Easy sheet-music generator from letter notes? (need answer fast)

Cafe Society
21

I’m not surprised. This is amateur hour, and it’s a very silly song not intended to be played, but only ever sung. The idea is that there’s a kind of… I don’t know what you’d call it properly – ad-libbing rhythmically to shoehorn all the syllables into the measure, and with all the shoehorning the measure gets stretched out longer than it should be (which is intended to sound silly and a little irregular). It’s a sort of (very short) cumulative/iterative song, like “I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” you know? “The Rhinoceros is ___-ing up and -ing (or-ing up __________, etc) on the Baby”. An intermediate verse, one I don’t often sing, is “The Rhinoceros is saving up to buy a can of peas to feed the baby.”

If you make Noteflight play it, in all its current awfulness, it really sounds just like we sing it, BTW. So it’s playable from a computer’s perspective, I guess.

Here’s the money quote – I needed to know this. Thank you for spelling it out for me. With your and Le Ministre’s help, I’m fixing my beams now.

Well, no. I tried it that way first, but that’s not quite how my husband sings it, at least going by the playback on the Noteflight site; the triplet setup as Le Ministre explained it to me (end results here) sound just right. I realize the Noteflight MIDI player is incapable of a subtlety most musicians take for granted and that the triplet notation might not be needed for human players, but it does get me the results I want.

OK! I’ve fixed that (you can see it fixed if you refresh). Should I change the “MIGHTY” in the 8th bar too (to, let’s see, I think it would be triplet-quarter tied to quarter tied to half), or is it just dotted notes that shouldn’t span the middle of the measure?

22

On re-reading, this intrigues me, and might make a fine solution to my Rhinoceros problem. I’ve never seen how this is done – can you describe it or point me to an example?

23

Bars 11 & 15 (same rhythm) should be quarter, quarter tied to eighth (that’s the middle of the measure division I was talking about).

Bar 16 should be half, quarter (a half note does not violate the middle of the bar rule, and makes it easier to read. Correct notation, even). I’m not sure why you changed this.

Bar 12: strictly speaking, to follow the no-span-over-the-bar-half rule, it should be, starting on beat 2, a quarter tied to a following half. However, this is one place that rule is always violated, and I would definitely use a dotted half note for beats 2,3 and 4.

One of the things I often had to do when writing lead sheets for non-musicians was to make an executive decision about some notation situations. Rarely was the goal to be perfectly, exactly, pedantically perfect, but to make something easy to read and follow common conventions. Also, I keep in mind that while 18th Century music had to be notated exactly as the composer wanted it to be played since there was no other way to convey the musical thought. But today, in modern pop music, a musician is more likely to listen to a recording for the first time he hears the song. The paper notation is only a rough guide, and neither Elton John nor the audience is going to care if you play it exactly as it appears on paper. (Sweetening studio sessions, like string or horn groups, where all musicians are following written music, would be an exception.)

For this reason, and especially since this is a children’s song, not a Bach Cantata, I would write bars 11 & 15 with two quarter notes and a quarter rest on beat three. How important is it to hold that second note longer? If you say yes, write it that way, but if you do it my way, it will be just a little more conventional and easy to read.

For the same reason, in bar 12, I would make beat 4 into a quarter rest. Give the singer a chance to take a breath before the long passage that follows.

If you DON’T want the singer to catch a breath, you need to indicate that with a phrase mark (a slur, looks like a tie) over several bars. Again, for a kid’s song, that’s probably more info than you need.

Notation involves much subjective interpretation, so feel free to disagree with me. But in my years in Hollywood, it was rare to find someone who wanted to correct my output. Most were glad it was highly readable.

If all you want is a computer output, then why put into human-readable notation? A MIDI file works even better.

35 years ago, someone brought into my studio some written music that was transcribed by a crude, but accurate, program from a sound input. It was completely unreadable even by the best musicians. Sometimes – at least at the current stage of the computer art – a human can make better decisions than a program.

Was the original note held for a triply-dotted quarter note at a fast tempo? Maybe, but who cares? Just say it’s a half note and be done with it.

But programs are getting smarter. I might not feel that way in 10 years.

24

One more tiny thing, emmaliminal. In vocal music only, when a word spans more than one note, a horizontal line (called an extender) should be drawn from slightly after the end of the word and continued to the last note that is held. This is true whether the notes are the same pitch or different (that is called melismatic). The line is thin, and at the bottom of the text.

This helps a singer know, at a glance, how long the word is to be sung. Sure, the notes do that, but the line is just one more tool.

Look at some commercially printed music if you don’t know what I mean. Unfortunately, there is a lot of sloppyness in much music, and the termination of the line isn’t always exactly under the note, but somewhere in the vicinity.

In your “Soren the Mighty” example, the extender is needed in only one place, bar 11 after “mighty!”

