Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

If you have an iPad, check out: http://symphonypro.net.

The app allows you to create and edit sheet music. There's a built in keyboard and a real-time recording feature. If you have a Core MIDI compatible device, you connect it to your iPad and input notes in real time from that as well.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers

Ableton Live with the Session view is how I make my music. In fact, here's a stupid rough video of how I do my stuff.

http://www.bphogan.com/files/videos/livesession.mov

The best solution, of course, is to develop this "sound recognition skill". While the amount of work it takes get there is significant, the benefits far exceed the mere ability to transcribe what is in your head. Most people think that the ability is magic, so that whe you develop this ability, people will think you are some kind of musical genius. It is similar to how the computer illiterate respond to programmers.

I use pen and paper. Anything else is an (understanably neccesary) shortcut. I feel for the trees, but I havent found an iPad app that allows you to simply write on a representation of staff paper yet.

Thank you all for great comments. I think I should add a few more words here.

In my case playing music (and recently composing) is just a way to break from daily activities or relax in spare time. I used to do it years ago and somehow this year I started doing it again. This is why I do not intend on spending money on it (like > 22$/30EUR/100PLN), just want to use whatever best free tools are out there.

By best in terms of music prototyping I mean the most effective ones:

- giving the possibility to quickly store my musical ideas, like by supporting input from playing on a computer keyboard (by "live performances", mind I used scare quotes also in starting message, I meant rather playing for recording purposes than for amusing of others than me in the room),

- allowing me to easily rearrange, tune and mix my crafted pieces.

Once again, literal score is not the purpose of music prototyping, but some way of saving the music sketches, overwriting and enhancing them, etc., just working on them (but doing it in a efficient manner) seems crucial to me, as otherwise I'll lost idea before writing it down or won't have enough time to tediously input it in clunky tracker/sequencer/staff editor/whatever.

No comment explicitly addressed my wish for rapid prototyping/transcribing (don't get me wrong, I am not complaining here just stating the fact), but I've seen some new app names that I'll try to test later and check how they fit (if at all) in my idea of composing/music recognition workflow.

Maybe I'll have to prototype my own tool for music prototyping one day. :)

Thank you for comment. See also the comment in my new thread. 549EUR for Sibelius 7 isn't cost I would afford for kind of hobby-like stuff, even though I heard some good things about it. There is also no Linux version (my main OS, but I have Windows). Does Sibelius really lessen that much your hair pulling efforts?

Great score editing alone is not what I need, but it's surely a nice feature to have. I heard some good things also about Finale or sophisticated SCORE too.

I cannot tell I am really educated music fellow (know basics, though, like triplets and many other things, what I really lack is possibly music composing theory and similar knowledge), so to some degree I agree with you about problematic over-simplicity of trackers in terms of proper music input.

I know that a lot of folks is still using Cakewalk Professional v3.01 (which is free!) for MIDI sequncing. If I get to MIDI stuff again, I'll have to revisit it after these 15 years. I remember I liked it back then.

http://www.simpilot.net/~richnagel/#cakewalk