Choosing the right technology for the job depends on many factors. One important factor is fun, and I do have fun making a beautiful print-like chart in Tux guitar. LilyPond offers even more versatility, and now there’s My VexFlow. But some very close friends have asked me to record a Tom Cochrane song on solo acoustic, so I thought I’d share the technology I chose and the criteria by which I chose it.

I’ve heard the full band version a million times but they’ve specified this arrangement. There’re 8 bars where I have to keep time on the guitar while they go a cappella, so I just need a guide I can see from where I’ll be sitting or standing, something to look at, to keep me focused in case an engineer or a videographer makes funny faces at me while I’m trying to play. I should only have to listen to the song once to prepare it, and pause playback only long enough to enter what I just heard. I needed the option of misusing Coda and Segno, writing myself notes in the margin, and so on.

I chose the technology pictured — it took 9 minutes (much less than getting the image off my phone and uploading it, blogging about it, etc!). I made the manuscript paper template in Word 97 if I recall correctly, more recently used Open Office to convert to PDF. I printed it out on a bubble-jet printer, standard paper. It’s a No. 2 pencil.

Tux guitar is my choice for lead sheets, if that’s what I need to do, but to place things perfectly, or even to get a full choice of things to place, in the open source world you’ve got the learning curves of scripting tools like Lilypond and VexTab …or pens, pencil and paper!

§