gets some use and it's a chance to take a break from analysis and have some fun. It's an opportunity to relax. Music and physics are two different worlds for me, opposite worlds. I could have gotten into the physics of music, of course, but I passed on it. Music is my break. 
GVR: Can you tell us a little about your job at the lab?
DR: I've been working on and off at the Space Sciences lab at UC Berkeley since 1979. I have good friends there, and I keep coming back to the Bay Area. But I'm a very solitary person, and I love the desert and solitude. I can't wait to get back to the desert. There are about 5 people I write to. I just need a few super quality friends in my life. You should leave something while you still love it, then you want to go back. GVR: You offer free lifetime upgrades to MusEdit purchasers. How can you afford to do that? DR: I was painfully aware of MusEdit's bugs in the first few releases. I spent at least half of each upgrade fixing bugs. I'm not going to squeeze my customers to pay for something that they should have had from the beginning. MusEdit has about 4,500 customers. They can all upgrade for free, but there is also an option to order an upgrade for 25 dollars. I've had over 700 paid orders for upgrades! It's touching - it restores my faith in MusEdit and in people, and it vindicates my free upgrade policy. It's a selling point for MusEdit, free lifetime upgrades. GVR: Do you have any advice for new users? DR: New users tend to be very mouse and graphic oriented. The keyboard is much better and faster. Most people seem to stop learning at a minimum level of proficiency. I really wish people would read my two pages of suggestions and really useful tips. There's a list of ten essential things. Any user can really increase their productivity by using a few of the keyboard shortcuts. My wish is that people would use MusEdit to create beautiful, high-quality scores. I'm very proud of MusEdit's flexibility. Unfortunately, you have to get into it to find those capabilities. There are a lot of nooks and crannies in MusEdit. A lot of people stop when they have only reached a basic level with it. If you go a little farther, you discover, wow, you can really do some neat things with it. It lets you do what you want. As a programmer, I have to admit there's this horrible dilemma. A lot of MusEdit evolved from people saying, well, I wish MusEdit would do this or that. People want some wierd, narrow feature, and if I were to put every feature that everybody wanted on every menu, the menus wouldn't even fit on the page. Some people want it to be really, really childlike, and other people want to be more like power users, and it's really a dilemma how to resolve that. It's hard to strike a balance between ease of use and having sophisticated features. If the menus are huge, people won't find the features. I think there's already enough nooks and crannies in MusEdit that people aren't aware of. It would be nice to be able to have different versions for different people. But from my end, that's just impossible, you know. How to make it be, in one package, simple but powerful and easy to use. I think that's why some people get a little intimidated by MusEdit. GVR: Can you give us a thumbnail profile of the average MusEdit user? DR: That's a little hard to say. I'm guessing. Mostly 35 and older, many retired and over 50. They tend to be more craftsmen, people who fingerpick. Lots of music teachers. MusEdit is not for beginners, in my opinion. It's more for the people who like notation, it's not for the three chord heavy distortion guys. One thing that's happened is that I've added a lot of drum features to MusEdit in the last few years, and a lot of drummers are starting to like MusEdit and that's really cool. I would say that's my 2nd biggest group of users now. I'm actually pretty proud of the way that MusEdit does drum notation. When a drummer sends me a score, I just look at it and say, how fabulous, how cool, look at what he did! And I love hitting play and hearing boom-chicka, boom-chicka. I'm like, wow, I didn't know MusEdit could do that! It just gives me goosebumps when I see MusEdit doing something I didn't know it could do. I guess my view is that a typical MusEdit user is about a forty five year old fingerpicker or teacher, male, who knows more music theory than I do! GVR: How do you feel that MusEdit compares with the competition? DR: I'm not a good businessman, I'm afraid. I have a phobia of looking at the competition. When you see someone else's idea of how to do something, you lose imagination about how you might do it yourself. I think it will contaminate my thinking. I have a fear of just copying other people. And I don't want to go to other people's sites and see all those features that I don't have — all that work I'll have to do! So I don't have much experience with checking out what my competitors are doing. 
GVR: What do you think is the future of computer notation software, and
what is MusEdit's place in it?
