R. Ray Depew

Musician


"O come, let us sing unto the LORD: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation."

Psalm 95:1 (KJV)

"I will sing unto the LORD as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being."

Psalm 102:33 (KJV)

Music for Download

Terms of use: The sheet music on this site may be downloaded free of charge. You may print and copy as many selections as you wish for non-commercial use, including copies for use in church and school choirs. All other rights reserved, including the creation of derivative works. Some of this music may be covered by other copyrights.

Music is available for download as a PDF file and a MIDI file. I'm in the process of converting my arrangements to MP3 files; please check back for updates to this list.

Please tell me when you perform any of this music or when you hear it performed, so I can keep track of it.

Type Voices Title PDF MIDI Notes
Religious SATB Come, Come Ye Saints 9 pgs,
72 kB 		4min 12s,
19 kB 		Y
Religious SATB God is Love
(Earth With Her 10,000 Flowers) 		6 pgs,
TBD 		2m 27s,
12 kB 		Y
Christmas Duet for mallets Carol of the Bells / We Three Kings 4 pgs,
TBD 		1m 28s,
10 kB 		Y
Christmas Trio for mallets Carol of the Bells / We Three Kings 4 pgs,
TBD 		1m 28s,
10 kB 		Y

Lime Lime music notation software

Lime is available for either PC or Macintosh. With Lime, you can enter your music using a MIDI keyboard or a mouse and QWERTY keyboard. You can make your music as simple or as complicated as you wish. Editing isn't much more difficult from editing a text document — if you're a musician of moderate skill. Lime supports multiple parts and multiple voices, enough for a full orchestra. There's no limit to file size or composition length. It supports dynamics and tempos. Output can be hardcopy, PDF files (if you have Adobe Acrobat), MIDI sound files or cut-and-paste to other software such as MSWord. Lime no longer supports the NIFF (Notation Interchange File Format) standard, and is constantly improving its support for the MusicXML data interchange standard, which allows you to shuffle files between Lime and other music software that supports MusicXML.

One word of caution: Lime is not for beginning musicians. It is serious, professional software. If you don't know how to write music, Lime is not the place to start learning.

You can find out more about Lime by:
- Sending email to Lime@cerlsoundgroup.org
- Visiting their web page at http://www.cerlsoundgroup.org
- or writing them at
Lime
1906 Augusta
Champaign, Illinois
USA 61821-6067

Just for fun, tell them I sent you. It won't make any difference to me, but it helps them to track the program's distribution.

Lime is not freeware; it's shareware. You can download it and use it without ever paying the license fee, but if you like it and use it a lot, please pay for it. It's as good as the commercial packages selling for five or six times that much.

Lime is still alive, and is constantly being improved. The most recent release is Version 9.16.

MuseScore music notation software

I started using Lime in 1998. At the time, it was the best free music notation software available. Now it looks like Lime might have some real competition.

MuseScore is a relatively new offering in the music score notation field, first released as free and open-source software in 2009. If you believe its webpage, it's "the world's most popular notation sofware." MuseScore is available for PC, Mac, or Linux.

I think I'll give it a shot, just to see how it compares to Lime.

You can find out more about MuseScore, and find a download link, at https://musescore.org.

LilyPond music engraving software and Frescobaldi sheet music editor

LilyPond bills itself as music engraving software, not music notation software. Eh. That's splitting hairs.

LilyPond is another music notation package, like Lime and MuseScore. It is free and open source, like MuseScore. It's available for PC, Mac or Linux.

Unlike the other software packages, however, LilyPond doesn't use a graphical or WYSIWYG interface -- you know, music staves and a mouse and a piano pseudo-keyboard. You enter the music directly from the QWERTY keyboard, and save it in a text file. Then LilyPond runs the text file like a computer program and turns it into beautiful sheet music. Some people say that the finished product is better than that turned out by MuseScore.

The QWERTY keyboard paradigm (vs. a piano keyboard) might be difficult for you to catch onto at first, but LilyPond has some good webpages which gently introduce it to you, and they will win you over.

Since it is free and open source, anyone is free to embellish it or to build companion applications. One such companion is Frescobaldi. Frescobaldi is sort of a WYSIWIG add-on for LilyPond. It gives you a split screen, with the text file on the left and the resulting sheet music on the right. You edit the text file, then hit a control key, and the sheet music is redrawn, reflecting the changes in your text file.

Computer programmers call this split-screen editor an Integrated Development Environment, or IDE. Once you get used to it, you'll find that you work faster in Frescobaldi than in one of the WYSIWYG applications.

Two other things:

  1. You don't need Frescobaldi to create music with LilyPond. It's an add-on. But LilyPond can stand just fine on its own.
  2. LilyPond can also read your text file and turn it into a full-blown MIDI file instead of a PDF file. (Next step: we need a way to convert it directly into an .MP3 or .AU audio file!)

LilyPond can be downloaded from https://lilypond.org/.

Frescobaldi can be downloaded from https://www.frescobaldi.org/.

Audacity Audacity sound editing software

Audacity is free, open-source sound recording and editing software, that is as good as some of the commercial products out there, and better than most, in my opinion. With a strong user base and an active developer team, it will only get better with time. Audacity will do anything the other packages can do, and just about anything you want it to do.

You can find out more about Audacity by visiting the Audacity web page at SourceForge: http://audacity.sourceforge.net.

Audacity truly is free and open source. It doesn't cost a thing. It installs easily on any operating system, and it's easy to use.

This Gun Not for Hire

It's tempting, but lets be realistic: I'm not going to quit my day job to write music, and I can make more money moonlighting as a wizard than as a musician. I just do this for fun. If you contact me about a musical project, I will probably redirect you to friends like Dan Hoeye, Sam Cardon and Peter Breinholt, professional musicians who really know what they're doing and can do a much better job than I can, or Sally DeFord, a talented composer whom I deeply admire, or my daughter, who has a music degree from the University of Northern Colorado.
Edited by VIM Created by Ray Depew, 29 Jul 2002
Last edited by Ray Depew, 25 Feb 2021