I’ve found that a lot of the guitar stuff is wrong, as well. I often find some simple, hard-rocking tune gets transposed into a bunch of fancy-ass jazz chords that I know damn well the original artist didn’t use. Sucks balls, it does.
The other thing is, along with guitar tabs/chords being wrong, the lyrics are often wrong. It appears that someone for whom English is neither their primary or even known language does the jotting down of lyrics, then EVERY SINGLE M-FING lyric site will have the exact same WRONG lyrics to a given song, along with a bunch of spammy popup horseshit. If I could find out who’s responsible for this, I would go to their house and knock their teeth down the back of their throats. :mad:
When I was doing takedowns, transcriptions, arrangements, etc., one problem that occasionally surfaced when given a tape (usually an open reel) was, “what speed should this be played at?”
The studio recording equipment at the time was highly reliable as to speed consistency, but not speed accuracy. A change of pitch (wow, flutter, long-term drift) was considered intolerable, but if the tape machine was always 1% too fast, nobody seemed to care.
One reason is if all recording work – overdubs, etc. – are done on the same machine, no one notices if it is 1% fast compared to specs. Only if played on another machine is it apparent. The second machine might cancel out the original speed error or make it worse.
Without doing the math, I believe a 3% difference equates to 1/4 step in pitch, so 1% is significant.
Although studio engineers were scrupulous in preparing for a recording session by cleaning heads, checking frequency responses, levels, etc., I never remember an engineer calibrating the tape machine with a standard speed tape.
And if the mixdown machine, usually a 1/4" stereo deck, was also a bit too fast or slow, you might have another accumulated error. By the time you get to the record pressing mastering lathe, the pitch might be 1/4 step high or low or more!
So I sometimes got a vinyl master pressing, either made on the cutting lathe or a test pressing from the master stamper, where the pitch was frozen to the 33.3 RPM speed and the pitch on all the tracks was “in the cracks” on a calibrated piano. What shall I do? Go up or down? This wasn’t experimental music, it was standard pop fare, so I had every reason to believe that A should be 440, not 453 or 429.
If I was lucky to have access to the musicians who recorded it, I could ask, but they were often off touring, stoned, or inaccessible and the publisher was in a hurry (I had to do the entire Eagles Hotel California album takedown overnight once the day before it was released – price no object, but the publisher wanted it the next day, no ifs, no buts).
I often tried to take a cue from the quirks of the instruments, but that was not always possible. In the long run, I wrote down what I though the pitch was. I had finely-tuned and calibrated equipment on my end that I built myself just for this purpose, and I could boost the pitch up or down as I wanted to match my standard piano.
Once upon a time I did an entire Norton Buffalo album. A month later, the Buffalo himself got ahold of the lead sheets I had written, and angrily called me up and chewed me out for writing them ALL in the wrong key, and where did I learn to write music, etc., etc.! I played him back the master and showed him the problem. I even pointed out that the key I used worked better with the guitar (sharps instead of flats) and he said, “Shit – I used a capo.”
The only good thing about that story is he paid me to hand-transpose all the lead sheets into the key he wanted, so I got paid twice. That’s about the time I wished we had computers so transposition would be easier and automatic!
And then there were the times when no keyboards were involved, at least on the original tracks. Subsequent instruments tuned to previous tracks, and if the first guitarist didn’t tune to A=440, the following players had to tune to him. If a non-tunable keyboard was overdubbed to a bad tuning, the tape machine was adjusted slightly to make things work.
So by the time an arranger gets something to work on for a piano-vocal sheet, the original pitch may be a big fucking mystery and nobody cares.
I’ve heard a story – I’m not sure it is true – that one of the Miles Davis albums (“Kind of Blue”?) was recorded on a too-fast or too-slow tape machine, and the pressing we are all familiar with is actually a 1/2 step too fast or slow. Without knowledge of the original keys (or tempos), something this far off would be difficult to challenge just by listening.
Kind of Blue did have some weirdness about it for a long time. IIRC the album was not mastered correctly on side one. Recent CDs are correct.
