I've always loved music notation. It's a wonderful art form.
In the 1970's I began creating sheet music for folks in Portland, Oregon as a means of making extra money while working through college.
One of my clients was the associate conductor of the Oregon Symphony, Norman Leyden. Norman was writing arrangements for the symphony's pops concert series, and he hired me to create parts for the various instruments using his orchestral score.
Norman's wife Alice was his principal copyist and she taught me how they worked. She used specialized caligraphy pens and very dark ink to write the notes on transparent paper called vellum, or onion-skin. This paper had staff lines pre-drawn on the back side and when the parts were sent to the printer--basically a blueprint company--both staff lines and notes would print.
To deal with errors, we used an electric eraser which basically carved the notes out of the thick vellum. Because the staff lines were on the back, they would not be removed.
We created sheet music this way for a number of years. Norman's library still contains many of these hand-crafted instrumental parts.
In about 1985, a company called Finale released a software application that allowed making sheet music on the computer. I hopped on board right away, only to discover that working with Finale was exteremely difficult. I was not that knowledgeable about the computer itself, much less this complex and tricky application. The first few projects I tried were chaotic, as we (me and a team of like-minded novices) would print out what we could figure out how to do correctly, and then hand write in elements we coudn't.
However, little by little, Finale became a very valuable tool. Today I use it to create, in some cases, some very complex sheet music.
I've included some examples in the tabs on the left, feel free to browse!