Page 1 of 2
What you can do with Pizzicato - taken from Pizzicato Notation (for other features see individual products)
User Manual and Tutorials
The detailed and progressive tutorials help you to use the software.
- Display the on-screen contextual help with a single key.
- The detailed music tutorial helps you to understand music notation or review music theory.
- Exercises will help you to play simple music scores on a music keyboard.
- Display the note names automatically.
- Pizzicato will help you to read a score. Sing or play your instrument while Pizzicato is playing the score as a reference for rhythm and pitch. Change the tempo according to your progress.
Music Notation
Just as you create a letter with a word processor, Pizzicato gives you the tools to write, print and hear your music, whether for the soloist, the band, the choir or the full symphonic orchestra.
Entering Music
You can enter the music with combinations of mouse clicks, tool palettes, keystrokes, the virtual piano keyboard, the guitar fret board window, or directly through a MIDI keyboard, step by step or in real time.
- The music notation is automatically spaced correctly. You can then zoom in and adjust any aspect of the music notation at any time.
- You can add accidentals, tuplets, chords as well as many other standard or custom symbols and hear their influence on the playback of the notes.
- Select measures and use the copy/paste function, for instance to duplicate measures or to transpose a melody without the need to rewrite it manually.
- You can use and manipulate up to 8 voices per measure.
You can enter music by playing the notes in real time at your tempo on a music keyboard connected through a MIDI interface (for instance MIDI/USB interface).
- Pizzicato displays the score and you can make any correction required and split the left and right hands on two staves.
- You can edit the notes graphically as on a piano roll editor. Music notation is adapted accordingly on the staff.
- Enter the notes with the help of a guitar fret board window, showing the names of the notes.
Fast entry of notes and chords
- Using this entry mode, you can select the rhythmic value of a note just by moving the mouse to the right for longer duration or to the left for shorter duration.
- You can encode simple music with only the mouse. There is no need to select tools on a palette or to use the keyboard.
- A similar mode is used to enter the notes of an existing chord progression, on one or more staves. A simple but powerful note entry mode to translate chord symbols into real notes.
Clef, key and time signatures
- You can use all clefs (G, F, C, percussion), standard or transposed (8). Change the clef anywhere in the score.
- Select the key signature (number of flats or sharps at the beginning of the staff) and change it anywhere in the score.
- You can transpose the score from one tone to another, just by changing the key signature or by selecting an interval.
- Specify the number of beats in the measure with the time signature (4/4, 3/4, 6/8,...) and change the time signature anywhere in the score.
- Create composite time signatures (3+4/8), advanced key signatures (mixing flats and sharps), free measures (with no time signature), multi-measure rests, and customize the measure appearance and content.
Chords, text and lyrics
- Add chord symbols and convert them automatically to notes on the staff.
- Add a title, the composer name or any free text associated to a page or a measure.
- You can enter the lyrics just by typing in the text syllables and Pizzicato will place them correctly centered on the notes, up to 8 lines of lyrics per staff.
- You can even copy the lyrics from the text of another program (Word, Open Office,...). You can adjust the position of lyrics and change the font, size and colour of each line.
- Use the chord progression window to enter or edit the chords easily.
Page layout of the score
Adjust the page layout, customize the number of measures for each staff or simply lay out the music as you want it to look on the page.
- Add page and measure numbers, brackets, instrument names, bars and repeats.
- Specify the global printing size as well as the size of each individual staff.
- You can optimize orchestral scores by automatically hiding empty staves.
- Insert images and graphics in the page layout of the score. You can write music tutorials and exercise books directly in Pizzicato. You can print in any paper format including booklet printing.
- You can extract individual parts from a conductor score and print them.
Other notation features
- Pizzicato contains all the tools you need to write sheet music for the guitar or other fretted instruments like the banjo, the bass, etc.
- You can enter the music with the mouse on a tablature, TAB or on a standard staff. You can display both staff and TAB or tablature and Pizzicato can convert from one to the other.
- A customized library of 240 fretted instruments is available and you can ask Pizzicato to design a chord diagram library with specific features such as the position on the fret board or the number of strings used.
- A full library of chord diagrams is available, and you can add your own to complete the library.
- A set of specific symbols for the guitar may be added to the score which will affect the performance of the playback.
- Pizzicato provides all the tools needed for drum notation. Note heads, staves with 1 to 16 lines, the percussion clef and MIDI mapping of instruments are combined to create nice looking drum parts.
- Pizzicato will import MIDI files and can split the individual drum instruments so that you can easily edit the parts and print high quality drum sheet music.
- With Pizzicato, you can manage advanced pianistic notation and multiple grace notes, both for page layout and playback.
- You can add custom symbols to the palettes and define their graphic aspect as well as their sound effects on playback.
- A special copy/paste function helps you merge staves together or split apart an existing staff.
- Assign colours to notes based on the note names, the pitches, or individually.
- With an existing chord progression, you can intuitively design a melody.
- Pizzicato can display the score so that the notes being part of the current chord are displayed in green, the notes of the associated scale are displayed in orange, and the other notes are displayed in red.
- With this system, green notes are the strongest notes for building the melody, orange notes may often be used as passage notes and red notes should be avoided, except for rapid chromatic passages.
- It becomes easy to design a melody on a chord accompaniment, because the note colours help you to select the best notes.
- You can test many possibilities by moving the notes or changing the chords and seeing the note colours being adapted.