I’m pretty sure that this problem is due to not enough people caring about doing it right. I was a member of a band a long time ago that had a song released as sheet music. The first we knew of it was when the final glossy copy came our way. No-one had even mentioned it until then. The guitar tabs would have required an octopus to play it. But, yep, capo second fret and the thing was trivial to play.
“read and write” is different than “compose”. No one doubts the man can compose. But he IS musically illiterate, in that he can’t read or write in standard musical notation. Not that he needs to. Quite a few musicians are illiterate in that fashion, and being able to read and write music won’t automatically make you a world class musician.
Musicat’s comment surprised me in a different way. Classical composers slip into 12/8-ish sections within a 4/4 metre, and other such combinations, with ease. The Moonlight Sonata is a good example, IIRC. So I don’t see why it should cause such a problem in other genres.
It seemed that you were saying that because he doesn’t write the sheet music, the key is free to be chosen by the person who does write it. My point is that he chooses the key when he composes the song, so the sheet music writer has an original key to use and that still leaves the question of why that person would choose to transpose it. I will transpose a song to make it easier for me to sing, or to make a piano part, for example, easier to play on the guitar, but I’m not writing for the masses.
I used to have the sheet music for Pink Floyd’s Money. Instead of being written in 7/4 it was written in alternating bars of 4/4 and 3/4. It was functionally the same but it looked more scary to me than just having it in 7/4 which seems a more logical choice. Other versions of the sheet music have been written in 7/4.
Surprisingly I do know of at least one gigue published in 4/4, from the sixth guitar suite by Ludovico Roncalli. It was funny–I was looking and looking for the sig, expecting 12/8 or something similar, and finally realized I was staring right at it…“C” for common time.
What really irks me is when I hear an old song with sharps and flats played all natural with no sharps or flats. I have a good ear memory for old tunes and I hate to hear them played all wrong. That happens a lot here in Colombia.
I had a protracted argument with my employer about this particular situation. I had already written an arrangement in 6/8 (or 12/8, I can’t remember) and the producer/publisher told me to rewrite it with all tripets.
Yes, it did, but he was paying me to do it his way and he thought it would sell more copies his way.
I don’t think the typical sheet music buyer is from the classical field, or wasn’t expected to be at one time. Maybe times have indeed changed.
Another example RE the OP: When I wrote out a lead sheet, it was usually with absolutely no help from anyone involved with composing or recording the song. To a musician, this is absurd, but that’s Sho Biz. (The worst case was having to write out lead sheets for John Williams movie scores just by listening. A composer’s full score would have made it so much easier, but I couldn’t convince some publishers that depositing a score in the Copyright Office was a better idea than having me do a one-line melody lead sheet representing the entire orchestra. They’d always done it that way, and John Williams didn’t care as long as he got his royalties.)
So how am I to know if it was 7/4 or 3/4+4/4? Or if a 2/4 bar was inserted (happens in Country all the time), is that a 4/4 + 2/4 or a 6/4 bar? I had to make the best notational guess, and I have some music I wrote down 30 years ago that I ask myself now, “why did you make that decision – it’s stupid!” Hindsight is so rewarding.
So whatever decision I made might end up repeated if the song went from a lead sheet to another notation. After all, they were being guided by the “official” lead sheet, right? How did they know how I made my decision?
I wasn’t having a go at the transcriber with the 3/4 + 4/4 by the way, I just thought it interesting and put it up as an example of where someone has probably thought it would make the music more accessable to the masses. It’s interesting reading your posts because I had no idea that people were expected to just transcribe, sometimes complicated pieces of music, by ear in a very short time frame.
I worked into a specialty made necessary by an antiquated copyright law. From 1909 to the late 1970’s, the only way to copyright a musical work was to submit written music to the copyright office. (In 1909, written music was pretty much the only form of music that could be reliably preserved and reproduced, as sound recording was in its infancy.)
