Category Archives: those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush

Using MuseScore to create lead sheets

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As I noted in an earlier post, I recently purchased Finale NotePad, the cheap-o version of this music notation software. I needed it to create some basic lead sheets for some new material that The Viper and His Famous Orchestra will be debuting at our summer shows for 2009. Lead sheets are a practice tool for bands working in a vernacular tradition — they typically include just a simplified version of the “head” melody of a song written out on a treble-clef staff, with chord symbols written above the staff (like what you’d find in a fakebook).

As a notation project, a lead sheet is a pretty simple creature and doesn’t require all the bells and whistles that someone doing, say, a full orchestral score would need from software. And I found NotePad pretty easy to figure out to quickly get a line of music down on paper. But because lead sheets are created for musicians who need it mostly as spot-check reference tool for practicing, and for musicians who may or may not be skilled readers of music, they do create there own demands on someone notating the music — mostly, demands for simplicity.

Some of these demands I found hard to meet with Finale NotePad. Most notably, I found I couldn’t get the line to break where I wanted it so that there’d be a nice, round, easy-to-read four measures per line  on the page. This doesn’t sound like a big deal – but it makes a lead sheet infinitely more useful as a practice tool if it can be set up this way.

On my earlier post, I noted this issue with NotePad and mentioned that I was going to be trying out an alternative, free and open source program called MuseScore. Well, within less than a day, I’d been contacted by two separate boosters of MuseScore with helpful advice and more. A David Bolton commented on my post, saying “MuseScore can add grace notes and double bar lines plus many more things that NotePad can’t do.” And then some superhero known only as “Lasconic” emailed me out of the blue, having voluntarily taken on the project of himself or herself inputting my lead sheet for “Heyse Latke” into MuseScore. As he/she writes:

I created a musicXML file from your pdf with an OMR software and open the musicXML with musescore. Then I modify it. The most recent prerelease of musescore has a plugin to break every 4 measures automatically. You can break where you want too of course. You can label the part with rehearsal marks, and use double barlines. I didn’t put any appogiatura, but it’s also possible. Not sure you’re playing a mandolin, I thought it was a ukulele. I didn’t change it neither but it’s possible as well. The result looks cleaner and beautiful, at least for my taste. Hope you like it! Tell me what you think and try musescore! It will be great to have your feedback on the forum: http://musescore.org/en/forum.

And he/she is right: it is cleaner and beautiful. Take a look at:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/497455/heyse-latke.pdf

Or the musescore file at:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/497455/heyse-latke.mscz

I haven’t yet properly thanked Lasconic or written to the forum. But I have begun using MuseScore and am finding it to be absolutely perfect for my purposes. There are some issues with needing to download a supplementary midi pack to be able to play back some of the fuller, multi-staff scores I’m now also creating with it. But for creating basic lead sheets, it’s an easy-to-learn, simple-to-use program for creating very usable, professional looking stuff. I’m very impressed and happy with it.

My seafaring lassie will smile on the Bard of Armagh

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"Bard of Armagh" ballad sheet

"Bard of Armagh" ballad sheet

In putting together 5 shows for the summer that will require two complete sets, and doing it with an Orchestra that resides, Famously, in 6 different cities in 3 different states, I’m spending a lot of quality archive time digging through old file folders (manila and electronic) and old hard hard drives to dredge up or create reference material — lyric sheets, chord sheets, lead sheets, arrangement notes, scratch recordings, etc. — that I can pass on to everyone else via email and, now, via the wiki I’ve started putting together for the summer for just this purpose.

Thankfully, the rest of the Famous Orchestra appears to suffer from the same archive fever that I do. And now all kinds of great material is starting to show up on the wiki: lyrics to Tre-P’s “Drunk Bus” contributed by Ed Burch, chord changes for “Winnebago Bay” and other songs contributed by Riley Broach. And this: a page of sprawling handwritten notes for “My Seafaring Lassie,” developed in situe as we were pulling together this then very fresh piece of hardtack for a couple of shows during the summer of 2002 (I’d finished writing the song on the treadmill on the cargo ship on which my wife and I crossed the Atlantic Ocean on our move back from Turkey just weeks before).

Here’s the notes:

Seafarin’-transcript.pdf

And, just for reference, here’s a recording of “My Seafaring Lassie” from a solo show I did in December 2008 at the Home Grown Coffee House in Accokeek, Maryland:

Download: 77638953


(click here to download the mp3)

The contributor of the notes is Rob Henn, as will be apparent from what he calls the “admittedly trombone-centric (but still helpful!)” transcription of this arrangement. What I really like is the economy of these notes — there’s a lot being recorded here, and it’s a little bit of a fly thing all on one page: everything from the basic structure of the song, to snatches of lyrics, notes on vocal harmonies and punctuation, built-in contingencies for live playing (all those question marks!), bits of melody transcription, and references to inside jokes (such as our use of the “Picardy 3rd” to end the song).

At the tail end of the piece, you’ll also see:

Assorted phrases, Irish brogue talkin’, whatever…
– On my signal, I sing, “And she’ll smile on the bard of Armeagh! (Armeagh!)”
All, very lock-step in rhythm, “And she’ll smile on the bard of Armeagh!”

