SATB and Choir Notation

If you are a choir director or member, Pizzicato Choir, Beginner and Professional gives you several tools to help you write specifically for vocal groups or choirs.

Writing The Music

All the tools described in the Notation web pages are applicable for the choir. So, For more details about how to write notes and rests in the score click here.

Pizzicato's choir tools allow you to easily create a page setup in the most common forms encountered for choirs, such as this one for Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass or SATB:

or this one for a Choir:

Pizzicato makes it easy for you to have up to eight different voices on the same staff. For instance, here are two voices:

Adding Lyrics to the Notes

Once the notes are written, you may add lyrics and associate them to each note:

In each staff, you can have up to eight lines of lyrics. And, the position of the lyric lines may be adjusted for the full score, for a specific system, for a specific measure, or even, just for a specific note. The lyrics font, size, style and color can be completely modified to make the score as clear as possible or to set apart one of the parts for emphasis. The result is an easy-to-sing staff for each voice in the ensemble.

 A special window is dedicated to adding lyrics.  It makes it easy to write the lyrics as a continuous text, where you just need to add the separations using hyphens like this:

 
You can also copy/paste the lyrics from your word processor. Pizzicato then automatically assigns the lyrics to the notes you have already written into the score.

Playing Your Score And Learning Your Part

Once the score is written the way you want it to be, you can print it and hand it out to the members of the choir.  One added advantage though, is you can also listen to it directly on your sound card or external synth to check the piece for musical cohesion.

 You can then learn to sing your part. You ask Pizzicato to play all voices and you sing your part with it. Once you master your part, you may ask Pizzicato to play only the other voices and you then sing your part with Pizzicato playing the other voices.

 If you want others in your choir to use this approach to learn their parts, you can:

• Send them the Pizzicato document so that they can listen to it directly on their computer with Pizzicato (even if they only possess the free Pizzicato demo version, they will be able to listen to your score).
• Or, create a MIDI file from your score and send it to them. If they have a computer, they will be able to listen to it even without Pizzicato.
• Or, create an audio file with the Pizzicato audio export function. You can then make a CD or cassette that you may distribute to the choir members to help them learn to sing their parts correctly.

Summary

With these specific tools, Pizzicato helps the members of a choir learn to sing their part between the rehearsals. Additionally, 　the choir conductor may print excellent 　scores and help the members to learn their parts.

==> If you are a choir conductor or a member of a choir, get Pizzicato!

　Order Pizzicato for SATB and Choir Notation
by clicking here