Least favorite part of the composing process?

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love composing. It is really my “happy place” so-to-speak. But, I just finished a piece and I’m now on the engraving part. I’m about to take a nap because I know that any more “drag this symbol here”, “align that there”, “make this system fit on a page”, “avoid this collision”, yada yada, has the potential to make me drowsy. It makes for a readable piece of sheet music, but lord is it tedious!

Do you find that you have any least favorite parts of the composing process?

I guess I’m not nearly as far along as pretty much everyone else, here. I am completely clueless when I read about the software issues many of you mention. And to me, midi, is just an electronic tool that I know nothing about. I completely enjoy every part of composing that I have encountered. I enjoy the freedom to experiment with sounds. The one thing I don’t enjoy is trying to figure out what to do with it when it is completed. My wife and I are the only ones who hear my music, and that, to me, is frustrating.

The least favourite part for me is listening to the music any where else but on the headphones I use to write and mix. Having to listen on laptop, phone, Kindle, car, etc to see/hear whats missing this time.

For me - it is drawing in all the MIDI CC automation

I feel your pain, Dan. I’m in the same boat. Engraving, while rewarding when creating beautiful-looking scores/parts, can be very tedious and time-consuming for me as well. It could take me two days to write a piece and 2 months to outputs a fully perfect orchestra score and parts. I recently had a 12-minute orchestra piece premiered and it was 400+ pages of parts! Talk about patience.

I’m trying to find ways to speed up the process. I use StaffPad for writing and this produces a fairly usable conductor score when you are done writing the piece. This is fantastic and removes that step of creating a conductor score from a midi data roll (midi editing for this score prep is even more tedious than engraving!!!). Still, if one wants to put parts in front of real musicians, outputting from Finale is required.

I think the key is to do it regularly enough and have macros programmed to speed up the process. This saves having to remember how to do something in Finale and looking it up.

The other option is to outsource it. But that can be very expensive!

Good luck.

Brandon