Customer Reviews

Sibelius G7

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I have been using Sibelius G7 since early 2003. Over the years I had tried, and had been disappointed, by various notation programs for the computer. Most were overly complicated, were not user friendly or particularly intuitive (we guitarists prize the intuitive aspects of a product), were limited in their scope and demanded a learning curve which is impractical for a working musician. All were not capable of producing a guitar-TAB score at the professional level. Well, no more...enter G7.
I first learned about G7 from Sibelius--a great bunch of folks incidentally. I was just starting a new gig with an important internet client who was using Sibelius exclusively for all their music notation. Coincidentally, Sibelius had just launched G7. I decided to give it a shot and have never been more satisfied.
The easy-to-use manual (that used to be an oxymoron) is mercifully brief and succinct and gets you up to speed quickly. Then simply playing with the program and accessing the internal Help menu does the rest. Note entry is easily accomplished with the keypad or an interactive fingerboard floating in a corner of the screen. You create notes and chords or TAB effortlessly by simply clicking on the strings. Rhythms are easily entered with a preset value in another tool box also on the screen. It is easy to change rhythms as you go or to edit them later. Complex rhythms (like 32nd-note quintuplets) are easy to create with a simple selection and key command: select and type 3 for triplet, etc. Furthermore specific and idiosyncratic guitar expressions like string bends and slurs, techniques like palm muting and raking, and other similar elements are easy to enter. I paricularly like the simple text entry which can be inserted in any size and font style into the score. I often use these elements to amplify on special techniques in the music. TAB entry is also effortless. You can select and highlight the desired notes, hit ALT, point to the TAB line, and voila, your notes become TAB. TAB can then be edited or repositioned by simply selecting and dragging notes from string to string with the mouse or by selecting and typing in new numbers. I just realized that I have used words like easy, simple and effortless to excess in the last paragraph, but that's how it is with G7.
I have put G7 through numerous "road tests" in the real world for the past six months or so. I have used it regularly to generate notation for my Guitar Port Online articles and columns as well to create materials for clinics and private lessons. I have also enjoyed using G7 "off the clock" to produce printed scores of my private unpublished transcriptions that I share with musical friends and colleagues. G7 is now an essential tool on my desktop. I enthusiastically recommend it to all guitar playing musicians or anyone who wants to create beautiful guitar charts and scores for any occasion.

I'm a guitarist (amateur but hopeful!) and bought this new program a month ago, having seen rave reviews in a couple of guitar mags.

Basically, G7 lets you write, play back and print out guitar tab and notation v. easily. There's a cool fretboard on the screen which you can use to click notes in and see how to finger stuff. You can also input notation + drum parts, or even scan sheet music in, and download ASCII tab or MIDI files and turn them straight into tab printouts. Plus you can post your songs on the web so other people can print + play them.

Seems to do everything I want and quite a bit more too... plus it's so easy-peezy to use! Full marks from me!!

This software is great.
The documentation is excellent and I was up and running really fast. You can input notes from a MIDI keyboard or MIDI Guitar, as well as clicking or typing the notes in (using a,b,c,d,e,f,g!).
You can add lyrics, chord symbols and chord diagrams, and there's a guitar guide with it to help you learn even more. FABULOUS!!

I'm a Sibelius user, and I picked up G7 because of it's Guitar Guide and Virtual Fret Board (I'm not much of a guitarist). This program is absolutely AMAZING, and I can't believe what it can do for the price! It is in the same structure/format as Sibelius, and the files are even transferrable, so the singer/songwriter who doesn't need a "powerful" notation software can easily create lead sheets or charts in G7, and send them off to someone who can add orchestrations, etc. in Sibelius. (Although for some, G7 can probably do it all.) More, it's just so much fun to work with the fret board (and SO EASY to use), and the guitar guide is a great interactive source for learning everything you need to know about the guitar and writing for the guitar, so that alone is worth the purchase!
It's great~!

I was a Lilypond fan for a couple of years till I realized I wasn't producing any guitar notation music.

I have been building my guitar teaching business and thought that G7 would be the personal assistant I needed to transcribe students tunes into real notation and guitar tabbing as a back-up.