This was about as inside as jokes get. It could be excused only by the vaguely Irish (though, truthfully, English West Country) feel of the song. And the joke was basically this: Rob Henn had once had a dream in which, I think, The Viper and His Famous Orchestra were playing; and we either had to sing, or were watching, some Irish music performance in which the “bard of Armeagh” line cited in the “Seafarin’ Lassie” notes were sung. Rob had vividly remembered the lyrics, the melody, and the end-of-chorus turnaround from his dream, and so was sufficiently astounded some weeks later, while at the Hideout in Chicago, to discover a flyer for an upcoming performance BY the Bard of Armagh, which turned out to be the moniker sometimes applied to the late and great, hearty and hellish Tommy Makem — though I can’t believe it was actually Tommy Makem who was coming to the Hideout.*

So — to rip off Peter Stampfel here — we put it in the song! And sang it! And closed the song with it! Hurrah for The Viper and His Famous Orchestra! Hurrah for Rob Henn! Hurrah for Isaac the Bartender! And Hurrah for the Bard of Armeagh!

* Though a quick search turns up that Tommy Makem was, in fact, scheduled to play in Chicago’s Irish American Heritage Festival in July of 2002. And, in fact, “The Bard of Armagh” turns out to be an actual Irish ballad about a travelling 17th-century harper named  Phelim Brady, recorded at least once by Tommy Makem, and — the resonances start to pile up pretty thick here — set to the tune used by a song occasionally performed by The Viper, “The Streets of Laredo,” though there is no “smiling upon” going on in either song)

Hotter latkes

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Regular readers of this space will recall eight straight nights of posts last December devoted to my attempt at writing a Hanukkah song, “Heyse Latke Kalte Latke.” At that point, I didn’t yet have an electronic-transmission-friendly version of the lead sheet reflecting the slight tweaking that violinist Peter Jensen and I had given the tune since I first scrawled my handwritten version of the melody some months earlier.

Well, I finally broke down and bought me some music notation software — the formerly free Finale NotePad, now $9.95 in its 2009 edition. With the reconstituted Viper and His Famous Orchestra doing some shows later this summer, and with the limited time we’re going to have to actually all be in one place at one time to practice, I needed some way to make distance rehearsal more doable. I made “Heyse Latke Kalte Latke” my test case for the software, and I’m pretty happy how easy it was to figure out and getting something down quickly with even this cheapest version of the Finale line.

I’ve saved the result here for download, and you can then follow along with this recording of the Paint Branch Ramblers practicing it last November (it goes into Bill Monroe’s “Jerusalem Ridge” toward the end, but you can ignore that).

download

There are a few flies in the ointment. With NotePad, you apparently can’t add the grace notes I would have liked to get some of the more klezmer-y effects on paper. More problematically, you can’t do double bar lines to indicate the different sections (this song has clearly distinct A and B strains), and you can’t format the result so that it gives you 4 measures per line (which would make it easier to read and play along with).

I’ll also be testing out an open source program called MuseScore to see how that compares. I don’t need much in the way of bells & whistles, but it would be good to have a few key features that would enable me to put together better working lead sheets for practice purposes.

Hanukkah with the Viper, pt. 3

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For the first night of Hanukkah, I posted a recent Paint Branch Ramblers recording of “Heyse Latke Kalte Latke.” And yesterday, I posted the cheat sheet for singing and playing along in accompaniment.

But what if you want to play the melody itself? Well, today’s post offers you a PDF of the handwritten lead sheet that Peter Jensen and I use to make our contribution on the violin and the cümbüş, respectively. Ignore the chord changes, which are hopelessly more complicated the ones we actually use. You can find the ones we use on the cheat sheet from yesterday’s post.

You should also note that we have made two small changes in the way that we actually play it and make those corrections on the music.

  • In measures 4 & 8, you can add a short cadenza to the final f# note, so that it runs down the D major scale (F#, E, D) following the same two-sixteenth one-eighth note figure that you’ll see at the start of measure 7. On this one, it creates a nicely heterophonous effect if NOT all the players do this every time.
  • The more important change is the reversal of the 2nd and 3rd notes in measure 7, so that it goes G, A, Bb rather than G, Bb, A. It’s a really small thing, but it makes a big difference in the way the textured pattern of that part works out.

    We don’t really solo over this, but if you wanted to try, the song basically uses two modes. I don’t know the names of either. For most of it – the parts where the chords is D major – it uses what I think of as the basic klezmer mode (i.e., the one that you’ll hear in “Hava Nagila” or “Misirlou”) of a scale built on D using the notes D, Eb, F#, G, A, Bb, C#, D. For measures 7 & 8, 11 & 12, and 15 & 16 (where the chords go D, C, C, D), it straightens out the scale a bit, so that you’re using D, E, F, G, A, Bb, C, D. Though, frankly, when I ad lib, I don’t worry about that.

    And we don’t think you should either. Come back tomorrow night for more latkes, served up hot and cold.