Jack Cooper - Guelph, ON Musician

One of the popular activities among musicians is to gather and swap songs. This will happen either as an organized activity which people explicitly attend to trade and/or listen to songs, or informally at parties where the sharing of music and songs takes place alongside typical party events like mingling, arguing about politics or drunkenly missing the chair when you go to sit down.

I have a small peeve about circles of the informal type. In the Quaker tradition, silence and reflection play a large part in the prayer meeting. A particularly beautiful part of the Quaker meeting is the way in which silence is broken only when an individual feels particularly compelled to speak, comment, read a passage or pray. What is beautiful is that there is nothing ritualistic about this. The Quaker prayer session allows the individual to focus in the moment, and serves to help participants come nearer to God and each other.

Creating and performing music holds the same spiritual meaning to me as prayer. But what is meaningful to me is not the ritualistic aspect of going around the circle, but rather contributing when the spirit moves you, and with total attentiveness to the task of sharing this spirit with others.

My friends, I love the fact that the ritual of music binds you together and adds a great deal of meaning to your lives and community. But please have a little respect for those of who can’t treat music as a ritual any more than the Quakers can treat prayer as a series of ritual readings and songs. Don’t be offended when I don’t want to join the circle. I’m just not wired that way.

This website acts as a hybrid business/personal site so I don’t often know what is appropriate to share or reveal. I think it is important to me to be as authentic as possible with people I meet in either a social or a business context. So I want to write a few journal entries on my background, my roots, what shapes me as a person and as a musician.

First thing I want to share is that I am part of the 20% of Canadians who have experienced a mental illness during my lifetime (that’s 1 in 5 for those of you stumped by percentages). I am part of the 5% ( 1 in 20) of the ‘household population’ (?) affected by anxiety disorders. Numbers don’t convey the deep mistrust and misunderstanding of those who have experienced mental illness. The prevalent attitude by many is that mental illness signifies some kind of moral deficiency or personal shortcoming rather than an illness brought on by genetic and environmental factors. People who are depressed really should develop a better attitude. People with anxiety disorders need to relax, do yoga or some deep breathing. If you were lucky enough to be mentally ill in the seventies, you were subjected to all sorts of wackos trying to ascribe psychological origins for your aberrant personality. Thank god for the nineties and prozac!

My personal belief is that most mental illness stems from a combination of genetics and environment. You may be genetically predisposed to develop mental disorders, but may only develop in certain environments. My father’s side of the family exhibits an array of anxiety disorders. I had no idea that anyone else in my family had similar problems to me until I started receiving treatment in my early thirties. Some of my family has received treatment for their disorders. Some like my father, who likely suffered from anxiety disorders, never sought help or treatment. So genetically, I inherited a tendency to develop mental illness. My family’s move from my hometown in New York to Toronto triggered a set of full-blown anxiety disorders. As a whole, our family was much more vulnerable due to isolation from family and friends we had known for years, and the financial strain of dealing with my dad’s new business. Personally, I left a very stimulating music program in New York that meant everything in the world to me and found nothing comparable in the Toronto school system.

I’m not a pharmaceutical advocate and I am open to all philosophies and approaches to healing and self-improvement, but I am also a pragmatist by nature. So even if you told me that drugs don’t cure mental disorders but only address certain symptoms, I think that that’s a helluva lot better than living in misery for forty or fifty years. Even if it shaves a few years off my life. Out of all the therapeutic approaches, cognitive therapy makes the most sense to me. With depression and anxiety or anxiety-related disorders, it’s your thought processes that are fucked up. Cognitive therapy and its brethren gives those thought processes a name, tags them, sends them into a forest and tries to shoot them. But drugs are evolving as well. Newer drugs are working better and on the whole producing fewer side effects. Side effects like having no sex drive can be relaxing for a bit, particularly if sexual obsessiveness is a symptom, but can be really a drag after a while. After ten years on Prozac I felt like a fat, neutered cat. My current medication has only one noticeable side effect. I get severe brain shocks if I miss more than a day’s medication. Ever eat ice cream real fast and get a ‘brain freeze’? A brain shock is kinda like that except there is no ice cream involved and the brain freezes keep recurring. So I am usually careful not to miss more than a day.

