I started using notation software around 2001, probably Finale 97. A friend of mine named Raj, much older than I was at the time, recommended it. I think he worked professionally in a STEM field and was a capable, curious user of the software. At that stage, his technical confidence mattered more to me than anything else. Like many young people, I gravitated toward people who seemed comfortable with tools I didn’t yet understand.

What mattered was that I was excited. This felt like real notation software.

Before that, I had been using Voyetra Orchestrator Pro, primarily a sequencing and recording program that could also generate reasonably decent-looking notation from MIDI. In hindsight, I probably should have explored Cakewalk instead of Voyetra, but at the time, Finale felt like a leap forward.

I did a great deal of typesetting in Finale in those early years. Some of it was for my own projects, and some of it was paid work. I knew enough to satisfy clients: clean parts, correct notes and rhythms, readable layout. By the standards of the day, and certainly by my own then-standards, it passed. By my current standards, much of it was quite poor.

I upgraded to Finale 2003 when it was released, and that version remained my primary tool for a long time. I used it for composing, arranging, part extraction, and engraving, largely by intuition and habit rather than any formal understanding of engraving principles.

Then, sometime around 2010, I decided to typeset the first movement of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto.

There was no professional reason for this. I simply wanted to work from the cello part as it appears in the first edition orchestral score. By that point, I had studied the concerto extensively, likely with two or three teachers, and had played it many times.

I began the project assuming that entering the notes and slurs would be most of the work. And then something unexpected happened.

As I went through the score carefully, I began to notice articulations. Then the dynamics. Then layers of dynamic detail I had never truly absorbed before. Not just the obvious fortes and pianos that shape large phrases, but hairpins, accents, and subtle markings that live inside the texture, shaping direction, rhetoric, and gesture.

I remember being genuinely startled.

These details had always been there. I had looked at this piece countless times. But I hadn’t really seen them. They had not yet become part of how I understood the music.

That moment was a turning point for me.

It wasn’t that I suddenly believed I could realize every marking perfectly. It was about intention. Once I became aware of those details, I felt responsible for them. Even if I couldn’t execute every nuance flawlessly, I could make a conscious effort to bring them into the sound.

In a very real sense, engraving taught me how to listen differently. It trained my attention. It forced me to slow down and confront what the composer actually put on the page, rather than what I assumed was there based on habit, tradition, or memory.

Looking back, that experience explains a great deal about why I care so deeply about notation today. Not because engraving is an end in itself, but because notation shapes how music is understood, transmitted, and ultimately performed. When details disappear on the page, they often disappear in the sound as well.

I didn’t become meticulous overnight. But that project taught me something essential: much of what we think we “know” in music is simply what we’ve learned to notice. And learning to notice takes time, tools, and occasionally the humility of discovering that we missed what was right in front of us.