Thanks.
Your career sounds amazingly cool. Thanks for the answer!
Yeah, he’s got some interesting stories if you’re into the nitty gritty of that scene.
I never addressed your OP, but if you’re also just simply asking who does the music notation for those Youtube videos, it’s typically the video producer themselves from what I can tell. (If they’re lucky, they may be able to already find a transcription, which is addressed in the other posts as to where those come from.) Yes, it’s a skill that can be learned and practiced and certain genres, like jazz, often require transcribing out solos as part of the learning process. Stuff like transcribing the rhythm in that Immigrant Song clip you linked to is fairly basic transcription and shouldn’t require tracking down a score or anything.
I have to say I am a bit confused how a drum part is put to sheet music. As mentioned before, drum kits can vary a lot. Look at the drum kit Neil Peart played versus almost anyone else. Peart had a HUGE drum setup. How do you write sheet music for Peart playing drums? (He’s an extreme case but we can walk it down to any drum kit which my differ from the next drum kit.)
I read drum notation, and the above are the basics. You can always add notes for non-standard drums.
A follow-on question, inspired by the OP:
Is it generally possible to research and determine who, specifically, scored a specific work of popular music? A credit to an “arranger” isn’t particularly uncommon on pre-1990s** albums – could you count on a credited arranger, probably, being the one who transposed the from-the-head music to paper?
Or else are there other approaches to tracking down the “who scored it?” for popular music – you just have to know where to look?
…
** “pre-1990s” is not meant to convey a meaningful cut-off. It just happensthat I’ve perused very few post-grunge album credits.
Scoring/transcribing these days is a lot easier thanks to DAWs (digital audio workstations).
If you can get a tune into it (either directly inputting notes into an editor, or
playing the music with a midi device (usually keyboard, but pretty much
any instrument these days can output midi)), then you can print it out as
sheet music.
I don’t know anything about how music is actually created, but how does a band keep track of what they will play for a given song if they can’t read or write sheet music? Like how does John and Paul ask Ringo to play that bit on the drums he showed them a month ago?
I was asking my guitar instructor this question a few days ago; I’m struggling through a Black Sabbath guitar solo, using a Hal Leonard tab book. My instructor, who’s also a professional musician and music professor, said that Tony (Iommi) more than likely just created his music basically straight off of the guitar and that others did the transcription as required.
Their own records. That’s the same way they learned other people’s songs. And touring/ gigging musicians pick up a lot from the repetition of playing the same thing concert after concert.
As a person who used to read sheet music, but stopped and let that skill atrophy decades ago because it wasn’t useful to communicate with the musicians I worked with: memory and recordings become very important. I’ve been in the habit of recording our practices and writing sessions for quite some time. Also, if you can halfway play their instrument, you can sit down and demonstrate what you want them to play.
Can a computer really sort this out?
For example, I saw Natalie Merchant in concert at the Chicago Theater last Friday. Her band was a piano, drummer, cello, viola and two violins and a guitarist and bassist.
How can a computer discern who is doing what? Particularly the string instruments? (as in the violins from the viola and cello)
The key in that situation is whether the instrument is outputting MIDI signals. It’s true that most any instrument can output MIDI if it is properly equipped (a hex pickup on a guitar, for example), but very few instruments that aren’t primarily used as a synthesizer controller are actually equipped to do so.
Not quite (yet !)
I was referring to music already entered into a DAW.
Although, it could be achieved with midi pickups attached to the individual
instruments.
I guess they were already reading notes though, so there wouldn’t be much point !
In a video interview, Paul McCartney said The Beatles, as a band, never used sheet music. They’d rely on their memories and, at most, would refer to their hand-written lyrics. My guess is that they’d sometimes do that at the initial stages of putting together a particular song.
My understanding is that they couldn’t read sheet music, and various articles seem to indicate that McCartney still doesn’t/can’t.
In the several rock bands I played in and recorded with, that was exactly the case. Nobody wrote down actual music. If somebody want to tell the drummer to do a particular fill, they’d describe it or vocalize it out, and the drummer would catch on. As a keyboardist, I would just learn by watching. In one of the bands, I had a lyric sheet and just wrote my own notes out, like the chords, and any place where I might want to do some kind of fill (like “play decending fill here!” or something like that.)
It’s really not all that complex for most popular music. You just sit down, learn your part, and remember it. Or you take notes in whatever way you can (if you don’t read sheet music) to jog your memory. I read and write music reasonably well, but I would never ever write out my parts. I don’t need to. I can remember the part. I mean, is it necessary to read to be able to learn a speech? No. You can listen to the speech over and over just as well.
Yes, mine too.
Totally an aside:
I seem to remember the Beatles being asked if Ringo was the best drummer ever and one of the band members quipped he was not even the best drummer in the Beatles.
Jeff Lynne, of Electric Light Orchestra, is another who never learned to read traditional sheet music notation. In the 1970s, when ELO was recording music with a full string section in the studio, he worked with Louis Clark to do the arranging of the songs for the musicians in the string section.