I never did really well with counseling when I was young and looking for treatment. I read too many seventies books with theories about what to do about ‘nervous personalities’. They had all sorts of kooky names like that for mental illness back then. If you want to learn all you need to know about the seventies and the wacky self-help movement, read Tom Wolfe’s essay, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening”. When I finally convinced my family doctor at the time that deep breathing wouldn’t make my life significantly better, I was referred to an honest-to-god psychiatrist. If you don’t work in the medical industry, there’s something you should know about psychiatrists. They perform a specific function, and listening isn’t it. Unless listening falls under the category of making an initial diagnosis. There are really only two flavours of mental illness in the medical profession: The trivial ones, like regular depression and anxiety disorders, and the big tamales like schizophrenia and manic-depression (or whatever they call it these days). I was very grateful to talk to my psychiatrist for a while because he was writing a prescription for something that suddenly made me feel a lot less anti-social and gave me back an appetite for food I hadn’t had for years. But after a while I realized the relationship was one-sided. He was getting bored with me, because I was treatable and starting to get kinda naggy about the side effects. I saw another counselor through work, an affable man who was pleasant to talk with but wasn’t too big on encouraging shaking up the status quo. The next and final counselor I saw was great. He was a real shit-kicker and helped me prepare for some real changes I needed to make in my life. I honestly haven’t felt the need to see another counselor since then.

So I’m working on three projects now. Four, actually, counting a mini project wrapping up. The mini project is a small collection of songs by a London based singer named Gary Boyle. He is a very nice gentleman who I met this past summer at London’s Home County festival. A friend of mine, Andrew Kerth, was playing at the open stage and happened to do a plug for my business at the tail end of one of his songs. Andrew was my first guinea pig- I prepared a half-dozen of Andrew’s songs in leadsheet format as a fortieth birthday present. After Andrew did his plug, Gary approached me and asked about my services. Gary wanted to prepare a small book containing six of his songs to sell alongside his CDs. I agreed to have something ready that he could sell before Christmas. I am going to London to take some photos and interview him briefly to generate some additional content for the book.

The second project is a collection of notated songs and instrumental pieces by Norm Liota. Norm is a classically trained guitarist who plays fingerstyle guitar. I am stretching my capabilities by learning to transcribe his instrumental pieces- one in particular, called ‘Dreamwater’, is extremely challenging and I will be very satisfied when I’ve finally nailed the transcription. I will probably produce both a book as well as individual sheet music that will be sold and distributed over the internet using some very cool interactive digital sheet music technology. More on that later.

The third project is a collection of songs by Katherine Wheatley. Katherine is one of my favourite writers and performers, and has a tremendous catlogue of songs. I’ve started the transcription process, and hope to have a book available by springtime. I would love to have the book finished by the time Katherine appears at the Registry theatre in Kitchener, but we’ll have to see.

The fourth project is an anthology of songs by Eileen McGann. Eileen has a tremendous local following in Kitchener-Waterloo thanks to a series of concerts hosted by Jack Cole and the Old Chestnuts Song Circle. Eileen is brilliant both as a singer-songwriter and interpreter of traditional music. She is also an accomplished visual artist, and her songbook will contain some of her visual art as well. Ken Brown will be helping me with the project (actually, he always helps me- I guess I mean he’ll be helping me more than usual with this one). We are aiming to have the book ready before the arrival of summer.

I actually enjoy working on multiple projects. If I get stuck on one particular project, I can un-stick my brain by switching to another project. Hopefully I’ll have some time throughout all this to pick up my guitar for a purpose other than figuring out chords or guitar parts.

Cheers,
Jack

As I mentioned in a previous entry, I have been using lilypond as my primary tool for transcribing and formatting sheet music.  Lilypond is open source and freeware and runs on Windows, Mac and unix/linux environments.  There is no user interface with lilypond.  You simply type the markup language commands into a file or series of files and then run the commands through the lilypond program.  In Windows in Mac, it is simply a matter of double-clicking the file containing lilypond code (usually containing the file extension “.ly”)

So how does it all work when I am creating a leadsheet for a song?  I’ll use an example most everyone is familiar with- Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna”.  Rather than hum the song for you here, I’ll ask you to hunt down an .mp3 over the internet if you are not familiar with how it goes.  Although there are many, many covers and interpretations of this song, the structure of the song is usually the same.  This is a Verse / Chorus structure.  The original version published in 1848 contains four verses.  The song wouldn’t be politically correct today, but as a coworker pointed out, he remembers seeing blackface routines on television growing up.

