Customer Reviews

G7 Kontakt Edition

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

See my previous review for G7 (from before Kontakt update.)
This is a great program, with no bugs to speak of, and even faster than it was. I'm now at the point where I can do a fairly involved lead sheet in a half-hour. It's a fine teaching tool, and its font choices are all you could ask for. You can arrange 4 instruments (the most I'd use) easily. It will play back my arrangements so I can check for accuracy. It's completely in sync with my Mac. It's a pro tool.

DOES handle 6 channel midi guitar input - I don't know what the previous reviewer's problem was. Also the manual is excellent, the printed output is publication quality. handles tab and notation and converts back and forth with a mouse click. Also imports ASCII tab files of which there are thousands for free on the Internet. Scanning works but you must be careful to use clean printed originals. Aldo Kontakt is a nice set of guitar and pop music oriented sounds. Overall very good program - well designed and a good value. Far and away exceeds its competition in this category - Finale Guitar.

The Sibelius G7 supports all sorts of fretted instruments, including banjos, steel guitar, dulcimers, mandolins, gamba, requinto, sitars, ukulele, vihuela, dobro and lute. In addition you can add keyboards: piano, electric, synthesizer, honky-tonk, percussion: all sorts of drums, cymbals, tambourine, wood blocks, handbells, too many to list, string instruments: treble and bass clef, and voices.

For the guitars and fretted instruments it easily converts from notation to tab and vice versa by selecting and then copy/paste. You can also edit the tab properties to your liking, and watch the playback on the fretboard.

There are also preconfigured staffs, that have the most popular combinations of instruments, even a mariachi band is included.

Note entry is easy and intuitive. You can use the mouse, or keyboard, and also click on the fretboard. The documentation and tutorial are clear and easy to follow, and within minutes you will be composing or transcribing some music, arranging to fit your band or ensemble, and printing it out or uploading to the Sibelius G7 website to share with others. The printed output is nice looking too and comes with several styles including Jazzy and Handwritten. The program itself seems stable on my Windows system, unlike Noteworthy which caused the computer to hang (losing my work when I rebooted).

Finally, G7 will meet most of your needs for small ensembles and bands, and unless you are composing a symphony, you won't need the really expensive Sibelius Professional edition. The price is right and it's fun to use. The included Kontakt sounds emulate the fretted instruments pretty well. I should also mention that it does notation for guitar special effects like pull-offs and hammer-on, bends and releases, slides, trills and vibrato, tremolo arm bends, slides and scoops, as well as notation for chord slashes and strums. Chord diagrams can also be easily created above the staff. There is just so much included, you won't be disappointed.

The program is very user friendly if you know some music theory though not a lot. The scanning part of the software works great but requires a high quality scanner and there is still some clean up required of the user. The abilty to compose and publish music is great. I find it useful to listen to an unknown piece (using the midi player) and learn to play it. It will transpose and print out very useable scores of either notation or tablature. Great piece of software.

I am in pro audio and know software very well. This thing doesn't work. It is totally non-intuitive and was a waste of money!

The shipping was very fast. The product itself is very easy to use. My only disappointment is you can't use a USB 2.0 hookup its got to be traditional midi. So what I have won't work for entering music through playing guitar. Had I known I probably would have just stuck with my Finale program. Although I like the fact that this is geared for guitar.

I have found everything about the G7 product itself to be wonderfully easy and intuitive to use. I have been using G7 for almost 3 months now and have only one complaint - and a word of warning to those of you still pondering a G7 purchase.

One of the features of the G7 package is to be able to read the music notation of other G7 and Sibelius users on the Sibelius website forum, and that same material which a friend may send to you via email. This is done by an add-on piece of software called "SCORCH" which is included in the G7 installation CD. However, even though your computer may download and successfully install SCORCH, it may not work, even though your computer's OS (operating system) may handle the bulk of G7.

When I purchased G7 from Amazon, my OS (Windows 2000) was included in the G7 minimum specification requirements for the host computer. But Sibelius does not tell you in any of their advertisements or published specs that W2000 won't work with the SCORCH add-on. So, while I can write, print, email, and even publish my music, I can't read it - or anyone else's.

Here is the email I finally received from Sibelius after trying several different SCORCH downloads and failing to be able to read the notation:

Dear Frank

Unfortunately when creating software and drawing up license agreements, we cannot foresee the changes in technology. This does mean that older software will no longer work on occasions. Scorch is an add on and we have had to change this technology so that it can work with the latest OS on Mac and PC. It cannot work with both old and new I'm afraid.

Best wishes


Richard Payne
Training Manager &
Products Specialist

Sibelius Software Ltd
The Old Toy Factory, 20-22 City North, Fonthill Road, London N4 3HF, UK

Tel: 020 7561 7999 (+44 20 7561 7999)
Fax: 020 7561 7888 (+44 20 7561 7888)
http://www.sibelius.com

London and San Francisco

So if reading Sibelius or G7 notation not generated by you is important, check with Sibelius to see if your OS is compatible with the SCORCH add-on.

Frank Balogh Jr.

This is a very aggravating program to use. Unless you're entering notes with a MIDI device, creating scores with a mouse is beyond tedious, requiring many clicks and keystrokes to enter each note. Guitar TABs, in particular, are exteremly tedious to enter and change note values. Even the most basic functions seem counter-intuitive and do not work in the traditional point-and-click/copy-and-paste manner. Once you invest five or six hours learning the quirks of this interface, it is very powerful and allows you to tweak your scores in many ways. The customizable MIDI playback is very well integrated, even allowing you to apply things like swing time to the playback, and offering decent choices of instruments sounds. Still there are many annoying limitations:

(1) Selected items show up in blue, which is almost impossible to distinguish from non-selected black items; there is no way to customize the highlighted color
(2) MIDI playback does not recognize Segnos, Codas, nested repeats, D.C. al fine, or any other similar play directives; it can do only simple repeats and 1st/2nd endings
(3) lyric entry and selection is very cumbersome
(4) precise tempos are impossible to set during playback using the "tempo slider" -- the slider jumps too far when you try to fine-tune it
(5) there is no way to shift a phrase of notes forward or backward in time -- for example, if you have a quarter note followed by six eighth notes, and then you change the quarter note to a whole note, it will over-write all the eighth notes without allowing you to shift those eighth notes back in the score -- this means you have to re-create parts you already entered if you change the timing of a note that came before it.

All in all, I like the end product, however tedious it may be, and the price is certainly appealing. But I find myself wishing I had sprung for a more full-fledged notation program.