By Tin Pan Alley days and beyond, since so many “songwriters” wrote with guitar and voice, not pen and paper, the most common copyright medium was a lead (pronounced to rhyme with “feed”, not “led”) sheet. This is a form of musical shorthand that has three elements:[ol][li]The melody and rhythm (if any) in the form of notes showing both pitch and duration,[]The harmony (if any) in the form of chord symbols, and []The lyrics (if any).[/ol]While this form of abbreviated notation is quite adequate for 99% of pop music, it is a total farce to try and represent an entire symphony or complex jazz work as a lead sheet.[/li]
To a professional musician, a lead sheet is all that is necessary to recreate a pop song, even one that he might not have ever heard. A good lead sheet writer will include specific riffs, harmony parts or bass lines, if any, along with the main melodic elements, but it’s usually just a single melody line.
Publishers got used to hussling off a songwriter’s latest demo made with guitar and vocal to someone like me who would put the essential elements down on paper that they rarely considered there might sometimes be a better way (sending the complete John Williams score to the copyright office, for example).
The lead sheet was (and still is) utilitarian for other purposes than just copyright. It would usually be sent out to artists along with the demo recording by the songwriter or a small house band. Artists could use the sheet music to follow along with the demo, and if they liked the song, sent both along to their arranger, where the lead sheet saved him some time figuring out the harmony and lyrics.
In case you are wondering, the typical pop song took me about an hour and a quarter from first listening thru a pencil sketch to final pen and ink lead sheet. (Country songs took a lot less – I could write the entire harmony progression after hearing the first chord .) I did so many because I could do both the takedown to pencil and the pencil to pen final copy myself; other houses split the job into two specialties and used two people. I always thought this was inefficient, since much of my sketch I carried in my head for just a few minutes. If I had had to write all of that down legibly so someone else could read it, it would have taken longer. Also, I was able to play the final product along with the original sound for proofing purposes; the houses that split the task (the union required it) never fed the final product back to the first person for proofing, and the error possibilies were considerable.
I remember getting a Hal Leonard Beatles book and being very frustrated that about half the songs were transcribed in the key of B flat. (Which, needless to say, one would NOT use if the goal was to make it easier for an amateur guitarist to play.)
Musicat, this is all fascinating. All the sheet music I’ve played, and you know, I never really thought about what happened to it between the artist and the music store?
Ahh, but a true collector would have both versions and compare the wrong speed with the right speed!
In spite of this being GQ, perhaps I can get away with another anecdote to illustrate that.
Sometimes the artist was isolated from an arranger who wrote a piano-vocal chart for sheet music purposes. Other times, not so much.
I was hired to do the piano-vocal book for a Cat Stevens album, Izitso. (This was before he converted to Islam and he was living in L.A.) I was given a commercial copy of the album. I honestly don’t remember if I did the lead sheets or not – only the arranging gig stands out in my mind.
Unlike lead sheets, a P-V album of the era was typically designed for diehard fans. We expected them to play along with the record and therefore took few shortcuts – no bars were omitted although repeat symbols were used were possible.
I knew that Cat Stevens (I forget what name we called him familiarly then, but it wasn’t Yusef Islam) wanted to look over the final sketches before publication, and I had to submit a readable pencil sketch to the company in Florida that would do the engraving, so I wrote out P-V charts for all the songs and met with The Cat for some proofing. First of all, he asked me to play what was written, as he didn’t read music, but he did play keyboards. Not far into the first arrangement, he screamed, “Stop! That’s not what I played! It goes like this…” and he recreated the keyboard part exactly as I heard it on the recording.
It was not the first time I had been confronted with a volatile artist who said I was 100% wrong, but I explained to him that my task, as I saw it, was not to reproduce exactly what the keyboard part was, ignoring the rest of the orchestra, but to provide a playable, pianistic composition that reflected in the best way possible, given the difficulty level of the average amateur piano player, the overall sound/flavor of the song.