Now, there are small details to quibble over.  You may argue that there is an introduction before each verse, and instrumental bit at the end of the song.  I wouldn’t argue with you, but for simplicity sake I am going to transcribe this with no filler bits.

Once I’ve determined the song structure and I am familiar enough with the chords and melody, I will start entering my lilypond information.  I’m not an overly organized person by nature, but I’ve adopted a structure use for transcribing leadsheet or any songs with lyrics in lilypond.  I have a ‘master’ file, which describes the song’s structure, a file containing melody information, a file containing accompanying lyrics, a file containing chord information, a file containing all additional lyrics, and a file containing fret diagram descriptions.  I am going to omit the fret diagrams from this example.

Okay, let’s start with the song structure.  I created a file called ‘Oh Susanna.ly’. Here is an image of that file:

There are a bunch of \include statements that link in the other files containing melody, lyrics and chord information. There is also some information that defines how the musical score will look- what elements will appear as music staffs, above staffs, below staffs, etc. I don’t change much here except the names of the files I am linking in.

The next thing I do is enter the melody information. Here is the contents of the melody file:

Real pretty, huh?
There is a lot of cut-and-paste involved- if a certain melodic line repeats, I just copy and paste that bit. The lines beginning with ‘%’ are comments, and help me remember why I entered what I did. The ‘\break’ command forces lilypond to output a new staff line. The note information consists of letters followed by a symbol and number. This indicates the note, which octave, and the length. There are a couple of commands at the top of this file defining the key, tempo and clef. I am using a \repeat command so that the verse and melody chorus, entered here once, is followed by a repeat sign.

Following the melody is the accompanying lyrics:

With lilypond, syllables are separated by double-dashes surrounded by spaces. The \set stanza prints a verse number or text before the actual lyrics. Slur notes are just attached to one syllable. It is difficult at first figuring out how to properly match lyrics to melody, but after running lilypond a pdf file of output is produced so you can check for errors.

Next, the chords (or as Wendell Ferguson says, “Christ, the Chords”):

Entering the chord information is the easiest part of lilypond if you are using relatively simple chords. Complicated chords are a bit tricky- you have to read through the lilypond manual (available online) to find the right way to print out some chords.

Finally, the additional lyrics. I basically print this out as freestanding text after the musical score:

The \markup command is used for text formatting in a variety of circumstances. It allows text and graphical images to be placed above staffs, within lyrics, or as a separate entity.

To ‘compile’ my code, I double-click on my master file in Windows. A log file is produced showing what was done or not done, and any errors. Both a postscript and pdf file are produced if the code ran successfully. Here is the result of the above code:
oh-susanna

It’s getting late and I’ve undoubtedly made a few errors along the way. More about leadsheets later.

Cheers,
Jack

Baseball season is almost over!

I’m about to breathe a huge sigh of relief- baseball season is almost finished.  I’m not a sports junkie in general- I have zero to little interest in professional hockey or football, although I do enjoy following basketball from time to time.  I was a horrible athlete growing up.  I was actually cut from Little League tryouts.  The only team sport I approached mediocrity in was basketball.  The only athletic activities I ever really enjoyed have been jogging and swimming.  I suppose if I applied myself I could have been a passable medium-distance runner.

Yet I’ve been following baseball all of my life.  There are horrendously wicked web sites out there, like baseball-reference.com that feed my addiction.  I’ve been without television for long periods of time yet still need to follow the details of each team.  It is a huge time-sucker- I could be writing new songs, going out to more live entertainment, watching local council meetings at city hall.  I could be more productive!  I promise myself it will all be over by November.  My mind will be free of wondering who has made the most significant progress towards the hall of fame, which team has been flying under the radar and will surprise everyone next year.

Like a lot of number nerds of my generation, I was heavily influenced by Bill James.  I was introduced to James’ annual Baseball Abstracts by an article written for MathNews by Dave Till in 1983. Mathnews, for those of you dying to know, was the official newspaper of the Faculty of Math and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.  James is legendary not only for influencing a generation of writers and baseball executives, but also because the Boston Red Sox won their first World Series in over ninety years the year after hiring James as special consultant.  And then they won another one three years later.

