Wait!! i think I got it:
The engravers did a “clean” master from the draft sent by the arranger…, correct??
This puts another question: the engravers had toEbe skilled in music notation to do the work…
Best!! 
Crisanto
You have no way of knowing what the arranger had to work with. The 7.5ips tapes you mention are consumer releases. The arranger may or may not have used those.
The arranger may have received a copy of the song in any number of formats, possibly direct from the recording studio. It might have even been a different mix or a different take. The arranger may never have heard the final recording at all, but worked from a cruder demo. The artist might have sat down in front of him with a badly tuned guitar and played the song live.
Every one of these possibilities has a chance for numerous errors. The possibility of the published, printed music exactly matching the commercial recording is slim.
No, no. The arranger’s copy is a crude pencil draft. You would hope it is musically accurate, but it’s often hard to read! The engraver’s duty is to turn that into something that can be printed. The engraver’s job is not musical interpretation, just to make it look pretty.
The engraver’s output is camera ready to go to the printer. The printer (or platemaker) does the photography.
Yes. An arranger doesn’t much care how long the stems are, which direction, where the beams go, the spacing of symbols, the slant of the beams, the shape of the notes. The engraver cares a lot.
Modern-day computer copying programs handle all of these decisions, and some of them actually do it traditionally. Others, not so much. It depends on who programmed it, and whether they had engraver knowledge or even cared about such details.
Plain and clear… Thank you very much!!
Excellent… Thank you!!
Why I’m interested in ‘And I Love Her’??
I’m Professor of History of Music and Musicology here, in Spain.
In November 2008 I started a research about the Spanish guitars used by The Beatles. I researched Ramírez archives in Madrid, where I could unearth some interesting facts about Harrison Ramírez guitar (=the one used on AILH and some other Beatle Songs), and I gave a conference about that at Ramírez shop in Madrid on 9 May 2009.
By Summer 2009, Amalia Ramírez, the owner of Ramírez workshop in Madrid, wrote to me asking for a brief text about George Harrison Ramírez guitar, based of my findings given at the conference at her shop a few months earlier, and telling that Harmonix (=tne company who has developed The Beatles Rock Band game) had contacted her to include the guitar at the game. Shortly after that, I could read an abreviated form of my text at The Beatles Rock Band website, under the Partners heading for the José Ramírez section.
As I’m again prepairing an article about this guitar, I’m currently working on the guitar reception, and the publishing story of AILH is a very interesting part of this reception.
Mr. Musicat: I would like to cite you in the list of acknowledgments of my article (=I still don’t know when will it be published, as there are still some facts regarding the guitar not solved). Could I send to you a PM??
Best!!
Crisanto
Yeah, but those guys have a roadie to hand them the specially-tuned guitar for the one song they’re going to play like that, and then hand back their regularly-tuned guitar for the next song. In scenarios like mine, it would require retuning, on stage, between songs.
The real problem, for me, was that the piano player wasn’t even willing to try to play the song in E. She just took one look and declared “E-flat!”
Bad, bad, piano player!
It’s interesting, because I grew up in a Catholic tradition, and I don’t remember music being particular flat-key heavy except for a few more modern hymns. In your tradition, what is the reason for all the flats? Were horns particularly common in church music or something else?
I honestly couldn’t say. It could be that the older hymns were written when only more affluent people, or institutions like churches and universities, could afford keyboard instruments like pianos and organs, and in church settings those instruments were played by highly-trained musicians. And so these players were easily capable of playing in any key. You also had one big, central church in a city that everybody attended, resulting in better chances of finding a highly-skilled player.
In more modern times, when the average person can often afford a piano, and towns are filled with small congregations, you’re looking at a much wider range of skill levels and often having to go with “whoever is willing and able to do it” when looking for a pianist/organist. So there may have been a tendency at that point to write in keys that the “average” pianist was comfortable playing in.
I’m just speculating, though.
Now at my regular church (the E -> Eb incident took place at a different church I played at briefly), we rarely see sheet music unless we’re learning a new song. Most of the time we’re playing from lyric sheets with the chords written in, and the key can change from one time to the next, depending on how the leader has planned things out (like putting a sequence of songs all in the same key to make them flow together better), and we just play in whatever key has been chosen.
I can say, though, that even with just a lyric + chord sheet, and regardless of key, I can usually tell at a glance whether the song was composed by a guitarist or a pianist. Piano-centric songs change chords way too often 
— sometimes to the point of having a new chord for nearly every syllable. Guitar-centric songs tend to stick with chord changes every 2 to 4 bars.
