Finale has an excellent Jazz font which you can use to give your music ahandwritten look. It also includes a great variety of jazz articulations, chords and dynamics, percussion notation and other specialized text items. A Jazz Band template is provided already laid out for brass instruments plus guitar, piano, bass and drums rhythm section. Sibelius also has a font called Inkpen which simulates neatly handwritten music and the range of notation symbols appears to be almost as comprehensive. Sibelius offers a Big Band template just like Finale's Jazz Band, and also has an R & B Band template, with 2 guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, vocal and 4 brass instruments, and a Jazz Quartet with alto sax, piano, bass and drums.

For a professional's opinion, I called jazz and big band trumpeter and arranger Mark Cumberland who does lots of copying of big and small band arrangements in a jazz style for the BBC Big Band and NYJO. Mark commented "I have used Sibelius since its inception but I am also learning Finale to make sure that I have both of the most popular packages under my belt. In Sibelius I particularly like the way you can hear back what you are doing as you develop the arrangement. And when you are copying it the ability to
hear what you are doing adds a further level of proofing. By the time you get to the studio you can feel much more confident that there aren't any wrong notes." But can it compete with hand-copying? "As it happens, the job I did last week was one of the first pieces on which I felt it was quicker working with the software than writing by hand. This was a minimalist string ensemble piece with lots of repetition - so the copy and past
features really saved time."

I recently transcribed a solo jazz guitar arrangement of the well-known Irish tune "Danny Boy" as performed by Jim Mullen. Having written this out roughly by hand, I decided that it would be worth printing a few copies out to give to friends - and to Jim himself. So which would be faster and which would deliver the best result - Finale or Sibelius? For me, Finale had the advantage, as I have used this, albeit somewhat occasionally, for a number
of years now. Sibelius, on the other hand, was a completely new software package for me to learn.

I decided that I would like to create tablature alongside the conventional music notation, and to enter chord symbols and guitar fretboard diagrams as well. Although I read and write music reasonably well these days, I am nowhere near as fast or as fluent as I would like to be - probably as I am a (mostly) self-taught guitarist who (mostly) plays improvised blues and jazz music - and Tab, diagrams and chord symbols can often make the music more accessible for me.