Bill James has influenced the way I think about business.  Let me explain.  His first publications of the Baseball Abstract were home made, crudely assembled collections of various studies about baseball.  Over the first few years, James started writing longer essays and included some statistics that were generally ignored by mainstream publications.  His audience started small, and grew by word of mouth and positive review over the next few years.  Some of his fans were influential folk in baseball and media, and one fan in particular landed him a book deal with Ballantine Books.  James’ book was published under Ballantine from 1982 through 1988- his books were self-published from 1977 through 1981.  None of this is what influenced me.

In closing comments of his last Baseball Abstract, James recounts the origin and evolution of the Abstracts.  His original motivation was to discuss issues that were conspicuously absent in most articles about baseball.  James was interested in exploring questions- most articles handed you conclusions, ignoring the question or conflicting evidence altogether.  An example James cites is the impact that individual catchers have on stolen base totals.  The typical article will tell who is good and who isn’t.  James would approach this by posing the question, hypothesizing about what the evidence would look like if this were true, and then presenting the evidence.  A lot of James’ articles were rejected by mainstream publications because, or so he was told, there was no interest in exploring questions- people were only interested in seeing the results.

In other words, there was no mainstream audience that had an interest in some of the geekier aspects of baseball analysis.  But James’ firm conviction was that there may not have been a mainstream audience, but there was an audience that was interested in this kind of stuff.    He was proven right, and this was one of his greatest satisfactions.  A host of imitators cropped up, imitating the form but not the unique style that made his work compelling reading.

I’ve kept this blueprint in the back of my mind with my music publication business.  One of the things I’ve always been interested in is the geeky details about songs and music and production.  There are a lot of articles about songwriting, and a lot of interviews where details about what influenced a particular song or writer are discussed.  But I am interested in other details, some technical and some not, that informs a writer.  And I am trying hard to incorporate these details into the songbook and sheet music publications that I am producing.

There may not be a mass audience for this kind of thing- a good number of folks just want to hear the music or learn biographical details about an artist.  But I am hypothesizing that there is an audience for this kind of thing.  People who want to know how and why certain sounds were created, what tunings are used and why, what other technical details inform the writing of a song.

Cheers,

Jack

In order to create a leadsheet for a musician, I require two things– a recording of the song and a lyric sheet.  If I am including fret diagrams, I sometimes need to get more information from the musician about the tuning used and some specific chord shapes.  A fret diagram is a fancy picture found in sheet music which shows where the fingers are placed on the guitar fretboard to create chords.

The first thing I need to determine is the structure of the song.  Are there repeating sections that can be omitted in the lead sheet?  Are there significant structural variations between verses of the the song?   Knowing the structure will allow me to figure out how much of the melody needs to be written out.  A simple structure of Verse / Chorus / Verse / Chorus / Verse / Chorus can be transcribed as a single verse and chorus, with the additional lyrics placed below.  Many songs are more complicated than that, but there are usually some repeating elements that will allow the transcription to be shortened.

I omitted something in the first paragraph.  The other tool I rely on to transcribe a song is a musical notation package.  The two most popular commercial notation packages are Finale and Sibelius.  Actually, both Finale and Sibelius offer many versions of their software.  The full fledged versions, which can do everything, are over $500.  There are cheaper versions, which can do basic leadsheets fine but lack some of the fine-tuning capabilities of the flagship products.  There are several other commercial notation packages.  Some are cheap, some aren’t.  Most are WYSIWYG.  In non-geek terms, that means software where you are able to see instant results when you enter note, chord and lyric information into the editor.

Although I own the full-fledged version of Finale, I don’t use that or any of the other commerical products.  I use an open source freeware package called lilypond.  Lilypond is not WYSIWYG- it is a markup language.  For those of you not old enough to remember when Bill Gates wasn’t a monopoly, a markup language is a series of text instructions you enter into a file to describe the music output you want to create.  Yeah, I know, it sounds ugly.  But there are huge advantages to this approach, especially when creating a number of leadsheets or creating a songbook based on leadsheets where you want the same look and feel to each song.  I have a system in place when creating leadsheets where I have separate files for melody, lyrics, chords, fret diagrams, and additional lyrics, as well as a main file pulling all the elements together.  This modular approach allows me to organize and edit things really well, and it also means that when the dough starts rolling in and I am able to hire someone to help with the transcriptions, they will be able to work on a specific module (like entering the melody) without getting lost in all the other language commands that go into create the music output.

And although the markup language is entered into a text editor (and there are many text editors that can really facilitate the process of entering code), pdf output is always generated when running the code.

