Trying to find free apps that are worth having is a very tricky business – particularly for music creation. There are now so many apps that offer quick hits of music making through the assembly of pre-recorded loops, that to find something worth having for longer use is a little harder. This leads me to Score Creator. I found this while I was looking for something else entirely and it intrigued me.
Basic elements
Score Creator is a very simple app that allows you to write basic notation on tablets and phones. It is currently available for iOS and Android and can be downloaded from the App Store and the Google Play Store. The basic version is free but there is a paid upgrade for those who want a greater number of staves.
Once opened, the app greets you with a couple of demo scores and, once you've created some, existing pieces of music that you have written. It is definitely worth exploring these to see how effective the scores can be, but I wanted to dive straight in and start exploring the creative element of the app, so I clicked on the menu and selected a ‘New Song’.
When you begin a new project, the app asks you for all the usual basic information including key signature, time signature and tempo. On the right-hand side of the screen are the options for how many staves are needed and what instruments you want to compose for. I kept things simple in my first attempt and added a piano in 4/4 and C Major.
How it works
The score that appears is a simple, unpopulated stave with a set of buttons at the bottom of the screen to select pitches, values, accidentals, and other common musical devices. I was running this on my iPad that has an external QWERTY keyboard attached to it, and the way it was laid out implied I could type on my keyboard to input certain pitches – this is incorrect. I couldn't. The only way to enter pitches is by pressing on the virtual buttons on screen. However, this was quite easy and, given the target market of this app, it was probably a sensible choice to keep it simple.
The basic operation works by selecting a note value and then pressing the pitch you want from the selection on screen. The pitches aren't very clearly labelled – they use a large number of ledger lines to identify the notes on the buttons, but without context it's difficult to work out which one is which. Fortunately, they have written the letter names just above, so it doesn't take long to figure out, but it is a bit clumsy.
If you want to select any other musical element for a note, such as an accidental or a triplet value, simply press the relevant button until you have finished using it. This latter point makes sense, but what I found slightly surprising was that rather than turning triplets off again, the button cycled through duplets, quadruplets, quintuplets etc. until I reached unaffected no6te values again. This makes sense given limited screen real estate – but was initially surprising.
A simple introduction
Other simple functions such as chords are created by pressing the shift button and adding more pitches and, if you need to go back to change a note or insert a note, simply click on the screen at the relevant point. The use of a touch screen in score writing is a valuable one. Once a basic score has been created, it can be emailed either as a file for work on another device or as a PDF to send to someone else (such as a teacher).
This app is not going to compete with the big score writing software companies, and nor does it want to, but as a basic introduction for students to create quick musical scores on their own devices, it is a really good start!
Score Creator is free but paid upgrades are available.
