Pizzicato is a music notation and composition software based on the score and MIDI. Are you a beginner ? Pizzicato includes a free music course. Are you a professional? Pizzicato provides you with a lot of tools and allows you to create yours.

Just as you use a word processor to write your mail, you can use Pizzicato to write your notes, your music on paper with a professional quality. At home.

Before going further: remove any idea related to music being difficult or composition being impossible to learn without 10 years of study, because if you follow it step by step, the Pizzicato music course will show you exactly the opposite!

Pizzicato Light is suited to learn music and/or make your first steps in computer assisted music.
Pizzicato Beginner and Professional are suited to write, print, compose and listen to your music scores.

You decide, Pizzicato draws!

Here are some key features of "Pizzicato":

· Documentation and training : practical training to play the music keyboard
· Notes encoding : work and view the score using a graphic zoom, grace notes and various note heads
· Structure of the score : unlimited number of instruments per system, orchestral score optimization, reduced staff size
· Clefs, keys signatures and time signatures : all clefs(percussion...), arbitrary key signatures, hide the time and key signatures, creating free measures
· Chords, text, lyrics : lyrics fast encoding window, chord analysis and chord searching on a melody,
· MIDI effects : MIDI Sequencer/GM, synthesizer handling, export/import MIDI files, 4 MIDI inputs/outputs, realistic performance of symbols, possibility to create your own graphic and MIDI symbols, 95 drivers covering most synthesizers of the market, with all sound banks
· Others : tool palettes with a large selection of graphic symbols, copy pictures of measures to your text processor, tools for composition assistance, 20 accompaniment styles, parts extraction from a conductor score, etc.

Limitations:

· 30 days trial period.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· A modular software synthesizer is now included in Pizzicato. With it, you can create synthesized sounds, read samples and manipulate the sound material. You can create a sound from scratch or use the given examples.
· You can now directly import SoundFont sample files. Many such sounds can be found free of charge and free of rights by the thousands on the Internet. You can assign them to the staves of your score and use them in your composition. The final sound quality produced by Pizzicato becomes independent of the sound card and its synthesizer.
· Pizzicato includes a quality sound library to listen to your music scores. It is the Papelmedia library ( http://www.papelmedia.de/english/index.htm ), which is now a standard part of Pizzicato.
· You can create an audio WAV file from your score directly with Pizzicato, without the need to go through the complexities of sound cards and their sometimes bad quality synthesizers. The final audio file includes directly the high quality sounds from the Papelmedia library or from any SoundFond sample that you can find on the Internet. A global audio file may be created but you can also create a separate file for each staff, for instance if you want to work it in a studio, remix it or add effects.
· A new note entry mode has been added, to draw the duration of a note directly on the staff, modify its pitch, the stem direction,... All this only with the mouse, with no need of keyboard shortcut nor selecting tools on a palette. Another tool let you enter the notes of chords intuitively, based on existing chord symbols, for one or more staves. To delete a note or rest, you can now drag it outside the measure, which is sometimes quite handy to do.
· A new music composition tool let you graphically draw melodies, move them, transform them, assigning rhythms to them, directly on the score. With it you can literaly draw your melody intuitively, based or not on existing chords and scales. Anybody can now express himself (herself) through music. The music notation just follows you hand and you can thereafter listen to the melody.
· The score view now has an additional display mode: the global view. You can select which staves to display, the effects to display, the graphic note editors, the audio instrument selection, the chords and scales,... all in a very intuitive way so as to have all needed information in the same window, without the need to open/close several windows to work some specific part of your composition. The idea is to assemble in one window all pertinent items. Moreover, you can memorize preset and call them back in one click. Imagine working the strings of an orchestra, then the volumes of instruments, tempo variations,... Then the percussion section, the brass, the audio instruments selection, the chords,... You can switch at once from one setup to the other, which speed up your work by placing all musical items at your fingertip.