finding competent sheet music

[pogo97]

A friend brought over sheet music for Floyd Cramer's "Last Date" that he bought (paid for!!!) off the internet. It was awful. Not that the notes were wrong, but it had two obvious problems and other small ones:

1) it was notated in 4/4 rather than 12/8 so there were triplet markings everywhere -- very distracting

2) the "slip" notes were shown as sixteenths ahead of a dotted eighth note, which puts the emphasis on an unimportant pitch -- properly done, these would have been notated as grace notes

3) there were no section markings

4) there were no bar numbers

 

In all, it suggested an attitude of "get the notes on the page fast and cheap." I don't think he got it here (http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/mtd.asp?ppn=MN0053712) but this site displays the same problems.

 

Have any of you found an online music download service that meets the standards of good old printed music?

[senorblues]

I stopped reading altogether after the eight grade - 1961 - mostly because nobody was transcribing Ray Charles or Ahmad Jamal, at least not that I knew of. A few years later, I bought a few books of collections by the Beatles, BS&T, James Taylor, etc., but none of them were much help in figuring out what the keyboard was doing, and it didn't help that they were usually buried in the mix.

 

It's better now, although the most easily accessible sheet music assumes you're a beginner playing in your living room for your own amusement.

 

That doesn't really address your point, though, because if you're going to go to the trouble to transcribe something, at least do it right.

[daddymack]

Sadly, much of what you find on the internet is wrong. I blame most of the notation garbage on computer transcription programs. They have no 'human ear' to evaluate, say, the aforementioned grace notes. I suspect that most of the stuff on the web is done via these programs, and that no human ever bothers to review them before putting them out for sale.

 

A friend of mine, several years ago, paid [what I considered] a ridiculous price for a program that would notate any piece of music you fed it [via .wav]; a month later, he was whining about how crappy it was because it could not capture performance nuances the way he heard them...yeah, well, I tried to warn him. He was using it mainly to create charts of his original material [he is a multi-instrumentalist], and it was just not meeting his expectations.

Have they improved since? I have no idea; the idea sounds wonderful, but computers have no soul, and cannot grasp the emotional aspects nor the manual/mechanical nuances of human performance...yet.

 

That said, 95% of the tabs/lyrics/chords that one finds on the free sites like 'ult. gtr.' and its ilk are wrong as well...and now they are trying to get suckers to pay for upgrades? Bah!

 

I also pretty much stopped reading decades ago, although it comes up now and then [usually for studio work], and I am rusty [considering I used to sight-play when I studied piano in college]. The ability does come in handy, though, and I have found that very few 'musicians' [guitar and bass players] actually read. Most can't even follow the bars! Occasionally someone will come into the jam and hand out charts...and they look at me 'you will please translate this for us'. I should charge extra!

[pogo97]

It's not in the nature of popular music to make transcription easy. I rarely work from music notation on piano, and never on guitar.

 

I've had to really bone up on reading, though, to deal with my recent incarnation as a church organist -- basically a read-or-die situation. But at least there they have some standards for notation and you'll rarely find stupid beginner mistakes. On the other hand, the more recent hymn books have chords over top of the SATB and they are often poorly done.

 

The Floyd Cramer thing was an unusual example where a direct transcription of the performance makes some sense. But not when they make it unnecessarily hard to read.

 

My ideal is a good lead sheet. But for my own use, I just do words & chords to save (a lot of) time punching in the notes. Anyway, if I'm putting it in my book, I probably know the tune already.

[pinkfloydcramer61]

Innacurate transcriptions have been a sore point with me for a long time. Lots of publishers assume that they can put any junk out and no one will catch on to how off-base it is. Keyboard mag is a great source for accurate, professional transcriptions and helpful master classes- several of which are taken or adapted from Mark Harrison's Pop Piano book. In the 90's they had an article on playing country that included a partial transcription of Last Date. Sometime around then they also had a master class with Philip Aaborg on bluegrass (!) piano. One of my favorites was one with blues piano great David Maxwell that included excerpts from his Deep Blues cd. I would really love for Keyboard to have a comprehensive collection of their transcriptions available, in fact I intend to request that.

 

For New Orleans piano check out the transcription books by Josh Paxton (Hal Leonard) of Professor Longhair and James Booker, among others. They're slavishly accurate.

