You know, I actually struggled VERY hard for a long time (mentally) changing from Sibelius to Logic. Want to know why? Same excuse as you. I am a musician! Not a dam engineer! (well I am much more seriously both now a days but back then I had no DAW experience and no engineering sound experience!). It was total HELL getting over that curve! To let go of my beloved "sheet of music" and looking at blobs of crap on the screen with dots, and lines and hashes and all these confusing pluggy thingies and all these knobbie thingies all over the place. What the hell was all of this crap! :)
Now that I pushed myself through the curve (it wasn't easy) I would NEVER go back. EVER! What I can do today in a few hours will DESTROY anything I could have done in Sibelius in a week. Sounds to me like it's time for you to do the same. Start sooner than later. There are so many reasons why a DAW is better to work in than Sibelius but a die hard Sibelius fan might try to argue against it. One MAJOR simple fact, Sibelius is TERRIBLE at "real-time" inputing. No matter what they say, it is HORRIBLE and it's as buggy as can possibly be. I have written countless posts on Sibelius forums, written/spoke to Sibelius support about it's serious lacking in its ability to record your performance in live, without making a mistake. It was simply impossible! In 3 years, they NEVER were able to record me playing in a live chopin etude etc (every new version of Sibelius brought back hope that it would work! Nope still don't work on version 6!). Their response was, we're sorry, your piano skills are to good for this to handle, you should try a DAW. WHAT! I freaked out, I was terrified of all this bullcrap DAW stuff. I just wanted to "perform" music and go on with my day. And just like you, all I wanted was to SEE it as I am comfortable seeing music. On bars and staffs!!
Those days are gone. It's time to move on and get up here with us big boys now! :) so let's begin.
What is "Freezing Tracks" even mean? It is a term that is used in LOGIC. Cubase and others have the same ability but they call it another name. Notation software like Sibelius, Finale etc do not come with this feature. Here is exactly what it does.
Let's say you load a new project, load up a solo violin and press record. Now you play in a live playback of it and all goes well. Great. Now you load up a second track and a solo viola. You hit record and record another passage in. Can you see how if you keep going, this will quickly chew up your resources on your computer? The reason it is so "System Resource" hungry is because it is reading all of your project data, applying reverb and other channel plugs you have going (compression, EQ etc). It is also "streaming" the samples from a hard drive and uncompressing them as it goes. It is either upsampling or downsampling depending on the settings you have defined for the project (that's why in Logic, I recently learned to set ALL my templates to 24-bit/44,100khz because now it doesn't have to do any additional processing to the VSL Samples which improved performance on my machine 10 fold). All of this translates to serious amounts of CPU demand. It has to keep up with all of those processes in realtime while all the while you're twitching the xfade modwheel and expression pedal. Before you know it, you're getting pops and clicks because the system simply cannot process that much in "realtime".
So Freeze comes to the rescue! Let's say now you finished your violin part earlier. You can tell LOGIC to "freeze" that track and it will bounce just that one instrument to an audio file. (the only difference you will see is the green "Freeze" icon). Now that this track is nothing but an audio file (like a song in itunes) the computer doesn't even have to work hardly at all to play it. There fore, a track that took 20% of your CPU before, isn't even takin 1% anymore! After you do this to your viola, cellos and basses you can play a whole dam ensemble (chamber) and not use more than 20% CPU if that. It's because it no longer has to process plug-ins for that channel, stream the samples from an external drive, render all midi commands like xfade, expression, keyswitches etc. Your computer will love you for this!
I am working on a project right now that has 8 instruments in it. A ton of piano notes, and tons of strings along with an electronic sound mimicing the piano. If I try to play this I get pops and clicks. I just froze two tracks, piano and violins and already I am at 60% CPU, down from 100% before. See how powerful this is? After I finish editing my other tracks and freeze them I will be able to play this entire orchestration with less than 5% CPU.
So for me I simply record in a part (you can manually enter notes here if you want, it still works the same), fix wrong notes & timing issues, apply key switches to the patches I want, then record my expression level and xfade level. At this point, I should be fairly done with this track. FREEZE. Done. Move on to the next track, viola. Record (and repeat above steps). FREEZE. At this point I have 2 perfected tracks that are taking no more than a few % of my CPU. When you start to get into huge orchestrations, you will be able to copy and paste the same passages for the instruments that play in the same range (brass, Winds etc).
You will probably get frustrated, feel like you've stepped back 10 steps and have no idea where to go when you move to a DAW from Sibelius. But in the end your music will have a sound you simply cannot get in Sibelius without tremendous amounts of effort (and one hell of a computer if you're doing it all "in the box") since you can't "freeze" tracks and make your projects CPU friendly.
P.S. Logic's score editor is not really an option for me. I stick to Sibelius for scores, it is superior in that. At first the way you do it in Logic will seem extremely "unmusical" in its approach. But the results will blow away what you're doing now once you master it. In the years I have struggled with Sibelius not recording my parts as I truly played them, on the flip side Logic has NEVER failed me to record what I really played. Ever.
Maestro2be
