What is Reddit's opinion of Frescobaldi?

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It's definitely worth it. And using something like Frescobaldi takes a lot of the pain away from using it. There are so many things that Lilypond can do across so many different types of music that makes it the easy choice.

The key feature is that of all the engraving programs out there, Lilypond will produce the best looking scores out of the box without requiring all the tweaking that normally comes with engraving. In other words you don't have to be an engraver to use it.

Also, because it is a markup language (and thus a text file) this gives you a ton of power with the way you can generate scores. Here's a link to an article I wrote about how I'm using it on a huge project I'm working on. When I started the project I wasn't a programmer. Actually I'm still not. But I am faking my way through it creating a massive music generating program that also creates Lilypond files that are then compiled into scores. Because this is going online someday the scores must be perfect or nearly so without any additional tweaking whatsoever. That's just not something you can get with any other engraving software.

But of course you might not ever have that need but then again who knows? But knowing you are using a platform that can grow in any direction you want to go is a good feeling and makes for a nice investment in your future.

Also, it is actually pretty easy to produce simple scores. Go through the tutorial, use Frescobaldi, and in no time you'll have working scores. If you need to do fancy or complicated things then that stuff can require some patience but fortunately the Lilypond community is very active and incredibly friendly/helpful (see my article for examples of this).

In short, yes, it's worth the effort in order to get beautiful scores.

> Yes, I use musescore since Linux is lacking in the Notation department... and this is the best option. ...

> Any pointers on making my future notations more professional?

Fortunately for you as a Linux user (I'm one as well), you have access to what is currently the best notation program available: Lilypond. If the process intimidates you, you can use the Frescobaldi editor which simplifies much of the work (and is a favorite among Lilypond developers and power-users) or Denemo which is a gui editor (like Musescore, Finale, Dorico, etc) but uses the Lilypond engine to produce superior scores. All of these are free and are under active development and will help you produce much nicer scores.

Tabledit is worth it, IMO, if you're going to be doing a lot of tab entry; my license was purchased 12-13 ago and it's still supported, multiple releases later. No upgrade costs nor subscriptionware BS.

In case you're a programmer or textually oriented, Lilypond is FOSS, hugely powerful, and supports tablature for 5-string banjo (including custom tunings) but it's definitely got a learning curve. Frescobaldi is a nice FOSS LilyPond editor. If you've ever used (and liked) LaTeX for formatting text documents, you'll like Lilypond. (My favorite thing about it is that it's a "WYSIWYM" (What you see is what you meant") markup format; you enter the music and let Lilypond deal with the formatting. Entering music is faster and you don't spend half your time trying to click on pixels or hunting in menus.)

Caveat: All of that being said, I'm not sure it supports entering music in a tab-centric way; that is, you enter music as note+duration+string number (as necessary; it usually does a pretty good job figuring out the string on its own,) not string+fret+duration.

Sure!

First you need to download and install Lilypond and Frescobaldi - if you're on Windows or Mac, download them from those sites; if you're on Linux, you should find them in your package manager.

Lilypond is the engraving software: it turns markup into music.

Frescobaldi is the editing software: it displays our markup and music alongside each other, and makes it easy to edit them.

So look for Frescobaldi in your Start menu or Apps folder or whatever.

Now download this file and load it into Frescobaldi: https://gist.github.com/tepreece/0c948194c68aa40aa9c5af7ed448ebcd

It's a little something I've just written to explain the basic concepts and get you started. As it suggests - try changing stuff and see what happens. :)

I use lilypond. http://lilypond.org/index.fr.html

It's a text-based partition editor. The soft I use to help me type it is frescobaldi : http://frescobaldi.org/

It's free, totally free.

Transposition is really easy to do.

You can try Frescobaldi which is both very powerful and also Free (as in freedom and as in beer). Maybe overkill for what you need, but it has the ability to use Jazz layouts that bass players may be more familiar with.

> We play a lot of embellishments that certain programs can interpret as not fitting the time signature. It often looks like you've accidentally put 6 beats in a measure in 4/4, but it's just the way it's written.

I think I know what you mean, I've seen it in wind band choral books.

As for programs, I'm sure lilypond together with its frontend frescobaldi is up to the task.

I think it's worth the effort. Once you start to conceptually understand what's going on you'll find the going easier. It's such a different paradigm that changing how you think can be the tricky bit.

And I would suggest using the Frescobaldi editor which has some wizards and templates and a preview pane and other things that make the whole process easier. Quite a few of the biggest power users/Lilypond developers use Frescobaldi so you would be in good company.

Lilypond is the best engraving software available on any platform. It will produce a MIDI file. There is a bit of a learning curve so many people find using Fescobaldi to be much easier (and it's not just newbies who use it but experts in Lilypond as well).

Both should be available through your distro's repositories but I very strongly recommend installing Lilypond through the link above. The version in your distro might be as much as three years out-of-date. Fortunately the install is super easy so it should't present any problems.

I'm not sure what you're asking for with respect to the "augmentation tools". Also, what I'm recommending is a score-based approach, if you want something more audio-based then I'm not sure what to suggest.

Benjabenja has the answer you're looking for.

But - if you're a semi-super-genius, you could try Frescobaldi. Frescobaldi is a program that takes text input and runs it through LilyPond to create very nice scores. The learning curve is steep, though.