 

 

 

Don't want to mislead by giving the impression that I have absorbed all this material. Much of it I haven't gone over, as (until recently) reading notation was hard work. Now it's getting easier and I love being able to read- listening to the audio while reading along is the quickest way to learn and absorb new music IMO.

[daddymack]

When I was totally immersed in it back in college, I could read a score and hear it in my head [maybe not in the correct key]. I could take basic treble/bass clef sheet music and play it on piano with no rehearsal...but maybe not up to full speed due to my lack of dexterity. Now? slowwwww....I have truly lost the whole up/down reading skill required to play with both hands. Sad, really,I rarely play keys anymore at all, and I really keep telling myself I need to make time to revisit that, and then...I don't.

[Notes_Norton]

Incorrect sheet music has always been a sore point with me.

 

When I was in the "Stage Band" at school, most swing songs were written as if they were straight eighth note rhythms, without triplet marks. We were to understand the feel was swing. Others were notated as dotted eighth - sixteenth notes but we still had to interpret them as swing. I suppose they could have been written in 12/8 time but back then, most notated in cut time with 4/4 as the less common meter.

 

30+ years ago when I was in a jazz band, everybody used "The Real Book" for ''head charts". At that time the philosophy of the book seemed to be "If any chord is good enough to play, it's good enough to substitute" so the harmonies of the songs were nothing like those of the famous recording. It just sounded wrong. Then if you played it on stage enough, the recording started to sound weird.

 

I prefer the music to have the real chords so we can deliberately make substitutions knowing where we are coming from.

 

There are a few books out with the 'real chords' and the 'contemporary' chords written on top or in a different color. Some are decent (I'm thinking the two Dick Hyman books - but I think they are out of print now).

 

I write "Fake Disks" for Band-in-a-Box and use off-the-shelf music books. Since "The Real Book" became legal, a lot of the chords are better and a lot of the errors have been cleaned up. And it's still in a mechanized "Hand written font"

 

What's the deal with making a book look like some copyist did it? One close look tells you it's typeset as all the G7 and other chord scribblings look identical. And the robot copyist is a little sloppy, taking a second to see if that is a 7 or 9 or if that note is on the line or in the space -- good old regular printed music is easier to read. Why make it harder to read? It's a map, not a challenge.

 

And as you mentioned, Internet music often is really bad with grace or crush notes not properly notated. Standard notation that everybody understands makes it easy to read. If everything is standardized, once you know the standard, there is no decoding delays.

 

And what's with the newish trend for Alt7 chords. Tell me what you altered. If you want a #9, b9, #5, b5, or whatever, don't be lazy, write it down. It's not supposed to be a guessing game or 'trial and error' to figure which alteration sounds best. A good reader should be able to sight-read it. (I was an excellent sight reader when I was in school, now I need to woodshed tricky rhythms I used to be able to just play - if you don't use it a lot, you lose some of it)

 

As far as sheet music is concerned, it is usually for PGV (Piano Guitar Vocals) and the notation is for a pianist and simplified so an intermediate level hobbyist can play it without too much frustration.

 

I still read, I have over 550 songs and I make my own charts (lead sheets w/arrangement notes) for myself using a very old copy of Encore. I read new songs until I wean myself from them, and I refer to them, especially if we haven't played the song in months.

 

When I learn a new song I do my own backing tracks. I prefer to have the music because sometimes my ear cannot pick out all the notes in a dense chord or when a player isn't playing all the notes of the chord, it's nice to know what is left out.

 

Most music is like a road map, and like road maps, some are better than others. We need more than the music, we need our ears.

 

So for me I rely mostly on my ears but prefer to have the music there because two references are better than one.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

[pinkfloydcramer61]

No music degree here but I did take it for a year and a half, only one theory class though. It was there I found that yes, it's more challenging for a singer to sight read- especially when dealing with modulations etc. It helped that I had played and sang 4-part harmony out of the Baptist Hymnal.

[pogo97]

And what's with the newish trend for Alt7 chords. Tell me what you altered. If you want a #9, b9, #5, b5, or whatever, don't be lazy, write it down. It's not supposed to be a guessing game or 'trial and error' to figure which alteration sounds best. A good reader should be able to sight-read it.

 

I spent years wondering "What, exactly, is an alt7 chord?" thinking that it meant something specific -- like every other chord symbol. Last year I found a nice youtube explanation and now I know. But I'm left with the question: "why would you use that?" As you say, it's simply not specific enough to sight read. I've noticed that Brandt & Roemer don't even mention alt7 chords.

