Harmony Assistant is a specialized application for composing, editing, and printing music. Bundled with multiple functions and features, it can help composers, students, and music teachers to easily create and edit melodies by means of a flexible score editor. Using its own built-in synthesizer that works even on computers with basic sound cards, Harmony Assistant is able to reproduce the melody we are creating, which turns out very useful when making revisions and correcting mistakes.
The application includes dozens of score templates that we can choose from according to the type of music we are composing; and offers different display modes for each one, which is actually one of the new features of this version. The advantage of ‘Views’ becomes more evident when composing music for an orchestra, for example, as this makes it possible to set separate views and sheet music for each instrument.
Entering the notes on the staff is very easy and can be done with a mouse, keyboard or an external input device like a midi keyboard. Once we have created a tune, it is possible to add automatic accompaniment using the included set of instruments; and also add rhythm patterns, as well as digital effects. After that, we can save our work and print the score, which can be pre-customized in terms of its size, font, etc.
The application also works with digital audio tracks, and this allows us to add to the document recorded voices and audio samples in several formats, with the option to save the output as an audio file. Another feature worth mentioning is the module called Virtual Singer, which can sing the lyrics of a song on a score, generating different types of voices which we can fully customize and adapt to the composition.
For those with little experience in composing with the computer, HA offers more than 100 video tutorials, plus an exhaustive online documentation to learn the basics of the program by means of practical exercises and examples. The documentation also includes a thorough revision of music theory -music notation, harmony, etc.
The user interface is very intuitive, and is available in several languages including English, German, French, as well as Spanish and Japanese. The version 9.4 of HA includes countless improvements, new features, and fixes, which go from changes in the interface appearance to suit Vista style, to improvements in music notation and printing options.
Although the trial version of the program lets us make use of most of the functions, it does not allow us to save our work, nor print more than one page of a score.
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