Cool thread, guys.
I remember a few years back, I wrote a country music paper on request for a pop musicology journal (never got accepted, harumph), and was working with some old Ray Price tunes. Apparently, the lead sheets I have got the rhythm and melody just evvver so slightly wrong, so as to avoid paying royalties. At least, this is how one of my professors described it to me. Something so blatantly wrong in a song that was basically twelve bar blues, that anyone could have spotted it and fixed it on the fly.
I am a current Catholic church organist/singer/accompanist, and I can tell you that there’s enough things in sharp keys and flat keys that I don’t know where this theory is coming from. Generally, I wouldn’t get anything past Eb Major/c minor, or A Major/f# minor, which I think is just a general rule about bogging down the performer.
If you wanna go OLD school, there was only one key signature: no sharps and flats. IIRC my mensural notation classes, different modes were notated by the use of “Soft” Bs and “Hard” Bs, with the hard b eventually becoming styalized as a both a number sign and that natural symbol, and no longer only being used for Bs (obviously). And of course, since there was no such thing as “Fixed Do,” or A=440Hz, there was no good reason to have B-flat minor or E major, even adjusted for the modality of the time.
My (favorite) source, if I still had it handy: The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900–1600 (1942), by Willi Apel.
I would agree, except a) I’m a really bad, bad piano player, lol…and b)Sometimes it has to do with the sopranos. That extra semi-tone could make or break a piece, regardless of their ability to read it. I’d give the pianist the benefit of the doubt on this one!
I agree. I still use it for my classes…
Best!! 
Crisanto
Here’s an entry in [Wikipedia,](The use of a one-flat signature developed in the Medieval period, but signatures with more than one flat did not appear until the 16th century, and signatures with sharps not until the mid-17th century.) which relates to what I was saying in post #67:
I’m not strong on my music history, but it looks like flat sigs were more common before sharps, and since the church was the driving force behind Medieval music, that would explain the tendency towards flat sig hymns.
Fascinating thread, despite the fact my grasp of music theory is very shaky.
See this small survey of Beatles songs published by Northern Songs:
Song Original Key Sheet Music Key
Love Me Do C Ab
Please Please Me E G
P. S. I Love You D C
All My Loving E Eb
I Call Your Name E C
I Saw Her Standing There E Bb
I Want To Hold Your Hand G C
It can’t be a “reel_speed” question. It has to have another reason to choose those keys…
Crisanto
Yup. Since everything was moveable “do” anyhow, all you really needed to for the longest time was show if you had a “hard” or “soft” B sound!
I borrowed mine from a girl that took Medieval notation the year before me, and she finally made me give it back. AFAIK, it’s long since out of print, and the last time I checked Abebooks.com, it was FAR too expensive to get just for shelf dressing. 
Save the three songs transcribed in C, we have three songs with keys on the flats side vs. one with a sharp.
What do you think??
Crisanto
Your list is interesting, but I don’t see a pattern here. Certainly it’s not a reel speed issue (that would explain only a 1/2 step difference). I wonder if each song was handled at a different time by a different arranger. Yes, I know they are all from the same era and publisher, but it’s typical that all songs from the same album were recorded in different places and at different times.
In short, there may not be a single, good reason why the keys are so different.
“Love Me Do” is in G, not C. Still, I’m not sure why you’d write it in Ab major vs G major.
That’s what I was wondering. Unless you use a capo, Ab is an awful key for guitar. These aren’t PV are they?
Good undead thread. No keyboardist worth his or her salt uses the transpose (unless playing behind a chick singer who’s unusually demanding). I’ve always been used to the flat keys, and when a guitar player calls a tune in C#, I think Db – interestingly, it seems a lot of gospel/church players I’ve run across tend to call the keys by the sharps than the enharmonic flats. Don’t have a clue why. But it’s something worth talking about.
I don’t know that Ab is so terrible on guitar – I know at least one full-time pro who’d rather play in Bb than in F, and this was a cat in my regular Hammond trio, where, as you know, F is a pretty common key on organ, because of the geometry of the keyboard. Nobody has ever even bitched at me at playing in Eb, which is a very standard key for keyboards and the original key of a whole lot of standards. No, they didn’t tune down, but you’d think that would be a bitch playing all high on the neck and shit.