Isn't usage of a piano roll pretty standard for DAW tools such as this? I'm sure the more sophisticated tools can take a piano roll and generate sheet music for you, but I'm fairly certain the editing generally happens in a piano roll view
It’s not like a lack of a score view is awful, it’s just that it’s part of a pattern of missing tools that would be useful to people interested in composition. Like how there’s no such thing as a key signature (only scales), and you can’t reorganize parts of a song, and the chord tool uses a bunch of sometimes-correct names for chords so the tool can fit in with the scale. And then after you choose a chord, the name is gone. You can’t see what chords are already in the song. And there’s no flats.
People prefer piano roll, or score, or switch back and forth between both. The score is not just an artifact for printing books on paper, it’s a useful tool for reading music quickly. Piano roll is a lot more intuitive but it’s slow to read and falls apart when you start working with larger or more complicated stuff.
The people who want to “compose” music tend to gravitate towards the DAWs that have built-in scores anyway, like Cakewalk or Logic. That’s not universal by any means, it’s just kind of an average trend. Just like the people who call themselves “producers” tend to gravitate more towards piano roll. I put “compose” and “produce” in quotes because they’re somewhat arbitrary labels.
I keep going back to analogies—like, you walk into a kitchen, and there’s a sous vide wand, a centrifuge, and a Pacojet. But there’s no sink.
Or you go into a machine shop, and you see a six-axis CNC machine, but no calipers.
Ableton, FL Studio, Reason account for the lions share of DAW usage and don't have them. I follow the feature requests communities around these closely and have never seen anyone request that
Majority of DAW users are not thinking about their activity as “composition”. You can ask people whether they are a songwriter, producer, or composer, and I bet that the people who call themselves composers are much more likely to use something like Logic, Cubase, Pro Tools, or Reaper.
I think that it’s wrong to focus too much on the score functionality anyway. There’s just not a lot of tools in this product to help with songwriting. You can’t plug in standard chords easily, or change chords that you’ve added. You can’t rearrange song structure easily. The scales have weird names. I don’t know how to put in non-diatonic chords without changing the scale.
It’s expected that Ableton and FL Studio users don’t ask for notation. It’s not something useful to that user base, and if they wanted notation, they would probably just switch to one of the DAWs that has it, like Logic, Cubase, or Pro Tools. Reason user don’t ask for it because they just want to stop using Reason as a DAW altogether, and use Reason as a plug-in to a better DAW.
The title of the post is about composition. This can also mean different things. Is it for a band leader to get new ideas structured? Or is it for composing recorded parts? Very different things.
Most of the time I'm in bitwig, recording things in real time and editing things around, I barely use the midi roll.
I don't find the sink analogy apt. It's more like a grill. It's something specific that you might want to go to, and if you do, then you go there and you do that, outside the kitchen.
I just rub wasabi into my eyes and hit my thumb with a hammer.
Different folks, different strokes.
You can get pretty far with just a couple features. Like, a setting for how much tolerance you want (no 32nd notes here), an option to split voice by MIDI channel or something, and a button to switch between enharmonics.
I don’t think a score view is critical, it’s just one of many missing features here and for some reason a lot of people are focusing on it.
There's software I use (Reason) that doesn't have this, and piano roll or even things like Digital Performer's direct midi event list editor are one variety of really effective tools, but in my experience, anytime you end up working on a piece that might eventually need collaboration, lacks of notation will end up being a stone in your shoe.