The bugs are too many to mention and its interface is just a shiny facsimile of a Sibelius template of yester-year.

Their forum to date (2009) is non-compos-mentis (gone).

After over 5 years G7 Kontakt doesn't even hold its own forum!

Its been absorbed into a forum of other Sibelius products and lost in the shuffle.

When I finally reached someone there they had the audacity to suggest I reach deeper in my pockets for their flagship Sibelius 6!!

heres what you can do for me- make a guitar notation software!!

Make it so its valuable to people who buy your crap, not so its valuable to your bottom line! (Hint: American Auto makers)

I spent $90.00 without looking at reviews!.

Never buy something without doing your research.

Sibelius is just making products for Sibelius name sake.

Being a teacher and bandleader, and new to computers, I needed an easy program to help me prepare lessons, and more importantly to make my originals readable on the job, usually in low light situations. Some of my tunes have twists and turns, and my handwriting isn't beautiful. My computer-savvy colleagues spoke highly of Sibelius and so I gave G7 a shot. It does the work I need simply, elegantly, and most importantly, I found it easy and fast to figure out. It certainly does a lot for the money, too. I'm very satisfied.

I run a Master's Degree Program in Instructional Technology and am always impressed when a program can teach well. The animated fretboard in G7, and the ability to seamlessly go between standard notation and guitar tablature are superb. As a guitarist, I'm stunned by the number of uses I have already found for G7. It is also incredible for eliminating "grunt" work which guitarists, teachers and students have always had to go through. I almost feel guilty for having paid so little for it...almost. If you play the guitar and don't have G7, you are wasting time, effort and money.

I was looking for a program that would turn my guitar improvisations into sheet music in real time. G7 sounded promising so I tried it with a Godin Grand Concert and a Roland GI-20 for pitch to midi conversion. The results were horrible. Even at slow tempos many of the notes were a sixteenth note off, even though they were played precisely on the downbeat. The metronome tempo was not reliably consistent. (I was running it on a PC with all unnecessary services disabled.) Arpeggios are horrible. If you've ever looked at a sequence of a guitarist playing arpeggios, you'll know it looks like a mess of overlapping notes. And that's what the notation of G7 looks like. It has a feature that is supposed to turn a mess like this into a monophonic line by removing overlapping notes. When you run it a warning message appears stating that you can NOT undue this operation! (Very poor design) When you do run it the results are less then spectacular. Often eight notes are displayed as two tied sixteenth notes with the ties above the notes when they should be below or vice versa.

The main problem with most of the really negative reviews is people's expectations, of being able to simply throw together a music score without having to learn much, are just plain unrealistic. All the notation programs have quite a learning curve on them and this is no different. (Sibelius is a major supplier to the music industry - it doesn't produce rubbish - it can't afford to). Most of the bad reviews seem to be one-offs - reviewers who've hardly ever reviewed anything. Who know's what's going on.

I've used G7 since it was launched in 2003 and it was a bit difficult to get into, but after a month I could find my way round it fine - and having learnt this one, I find I can get around other products as well.

As G7 is now off the market (although I have upgraded mine to the latest ver 3.3 free from the Sibelius website) I would recommend you take a look at Notion Progression. Just taken a demo disc for a trial and found it very similar to G7 and simpler in some areas ways (and half the price). Very nice alternative if you're shopping for a guitar specific notation application. Notion Music Progression - Windows and Macintosh

Hi Guitarists and Composers, I purchased G7 a week ago. I was looking for music software to write and design a guitar chord book. My students have been asking me to put out a guitar chord book for years. With all the hundreds of music software packages out there, you would think many packages would allow one to make and print out a simple chord chart. But G7 is the only program I could find that would let you create and print out pages with chord diagrams only, or that let you easily mix chord diagrams, notation and TAB on the same page. G7 comes with built in chord libraries or you can create your own. G7 is not a desktop publishing program, but it does enough different kinds of text boxes that one could do any kind of guitar book or guitar lesson handouts with G7 alone. I am using G7 with Windows Vista and it works fine. If you have tried other notation software that assumes you are a keyboard player or is so complicated it would take you years to do a lead sheet. Give G7 a try.
Happy Guitars. Happy I purchased G7