Jack Cooper - Guelph, ON Musician

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