Sneak Peek at Lyricist Version 3

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Virtual Studio Systems prepares the popular Lyricist for it's next update.

Lyricist, an application from Virtual Studio Systems, is referred to as "The songwriter best friend" and honestly, there is not a lot in that statement to argue with. I have been using Lyricist to manage my songwriting for well over a year now and I am very excited to have the chance to help VSS test out version 3 before it's official release, and even happier that VSS allowed me to post this sneak peek.

Even with the current version 2 Lyricist is a great place to pull together all your scraps of paper, napkins, toilet paper or what ever you have written your lyrics on during a moment of inspiration. Add to that the ability to chart them with chord structures and arrangements and even have a rhyming dictionary to help you expand on your lyrics and you have a pretty darn useful tool. With an update version 2 added a chord wizard as well, which is my personal favorite part. With version 3 the application is reworked with a new user interface that is very fluid and easy to work with. I have chosen to try to cover each of the main views of your music individually and then highlight some of the features within the program.

Lyric View

The lyric view is a fairly simple rich-text editor (RTE) built to handle a fairly simple task, which is just writing, editing and arranging your the lyrics of your song. You can format your text with bold fonts, different font styles and sizes like any RTE. All of the content within this view and all views of Lyricist are also exportable to .rtf ("rich-text file") files for use collaborating with those musicians that will not have this application (ya I am sure there will be a couple :-) as it is then viewable in Windows Wordpad and other apps that support the .rte format.

Charting View

Now this is a very cool and useful view, it automatically copies your lyrics from the lyrics view and you can dice them up and format them to your liking, adding to them chord charts to lyrics to show structure. This as done as simple as clicking the "Insert Chord" button, and from the dialog box that opens you select the chord you want to insert, then click the "insert chord" button on that dialog and the well known fretboard graphic of that chord is added to the view.

Have you ever been plucking around on your guitar and all of a sudden you realized what you just played was really cool, you play around, find the notes and chords, look at your fingers and say "what the heck chord is that?"...if not you are a liar, not very experiemental, or just way over-educated :-) Enter the Chord Wizard (pictured below), one of the grooviest features of Lyricist (in my opinion). Go to the Lyricist toolbar and click the "Chord Wizard" button and you then are presented with the dialog box shown below. In this dialog click on the notes your fingers are on and the open strings that may be being played and it will tell you what chord it is as well as a list of what chords it is close to and tells you the minor adjustments you need to make to make it the other chords. Though this isn't a documented use (I don't think anyway) what I have done at time, when trying to "find the right chord" for one spot in my song, I just hit some notes that are in the key my song and see what it spits out to me, the Chord Wizard has once or twice found that elusive chord for me. Heck you can even switch views to search based on a left handed fretboard!

Arrangement View

The arrnagement view is essentially the chart view without the lyrics, just a display of the chord composition of the different pieces of the song. In this view you see the basic arrangement of the song (logical, eh?) it's possible to add alot of other notation to it such as time signatures, BPM's, "repeat" notation and similar arrangement type notation.

Nashville Charting

Nashville charting (no screenshot) is a commonly used methodof notation that has been in use for many,many (hundreds, actually) of years, but was strongly adopted in Nashville, and therefore the current naming of it. Quoting from the Lyricist help documentation: "Nashville Numbering is a method of writing out chord progressions independent of key. Rather than referring to a chord by its root note, Nashville Numbering refers to the root's position in the song's current key. This makes it easy to transpose the song to a new key on the fly, such as in a studio recording situation. Most session musicians are quite familiar with the Nashville system of notation."

Though I do not personally use it, it is very common to use in session playing. If you do know and use this style of notation this charting will be of a great help, as it will be another useful way to share your charts with other players. For more information on the specifics of Nashville Charting, refer to the Lyricist help documentation, as they explain it quite well.

Other Features

As I have stated above, there are many other cool features to help the songwriter in here, such as the rhyming dictionary, a spell checker, even a thesaurus. One of the more sophisticated features is an automatic transposer. When you click the "transpose" button it analyzes you song and loads the information it needs to do it's thing. From there you pick what key the song is in, what key you want it to change to and it will change all the chords accordingly, and from my simple tests it seems to work pretty well.

Lyricist stores all of these songs in it's own proprietary database file which is managed very intelligently by the application handling compression and decompression well, and it also makes it quite easy to back up since it is a single file. Adding that file to any scheduled backup routine on your PC (a few of us do that) is pretty simple with even the simplest backup software. The songs are managed by the album they are assigned to. The Lyricist database also stores artist information for each song as well as a little scatchpad just to store notes about each song that are not shown in any "view" but just on a little "notes-to-self" viewer, which I have found quite handy at times. Albums and songs are quite easily managed by the "Album Exchange" function, which gives you full control over moving songs from album to album, deleted un wanted songs and the like. In that same menu is the album management to add and edit albums.

Lyricist also contains menubar links to many useful web resources (I did notice that HRC was left out...must be an author oversite :-) for different promotional and informational sites for songwriters, as well as the expected links to VSS and VS Planet, a community for musicians supported in part by Virtual Studio Systems.

My Take on Lyricist 3

I would like to see the option to have the chord charting view more tabled by musical phrase not lyric phrase. Like one table cell for each measure or something similar to that, I believe it would make the charting much neater and easier to read and use. It would for me at least, but maybe that is just a personal thing.

As a whole, I liked version 2 of this app, version 3 I am already addicted to and it's not even released yet. Scheduled released date for the doanloadable version is around October 1st. The price is not noted, but version 2 is $39.99 so I am guessing v3 will be in the same neighborhood, and I presume if you own v2 you will be given the usual upgrade discount that is so common with software makers, and should be to reward loyalty. I will give more information when I have it about release dtae and price.

On a more personal note I would like to add that I like VSS as a company. Not only do they make great software for musicians, songwriters and engineers, but each and every employee of VSS is a musician, which means they more truly understand how musicians work and think, because they are musicians.

For more information about Lyricist, visit Virtual Studio Systems. There you can also checkout their other application, Track Notes, which is a great app for any engineer that wants to keep track of notes about recording sessions regarding which effects on what tracks, MIDI messages that are used, mixdown levels and pans and all the other information that usually winds up on a piece of paper that gets lost eventually.

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