Musescore playbutton vs. live Musicians

• Jan 8, 2018 - 14:09

I heard from a Youtube video that a playback feature in computers could make bad scores sound good and good scores sound bad. This is getting me worried because I have to compose a piece that our band will play (for a concert), but I'm not sure if it will meet their expectations of how good it sounds.
Is that true in the case of Musescore? How do you know if a score sounds like what it's written as?

I'm not sure if this the right place to ask, but I don't know where else to look.


Comments

This is a fine place to ask; the problem is there just isn't a good answer :-).

It's true that computer playback only goes so far in helping you understand how a piece might sound. But there is really no way to say exactly what differences to expect. Use the playback as a sort of "spellcheck" to make sure you don't have wrong notes or anything really really obviously off, but beyond that, you just have to rely on your intuition and experience. Feel free to upload your score to musescore.com (File / Save Online, from within MuseScore) and ask for feedback in any of the various groups there.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

As Mark said, any computer generated song is at best used as a "spell checker" to make sure what you wrote sounds OK. Just as a computer can make a score sound better or worse, a director can do the same with the students. I'm sure you trust your director to properly direct the volumes and tempos of the band to make it sound the best possible. I know I would have trusted my band director as a student.

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