For example, if the melody was in a flute line, I had to make it into a piano part. The string and horn lines should be incorporated if possible and if it didn’t make the chart “too busy”. Even though Cat, like many keyboard players, rarely played a bass line with his left hand, I was obligated to transfer the bass guitar part into a left hand piano part or the arrangement would be sadly deficient in significant harmonic elements.
I told him I would be glad to write down the keyboard part he played exactly, and I even played it back to him, but I said that’s not what you want in the stores.
To my surprise, I was able to convince him that I was doing the right thing, and we went thru all the songs, tightened them up a bit and fixed some minor errors.
Even more to my surprise, I was able to convince him that an original counterpoint line I wrote, which I had thought filled some empty space in the harmony of one song (I Never Wanted to Be a Star), was a good addition to the song even though it wasn’t on the record, so we kept it. That was pretty ballsy on my part, but it worked.
After our session, the pencil charts were sent to the engraver. Most arrangers would be done with the task at that time, just want to be paid, and never see the final product until it hits the stores, but I wanted to do a better than average job, so I asked to be able to proofread the engraver’s output before going to press. (It wasn’t really engraving, even in those days before graphic computers, but a combination of manual music typewriter, straightedges, curves and ink pen, but we called it engraving anyway.)
I got the proofs from the preparation house and found them riddled with errors. It was obvious that the workers had never tried to play what they wrote, or they would have noticed missing sharps & flats, misspelled lyrics, and other glaring (to me) errors. As I was meticulously documenting the corrections needed, and it ran into many pages, I got a call from the publisher. “Everything OK? Can we go to press?” I assured them that they had a few things to fix on almost every page – they were pissed, because they weren’t used to anyone proofreading their work – but they fixed them all before printing. And without a computer, all corrections had to be done by hand – erasing, white-out, paste-overs, or pen and ink.
This story is another example of how mistakes get into print. Without feedback, who’s to know if anything matches the original?
One more story, if you have the time…I was hired to do a Roseanne Cash P-V chart, I forget which tune, but it had a very nice viola & cello line written by my friend and bass player Emory Gordy that was an integral part of the tune. Now a piano-vocal (3-stave) part doesn’t always have the vocal melody repeated in the right hand, although it certainly is common. In this case, I thought that including both the viola part and the melody would make it unplayable by all but the most virtuoso players – some things just don’t fit on fingers or on keyboards. So I left the melody in the vocal part only. If anyone performed the sheet music with a vocalist, nothing would be left out, but if they played it on the piano only, they wouldn’t hear the melody. It was a compromise, but IMHO, it was the best one.
The publisher woudn’t hear of it, and forced me to rewrite the arrangement in a more conventional manner, ignoring the viola riff and butchering the chart. I pity the sheet music buyer who picked up the chart and expected to be able to reproduce the sound of the hit recording. They would be highly disappointed.
So that’s another way that sheet music can become garbage twixt original and music rack.
My very last comment in this post. Engraving, no matter how it’s done, with computer or by hand, is a relatively expensive part of preparation for printing. Therefore, it is rarely re-done if a song is re-printed or newly integrated into a collection. This explains why, if you pick up a copy of Maple Leaf Rag, first printed in the early 1900s, might look a little weird. It’s probably an optical copy of the original 1900-ish engraving in A-flat. I’ve never come across a re-engraving just to fix a mistake; most publishers don’t seem to care about accuracy a whole lot, and sheet music isn’t that much of a money-maker these days to justify another expense.
If you ever run across a copy of Izitso in sheet music form, or see one of the songs from that album in a collection, play it and compare with the recording. I’d be interested in hearing what you think. At least I’m pretty sure it would be in the right key!
.) I did so many because I could do both the takedown to pencil and the pencil to pen final copy myself; other houses split the job into two specialties and used two people. I always thought this was inefficient, since much of my sketch I carried in my head for just a few minutes. If I had had to write all of that down legibly so someone else could read it, it would have taken longer. Also, I was able to play the final product along with the original sound for proofing purposes; the houses that split the task (the union required it) never fed the final product back to the first person for proofing, and the error possibilies were considerable.