[WRGKMC]

Most of what you find on the internet is likely pirated material and probably doesn't have copyrights from the artist or publisher.

 

Back in the day you had varying grades of music being sold. I remember buying a Beatles Rubber Soul album book. It had the most detailed charts and chords I ever owned. It was an exact match to not only what they played but included all the inversions and partial chords the band actually used. It was obviously either written under the guidance of the band itself or someone who knew exactly how they played because there was stuff in there just too difficult to pick off listening to the recording.

 

They would also make books specific to various instruments the same way as you'd buy music for orchestrations. I played in orchestra playing violin for several years and was exposed to these scores quite a bit. The composer would use the master score and the performers would be given parts based on what they would play.

 

They did the same things in guitar books, at least on many of them. You could buy a book for guitar that has a very weak notation, or buy a piano version and have a much more detailed composition in there. I often found the books written for Piano that also had guitar chords were done much better. I guess they figured they could get way with a stripped down guitar book because few guitarists can read music these days. Problem is most of them have all the wrong chord versions. I suppose this helps to protect the artists and what they are actually playing, but its obvious the transcriber didn't have a figgin clue or what the artists was actually playing.

 

Pink is right about transcription programs. If the music was midi It would yield much better results. You do have to take into consideration, the business of hard copies of music is dead and dying just like the recording business is. back in the day you had publishing companies who hired competent musicians to transcribe the music or actually got copies form the musicians as part of their publishing contract. Today? The companies that still exist have turned to automation to cut costs. They may have someone proofread the results buy god knows their competency levels are. I'm sure anyone who has developed the skill would rather be performing instead taking a minimum wage job proof reading some computer generated score.

 

 

 

 

[onelife]

I wonder if Beethoven got it right. During the latter stages he was unable to perform the 'ear test' to check his work.

 

A few years ago I bought a set of CDs of all Beethoven's piano sonatas that was recorded by Robert Silverman. He used a sophisticated piano/computer combination to edit his performance in a way that reflected all the nuance from the sheet music. He told me it was an attempt to get as close as possible to what the composer intended.

 

Considering the only recordings of Beethoven's music from his own time are what was written down, it's important that those charts are right.

[daddymack]

A genius like LVB could hear the entire score in his head, every note, every rest, every breath...his inner ear was certainly better than most people's ears will ever be [i wrote a term paper on him regarding the effect of his hearing loss profundity from 1814 on]. Consider he wrote 5 sonatas for piano, plus the Diabelli Variations, 5 string quartet pieces, and several other works, not the least being the 9th Symphony...he definitely had it right.

Interestingly, he wrote so much for piano even though he was unwilling to perform on piano in public for fear he might misplay, and be ridiculed, which took a terrible toll on his psyche. There is a 'darker' air to many of these later piano pieces that is subtle but noticeable in comparison to most of his earlier work [before 1810 especially].

[pogo97]

And what's with only using one size of accidental? The flat symbol after, say, a "B" means something quite different than the flat symbol before a "9." The first should be large and match the "B" and the other should be superscript to match the superscript "9". Yet I rarely see chord notation where there are two sizes of accidental. They're either all full-size and level with the letter -- including numbers and alterations like you were using a typewriter; or the letters are full size but everything else is superscript and smaller -- including the flat in Bb. My eyes like to see the root -- including flat or sharp -- on the baseline and everything else superscript -- would this be so hard?

[senorblues]

. . . . which is why I use "-" and "+" to alter a 5th, 9th, etc.

[pinkfloydcramer61]

Very interesting subject to me DM, as someone with a profound (high frequency) hearing loss who still gigs. I would like to know more about your term paper and the resources you used for it. I'm curious as to the type hearing loss Beethoven had, whether high frequency or one more evenly distributed, and how it progressed through his life , and the effects on his career- sounds like you have that covered.

[daddymack]

that paper was written over 40 year ago, so forgive me if I can't list my sources readily...I did have to go to several university libraries [uCLA, USC, Stanford] [this obviously was before the internet was invented by Al Gore], as well as request sources from Juilliard's archives. I was more interested in, and the paper was more about, his pivotal position in the transition of Western music from the 'Classical' to the 'Romantic', not so much on his hearing loss...but when you research a topic, one needs to be reasonably thorough.

His was a progressive loss which started to be an issue around 1810 [around the age of 40], but became a major problem by 1814, when he stopped performing altogether.