staff_paper raze some things don't change. i never was much good at drawing a treble clef, even back in puberty times when i was actively trying to make some sense of all those dots and lines and squiggles. i'm still not any good at it. the bass clef is easy. it's pretty much a backwards C followed by a colon. the treble clef is a different animal. it's some sort of cousin to a cursive S on drugs. some people have a facility for making those curves. i'm not one of them. i don't know how long i spent trying to teach myself how to draw something that was a recognizable treble clef anyway, before it occurred to me that there's free staff paper on the internet. you can download it, and print it, and then there's no need to draw the clefs or make the lines yourself. the template is right there. all you need to do is write in the notes. so that made life a little easier. some of the note values are wrong. what little i've got left in my head of the near-nothing i ever knew on the theory side of things is little help, and what i can parse out with the internet's assistance will only take me so far. but i think it's at least semi-coherent. hopefully it'll make sense to the people playing violin and cello, whoever they happen to be. can't say i ever expected to have someone commission me to write a string part for their album, or that i'd be able to pull it off without too much trouble. not bad for someone who used to get all kinds of sermons about how their interest in music was stupid and their inability to read notation was a flaw they'd never be able to overcome... 151215 ... epitome of incomprehensibility "...not bad for someone who used to get all kinds of sermons about how their interest in music was stupid and their inability to read notation was a flaw they'd never be able to overcome" Whoever said that to you was illogical as well as unfair. It's like saying to someone: "Writing is pretty much useless... and by the way, you use too many semicolons." 151216 ... e_o_i I mean, if someone thinks a thing is stupid/useless, why do they want to bother about you doing it a certain way? (There's my point. I know I had one.) Oh, and what you're doing sounds really cool! Also, if you're interested in free music software too, there's MuseScore, which I use. You can put in the notes and everything through the program, and listen to what you've written in the process. But maybe you like writing things out on paper better - there's something exciting about scribbling out drafts on lined paper, in music and writing. 151216 ... raze i was using noteflight! which is probably a very similar thing. (and a melodica. because a melodica is much easier to carry into the bedroom than a piano.) i'll check out musescore. it's exactly like you said: i thought it might help to see where things were supposed to go on the staff and hear the notes at the same time, instead of totally eyeballing and picking it out one note at a time it like before. i was still picking out one note at a time, but it was easier doing it this way. and while i did end up writing it out by hand in the end, it helped a lot to have that visual reference. gave me a little more confidence in what i was putting on the page. the people who said that to me all those years ago were my mother and stepfather. haha! by their standards i would probably still be a miserable failure, but hey. i've got clean hair, and i live in a house, and i'm even getting paid to write this string part i shouldn't be able to write (which is all kinds of absurd and funny to me, because i'm not the person anyone would ever go to for an arrangement. but it's a lot of fun, and i appreciate it). it's a good thing they never got into the fortune-telling business. 151216 ... e_o_i Only tangentially relevant, but check out today's Google "doodle" - after the little video of Beethoven tripping over some horseshit and scattering his music papers, you get to put those "papers" together (the first 4 bars of the tune of the 5th symphony, the Cosmic Doorbell one). And then there's another little animation, with Beethoven's papers apparently getting caught in tree branches way above him, and you get to put together the first 4 bars of Fur Elise. And then the animation stopped or stalled. Do I understand this? No. Anyway the Moonlight Sonata is where it's at, Beethoven-wise, symphonic Cosmic Doorbells aside. Fur Elise is just annoying. 151217 ... raze john showman from new country rehab played that string part. the brain, she is exploding. 160424 what's it to you? who go blather from