DR: MusEdit's biggest weakness at this point is not being able to read scanned scores. And then the next one - I don't even know if it's possible from a physics point of view - I'd like to be able to create notation from recorded music, from real music, not from Midi. Midi's pretty easy, it's already a known routine. But boy, if someone could crack that... That would be such a wonderful thing to get accurate scores of songs you like. There is such junk out there on the internet, you know? The stuff people post. And that's the other thing that would be really great, that whole thing about transcribing live off a guitar, that's much more possible than transcribing live off a CD. Actually that's something that MusEdit will do now. If you put a midi pickup on your guitar, you can plug it into MusEdit and MusEdit will transcribe it in real time. There's where there's a collision between my nerdiness and my wanting to be free and easy with the guitar. They just collided, because, oh man, when I pick up my guitar, I don't want to hook up a midi pickup and... you know how you can end up 3 hours later and you haven't played a note? And you're still tweaking around with the computer and the pickup and all the electronics and everything, and you've lost your mood for playing the music, because you had to reboot the computer 3 times! That's why that part of MusEdit is so underdeveloped! GVR: What is the future of Yowza Software? DR: Oh boy, good question! The funny thing is, I don't know if you knew this, but I started Musedit first as a little personal project, and then I started to sell it and then I thought, oh, wow, this can go places. I always think of it as like a Wright Brothers plane — just too much weight, but it always kept sputtering along and that was cool. I like living very simply, so it's given me the freedom to live in the desert and everything, but never really gave me the freedom to not have to work any more, which I wish I could have. I wish I could have devoted myself fully to Musedit, but there never was enough to pay off my debts, and I always had to go back to the lab and work. But two and a half years ago, I got this idea for P.Bio. I don't know if you've checked the website for P.Bio. P.Bio was a completely different concept, where, because I travel a lot, I've always saved all of my credit card statements at the end of the month, and I always thought, "Wow, this is a map of my life." I have them literally going back 20 years, since I got my 1st credit card. I thought, if I could lay out a map and I could put all these dots on the map, I could see the entire route I took all those years. I tried to keep a diary like everyone else, but you get behind and then you get discouraged and you don't do anything, and so when I had that idea to access all this information, to access my cell phone and see who called me, access my email and see who was writing to me at that time, just like an automatic diary! I don't have to do a thing, and yet P.Bio does it. It literally draws a map, where you were in your life, day by day, and so I actually thought, this is a winner. I always thought, the problem with MusEdit is that it's targeted for guitar players who like to read notation and who are into computers. Each one of those things narrows it down. There are a lot of guitar players, but they don't read music or care about notation. I have to admit, man, when my friend and I got the idea for P.Bio, we thought THIS is it, this is gonna be a really popular program that anyone can use, and then the eternal frustration of never being able to do what I really wanted to do on MusEdit — because I always had to go back to work and make money to live — would be over. I thought this would be the ticket, and then I thought about how I could devote myself to MusEdit, and maybe even hire some programmers, and have the wonderful thing which would be to be able to scan music. Ideally I think everyone's nirvana would be to figure out how you could put in a live cd or a cd of real music and convert it to notation. I think if anyone could solve that one... Well, it's so difficult, I've thought about it many times, and I've got a physics background, so I've thought about all the problems of reading transforms and trying to dissect them... virtually impossible! But with P.Bio, I thought, Oh my god, I'm gonna be a millionaire, I can hire a team and really reach the nirvana of notation software, to be able to put in and analyze a CD and out pops the notation! [laughs] So, we released P.Bio in August [2007] and so far it really hasn't sold that well. You've been with MusEdit for a while - if you notice, the version is 3.9 and there's a few updates like version 3.94. I keep asymptotically approaching version 4.0, and i'm not going to call it version 4 until there's the real like, wow, it can scan music or something. Oh, man, that must be a really serious difference, and I can't go to version 4 until I do that, something so dramatic. So that's that, and right now in January [2008] I have to go back to the lab and start working again. There was a time there, I think it was 4 years ago where I actually sold 500 copies in a year. There was one month that sold over 50 copies and naturally you'd think that that's just the trend that's going to keep moving up from there. I didn't think that was the end, and then it started to go down. Then you have the old dilemma about investing in advertising, and, wow, you find out that you're actually making less money because the ads are costing more than what they're bringing in, and so you start cutting that back, and then sales go down and then you have less money to work and spend on advertising. GVR: Right, I remember you were doing print ads in Acoustic Guitar Magazine. DR: It kind of gooses the sales a bit but it started to reach the point where I started to go, wow, you know I got 25 orders, but my ads cost me almost 30 orders. You get a net loss on this. So, as I say, to me it's the analogy of a plane always just sputtering off the ground, it never soared, it never crashed, sometimes it'd be like twenty feet off the ground and go a thousand yards and I'd be all pumped but then it's rolling along again and tends to run out of gas. So it's such a fine line, isn't it, 'cuz you think that if just a few more people in the world knew about it, you know everything would be great. A hundred orders a month, I'd be in heaven. I'd always tell my mom that, she's always rooting for me, and my dad. My mom and I sit there and talk about this stuff. I think, there's 