Sheet Music Engraving
Customizing EasyCAD to Print Quality Sheet Music
Way back in 1988, in my high school years, I started creating music symbols in EasyCAD for reasons I can no longer clearly remember. I must have shown my work to my horn teacher because she asked me to create several sheets of various music scales. A few of those are included below.
EasyCAD seemed ideal for music notation to me. It supported part libraries, customizable menus, macros, scripts, and produced scalable output (ooh, ouch!, unintentional bad pun, sorry). EasyCAD was also written in 100% assembler and ran incredibly fast on our IBM XT clone. I can't imagine any other drawing program at the time filling this need on a 4.77 Mhz XT.
About 6 years later, a friend asked me to help notate a short piece. By this time EasyCAD had long been upgraded to support filled complex polygons, so I updated the symbols and produced the last two pages shown below without much difficulty. Not too bad for the late 80's and early 90's on cheap hardware and software, methinks. Better and easier than Finale, I thought.
EasyCAD seemed ideal for music notation to me. It supported part libraries, customizable menus, macros, scripts, and produced scalable output (ooh, ouch!, unintentional bad pun, sorry). EasyCAD was also written in 100% assembler and ran incredibly fast on our IBM XT clone. I can't imagine any other drawing program at the time filling this need on a 4.77 Mhz XT.
About 6 years later, a friend asked me to help notate a short piece. By this time EasyCAD had long been upgraded to support filled complex polygons, so I updated the symbols and produced the last two pages shown below without much difficulty. Not too bad for the late 80's and early 90's on cheap hardware and software, methinks. Better and easier than Finale, I thought.
April 1988. EasyCAD for DOS.
April 1988. EasyCAD for DOS.
April 1994. EasyCAD 2 for DOS.
April 1994. EasyCAD 2 for DOS.