You hyphenated everything just perfectly, and placed each syllable directly under the proper noteheads, so I have no complaints there!

One thing to remember about notation…it has changed and evolved over centuries, usually to make things more logical and to reflect musical practices. Yet because preparing written music used to be very expensive, a piece of music was rarely re-engraved, just reprinted. So if you find a copy of Maple Leaf Rag on the store shelves, it was most likely engraved around 1900, and the notation was frozen in time. Hymnals are often the same way. So be careful if you use such works as notational examples; we might have better ways of doing it now.

Conversely, if you pick up a modern fake book, especially one from the giant Hal Leonard publishing house, and the type font looks a lot like a manuscript pen, it was undoubtedly formatted since computers were available, and reflects more modern practices in notational styles, for better or for worse.

Hollywood copyists often have notational quirks brought about by the need for throughput and speed. You have to get it on paper in time for a recording session, and it has to be so readable that the studio musicians can sight-read it with few mistakes, as time is money all around.

25

Well now I’m really confused; by my understanding of what a bar is, “Soren the Mighty” only has 14 total.

26

Can you define the “place where it’s always violated” for me so I understand better? I don’t think I could generalize it yet.

Points taken, but this is a special case not fitting either of your descriptions above. I’m not setting these songs in notation either to communicate to instrumental musicians exactly how they are to be played or to serve as reminders of how the recording indicates they should sound; I’m aiming to capture vocalized songs for posterity and then print them out as a symbolic gift. The posterity part puts me more in alignment with your Bach cantatas – while I also know that my husband reads music slightly less proficiently than I do, so chances are good that he won’t ever actually read these sheets the way a session musician would. Even if he utterly forgets how they go, he’s probably more likely to click on the player icon in Noteflight to hear them than to use the sheet music. But the sheets are a tangible reminder of how much I love singing with him to our baby, if that makes sense. I want them to be correct to my standards (which are rapidly evolving thanks to this thread!) for my own comfort, though.

By way of analogy . . . my husband speaks, reads, and writes Arabic. I don’t. But one of my prized possessions is a framed cardboard coaster with a handwritten Arabic phrase on the back, which he scrawled and gave me at a restaurant many years ago when we were dating. He tells me it reads “I love you” in atrocious penmanship with several errors in how the letters are joined (he was a beginner at the time). It’s a memento, not a script, if that makes sense. He doesn’t like looking at it, because he sees the errors he made, so I keep it in my office. To me, it’s a mash note in a secret code.

These songs are my mash notes for my husband about how much we love our baby. I don’t want to look at them in a decade and cringe internally because of the cruddy beams, but I also don’t need to hold them up to a session-musician’s working standard for ease of reading. If anything, “pedantically correct” is more appropriate than “easy-to-read,” since we’re both notation geeks in other arenas.

Does that make sense?

I’ll be saving the MIDI output too, but as of today, the only way I actually know how to make a MIDI file is to start with Noteflight sheet notation. And like I explained above, I don’t want JUST computer output, but I like that the output I’m getting matches the way I want the songs to sound.

I can’t figure out how to do that in the Noteflight file; I’ll have to add those by hand after printing. I tried using the underscore character, but the software insists on centering each “syllable” under the first note to which it applies, defeating my hack.

Confused again. Or still. Bar 11 (if I understand bars, which I’m seriously doubting at the moment) of “Soren the Mighty” contains the lyrics “dum-dee dum-dee dum dum”. No “mighty” to be found.

Can’t take credit for alignment; that’s part of the software. But I spent stultifying cumulative months scanning for proper hyphenation in a previous job as a textbook copyeditor, so I’m glad to hear I got that right!

Good stuff to know about notation conventions re printing history.

27

FYI, all of you, thank you so, so much for your help. I’mma gonna print these up tomorrow morning before we head over the river and through the woods, so anyone who wants one more crack at getting me to understand why I really should fix something, now’s your chance.

28

Damn, I think I may have given some wrong bar numbers. I see now that the program puts bar numbers far away from the staff they refer to, and ABOVE the staff. Copyists always number very close to the staff lines, and always BELOW, to the left of the left-most note. ALWAYS. Can you imagine the confusion to a violin player, seeing a chart for the first time in a studio, if the numbers weren’t where they expected them to be?

So I apologize, and I hope you can interpret what I said. I was mousing over the page to pick up the bar numbers and didn’t notice the problem until just now.

I have no idea how to use that program, so I can’t help you there. I’m just describing notation as it has traditionally been done. I’ve found many music writing programs were not written by musicians or copyists, and you may have to take what you can get.

Please let me know if you can figure out my bastard bar numbers and if my comments make sense. I guess if you subtracted one staff line, so if I said bar 12, I really meant 8 – does that work? Do you now see the “mid-measure division problem,” which is primarily in true bar 7?

Sorry again for the confusion.