I suppose an example would suffice here, but I don’t have the time right now.  For the next installment I will walk you through an example creating a leadsheet of a public domain song (or a national anthem, or something like that.)   But the entire process will generally take me 1 -2 hours.  A song consisting of five repeating verses would probably be under an hour.  ”Suite:Judy Blue Eyes” might top 2 hours.  In fact, anything with “Suite” in the title automatically invokes a penalty.

The actual sequence I go through is transcribe the melody first, add lyrics next, then chords.  Along with the melody are any musical repeats, endings, codas, etc.

I’m randomly scattering thoughts here- another nice things about lilypond is its default output looks really good. There is a testimonial from a former finale user on the lilypond website, comparing the process of transcribing and formatting classical music using the two pieces of software.  What this user found is that in addition to the note entry process being faster in lilypond, he had to spend far less tine making formatting tweaks to the lilypond output, because the default formatting in lilypond was that much better.

Anyway, next up I will walk you through the process with a simple, well-known song.

Cheers,

Jack

I’ve been inspired recently by a friend in Kitchener named G.K. Eckert who recently created a blog site.  G.K., like many artists and teachers I know, knows the secret of success isn’t how talented or lucky or anything else you are, but how persistent you are and how receptive you are to new or existing information.  G.K. also realizes the value in disclosing what you know, without any preconceptions of how you will be received.

In that spirit, here goes:

I run a business called BerLen music.  One of the basic services I provide is the transcription of original songs into a a type of sheet music known as a Lead Sheet.  The lead sheet provides all the basic information about the song- the melody transcribed into standard music notation, the lyrics, the key, the chord symbols, and any additional instructions about the song (pauses, changes in tempo, volume, places where solos happen, etc.)   There are a couple of different ways to format a lead sheet.  At one extreme, a lead sheet might show the entire melody of the song transcribed in full.  At the other extreme, only a single verse or a verse with chorus might be transcribed with lyrics underneath, followed by the inclusion of additional lyrics.  The format will depend on the complexity of the song structure.

Most musicians have developed the ability to learn music really well by ear.  Repeated listening to a recorded piece of music will often be sufficient for many musicians to learn the melody (and in many cases the chords) of a song.  Plus a lot of musicians are entirely self-taught and may never have developed the ability to read music fluently.  For these reasons, many musicians will often rely on lyric sheet or lyric sheet with chords for learning to play a song by someone else (assuming they have access to a recording of the song).

But a properly formatted lead sheet will ensure that any musician who can read music will be able to learn a song accurately and quickly.  Even without access to a recording of the original song.  There are many scenarios where this can be extremely useful, for example:

• You are a songwriter but not necessarily an accomplished performer, and you would like to have another musician cover your song.  There does not exist a recording that can properly convey the melody and structure of your song.
• You are a performing songwriter and are adding new band members for live gigs.  You may have a proper recording but have made some tweaks along the way and want to convey the accurate version of the song’s structure.
• You are about to start a recording project and have recruited other musicians to play with you.  You want them to quickly become familiar with the song structure and chord changes.
• You want to add other singers to your song- some of the singers have good ears, some don’t but can read music passably.
• Oh yeah, and one more thing: you want something that is real easy to read and follow.

In the next segment, I will describe how I go about creating a lead sheet and talk about the tools I currently use. Generally, I can create a lead sheet from a recording and lyric sheet in 1-2 hours.  My rates are reasonable and I will consider giving discounts for a job consisting of multiple songs.

Oh, and here is G.K.’s blog site.

Cheers,
Jack

Eaglewood Folk Festival is a little festival run in Pefferlaw, Ontario (on the south side of Lake Simcoe).  Eaglewood primarily features songwriters, although there are a few additional types of acts appearing each year.  This is the first time I’ve attended Eaglewood in about five years.  I had a couple of different reasons for going. [...]

I received an email from an old friend today whom I served with on committee for Kitchener-Waterloo’s Black Walnut folk club (quick answer Dan- I am actively working on it..)
The Black Walnut folk club is one of those rare initiatives that has made it into its second decade. I believe it has lasted fifteen [...]

I’ve decided to revamp my jack-cooper.com web site.  I debated whether or not to keep this site active, as I haven’t performed regularly for a few years and haven’t recorded anything for about eight years.  Yet I thought there might still be some worth in trying to document my past and present activities as an individual [...]