6 billion people in the world and I can't sell a 100 copies and that would totally transform my life and then Musedit would go forward. And what is the future of Yowza software? Well, there's the dream, and the reality is - who knows? - It's not in my hands. GVR: So you've said a few words about your other software project, P.Bio. Is there anything else you'd like to say about P.Bio? DR: It's so funny about P.Bio. I thought that was going to be something natural, that people would latch onto it, 'cuz we live in such a digital time, and we're swamped with all this information. I've taken tons of digital pictures, I have over 60,000 of them on my computer. But it's always driven me crazy, that someone says, where are all those pictures from the Memorial Day picnic, and and I can't find them. I don't know, there's a whole folder called "Pictures to be organized someday" which has about 8 million pictures in it, and my friends say, "you took like a hundred pictures that day, why can't you show me any of them?" So P.Bio solves it. You go to May 31st, 2005, and bingo! it's got all the pictures, of you and your friends, right there. That's why I thought P.Bio would be such a natural. To me it sorts out the information glut that we have. There's no advertising, it's not all over the web, it's private and personal. So, I'm just so dumbfounded that people either don't get it, or they're not interested. Everyone's complaining they're swamped with information, they can't find anything, and it seems like the solution to it all. I don't know how to summarize it in one sentence, how to encourage people to take note. I think we need a better webpage. When I finish this MusEdit upgrade, I'll go back to P.Bio and put in some more examples, clarifying what it does and why. 50 dollars with lifetime free upgrades. Mike and I are very excited, we didn't want it to look like plain old Windows, so we created a theme. Really, it looks almost like a video game, and in retrospect, maybe that was going too far out. GVR: How has MusEdit kept up with the rapid changes in computer hardware and operating systems over the years? DR: I've always been apologetic that there isn't a Mac version of MusEdit. Fortunately the Mac has caught up more, and it's easier for Mac to run Windows, now, thank goodness. Umm — hardware? You know, I'm so proud of the fact — and I know it's really old-fashioned — but do you know you can still fit MusEdit on a floppy disk if you zip it? In these days of 100 megabyte programs. I started MusEdit in '97. I think pretty soon after I started working on MusEdit I paid six hundred bucks for 16 megs of ram! And so there's a lot of MusEdit, it complicates the programming, but it still has a very tight, very small, footprint. That's not as important these days, but you could run MusEdit on the Palm. When you had to send a file to someone, it used to be a big deal to send a 100k file. In those days we put a lot of energy into keeping things really small and tight. Now in these days that's reflected by not taking up too much space, compared to some of these giant computer programs. Sadly, because I've never been able to make much of a living off of MusEdit, most of my work on MusEdit has been devoted to maintenance, rather than saying, oh I should transfer it to a palm, make it work on this or that new hardware, take advantage of these things. Fortunately Windows has been backward compatible. It only takes a few small changes. Those are the kind of details to take advantage of new hardware, but that don't get as much attention from me as fixing bugs and getting everything working. GVR: Now that the Mac runs on Unix, do you have any plans to port MusEdit to Unix and capture some of that market? DR: MusEdit is written in C+, so it's not necessarily that hard to re-compile it. The problem always comes down to, like with the Mac, even though the underlying part of it is Unix... for example, P.Bio, this time we wrote it in Java, so that it would run on all platforms. Java's pretty good about cross platform, but the Mac has got a lot of its own little quirky... they have a lot of little things about them that really annoy the hell out of me. It's just, the problem is, I don't get enough money from it to be able to devote myself to it all the time. But if I could devote myself to it all the time, I'd work on it being able to scan, and I'd probably make it more cross platform. That's the other thing, the Mac has changed several times, and I'm always glad I didn't put the energy into it. There was version nine, and then I'd have been like, Oh my god, a year of work out the window! Unix is so ubiquitous, that it would even run on Linux then. I'd have time to work on it, and I could port it to other operating systems, make it read scanned scores, and so on. I'm going to work 3 days a week, and then I'll spend one day on P.Bio and one day on MusEdit, and when I say "one" that's optimistic! I had MusEdit on hold, and I don't want to do that any more. I want to get back to the regular updates. I used to update MusEdit four or five times a year. GVR: Well, I think we've covered the territory. We have about an hour of tape here, it's very cool, you've given us more than enough information to get a great newsletter article, and it's great to meet you for such an extended conversation, by the phone line, anyway. DR: You know, this is the first time this has ever happened! No one has ever interviewed me before. I've probably met maybe 5 MusEdit users in my life in person. Well, thanks guys! It's been totally fun! Postscript:Doug sent us this note some time after the interview:By the way, in the process of researching drum sites I discovered that the music community has finally agreed on a good system for interchanging music called "musicXML". This allows programs such as Finale, Sibelius or SharpEye (music scanner software) to exchange files with all other notation programs. This will bring MusEdit a big step closer to the goals I described in the interview, not because MusEdit will be able to scan, but you'll be able to scan music with one program and then accurately import that music into MusEdit if you like to edit with MusEdit. Now that I've finished the drum stuff my top priority will be to make MusEdit musicXML capable (import and export). Once that is done I'll finally bump the version up to 4.0! I'm hoping I can finish this big development in about two months. |
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Last page update 05-16-08 |
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