New discovery: LilyPond
Category music
Thanks to Ned Batchelder, I've discovered a fun new toy: LilyPond. It's a music notation utility that reads ASCII files and creates sheet music (saved as a PDF) that uses the same formatting style as hand-engraved sheet music. The result is music that is more intuitive for a performer to read than the output generated by most sheet music programs, such as Finale, easing the learning and performance process.
Although I found their tutorial a bit difficult to navigate, it only took a few minutes of tinkering with some of the downloadable templates to get accustomed to the syntax. And once I did, I found that its similarity to various scripting languages made it far more rapid for me (being a programmer) to notate music than it would be to create the same output with Finale. So I customized their SATB template to produce a barbershop template, and as an example of the output it produces, I've posted a ZIP that contains that template, as well as a PDF of a tag I co-arranged with Jim Richards in 2004 and the corresponding notation source file.
Funny story, actually. Every year the Barbershop Harmony Society (formerly known as SPEBSQSA) hosts a week-long convention called Harmony University, where members of the society, music educators, and various other folks all get together and attend classes designed to enhance one's understanding and enjoyment of the craft. When I attended in '04, I took the beginner-level arrangers' course, and spent an evening experimenting with what I'd been learning by writing a "tag". The tag of a song - which is not peculiar to the barbershop style, but definitely characteristic of it - is the very end of it; in many cases, the last few words and/or notes repeated in a more climactic fashion. Barbershoppers are very fond of tags, because they are typically the "juiciest" portion of a song, both dynamically and harmonically. Since they're usually just a measure or two long, it's relatively easy to learn a tag in a short period of time, even without sheet music. In fact, many barbershoppers will learn all four parts of their favorite tags so that, whenever they get together with other barbershoppers, they can grab three others at random, teach one part to each, and in a matter of a couple minutes be ringing some chords. It's addictive, and it's not uncommon to find a pick-up quartet hanging out for hours after a chapter meeting or show just singing tags. There are even what I would call "hypothetical" tags: an ending to a song that doesn't even exist, arranged as though that's how the song would end if it did exist, often just as an experiment in harmonization.
Anyway, I chose to write a tag to James Taylor's song "Gone to Carolina in My Mind", since (to my knowledge) no one ever had, and it's been one of my favorite songs for as long as I can remember. Which is funny in retrospect, since I never thought I'd move to either of the Carolinas, and in the last year I've lived in both. I thought the tag turned out all right, but the next morning I handed a print-out to Jim Richards, a skilled arranger and the instructor of what turned out to be my favorite class that week: Physics of Barbershop Sound. I told him I knew he was busy that week, but if he had some time, I'd appreciate his feedback on what I'd come up with. To my surprise, he showed up the next day with a revised version: the core of what I'd written was still intact, but he'd "re-engineered" it somewhat to maximize its ringability. We taught it to the rest of the class, and it was a big hit.
On the last day of that class, Power Play - at the time, the reigning International champion quartet - showed up. They were in town to do a show, and Jim had asked them to visit the class to help him demonstrate a few principles of the physics of sound, primarily the impact that genetics has on vocal production (all four members of Power Play are from the same family). At one point, Jim excused himself to go locate a piece of equipment he'd thought he had in the classroom but couldn't find, telling the quartet to keep us occupied... "sing 'em a song or something". Ironically, they couldn't think of anything they wanted to sing without duplicating what they'd be performing later anyway, so on a whim I handed them a copy of my tag. I'd been teaching it to people at random for a few days and this was the first time a quartet nailed it on the first attempt. I couldn't help chuckling when the bass turned to the others and said, "okay, let's try it again and get it right this time". He must have heard something I didn't, because, sure enough, they sang it again and it sounded even better. The lead turned to me and said, "That's a really cool tag. Where'd you find it?" Trying (rather unsuccessfully, I suspect) to appear nonchalant, I replied, "Oh... Jim and I wrote that." Which is sort of the barbershop equivalent of saying, "Oh... ya know, that's just some song I wrote with Sting."
Thanks to Ned Batchelder, I've discovered a fun new toy: LilyPond. It's a music notation utility that reads ASCII files and creates sheet music (saved as a PDF) that uses the same formatting style as hand-engraved sheet music. The result is music that is more intuitive for a performer to read than the output generated by most sheet music programs, such as Finale, easing the learning and performance process.
Although I found their tutorial a bit difficult to navigate, it only took a few minutes of tinkering with some of the downloadable templates to get accustomed to the syntax. And once I did, I found that its similarity to various scripting languages made it far more rapid for me (being a programmer) to notate music than it would be to create the same output with Finale. So I customized their SATB template to produce a barbershop template, and as an example of the output it produces, I've posted a ZIP that contains that template, as well as a PDF of a tag I co-arranged with Jim Richards in 2004 and the corresponding notation source file.
Funny story, actually. Every year the Barbershop Harmony Society (formerly known as SPEBSQSA) hosts a week-long convention called Harmony University, where members of the society, music educators, and various other folks all get together and attend classes designed to enhance one's understanding and enjoyment of the craft. When I attended in '04, I took the beginner-level arrangers' course, and spent an evening experimenting with what I'd been learning by writing a "tag". The tag of a song - which is not peculiar to the barbershop style, but definitely characteristic of it - is the very end of it; in many cases, the last few words and/or notes repeated in a more climactic fashion. Barbershoppers are very fond of tags, because they are typically the "juiciest" portion of a song, both dynamically and harmonically. Since they're usually just a measure or two long, it's relatively easy to learn a tag in a short period of time, even without sheet music. In fact, many barbershoppers will learn all four parts of their favorite tags so that, whenever they get together with other barbershoppers, they can grab three others at random, teach one part to each, and in a matter of a couple minutes be ringing some chords. It's addictive, and it's not uncommon to find a pick-up quartet hanging out for hours after a chapter meeting or show just singing tags. There are even what I would call "hypothetical" tags: an ending to a song that doesn't even exist, arranged as though that's how the song would end if it did exist, often just as an experiment in harmonization.
Anyway, I chose to write a tag to James Taylor's song "Gone to Carolina in My Mind", since (to my knowledge) no one ever had, and it's been one of my favorite songs for as long as I can remember. Which is funny in retrospect, since I never thought I'd move to either of the Carolinas, and in the last year I've lived in both. I thought the tag turned out all right, but the next morning I handed a print-out to Jim Richards, a skilled arranger and the instructor of what turned out to be my favorite class that week: Physics of Barbershop Sound. I told him I knew he was busy that week, but if he had some time, I'd appreciate his feedback on what I'd come up with. To my surprise, he showed up the next day with a revised version: the core of what I'd written was still intact, but he'd "re-engineered" it somewhat to maximize its ringability. We taught it to the rest of the class, and it was a big hit.
On the last day of that class, Power Play - at the time, the reigning International champion quartet - showed up. They were in town to do a show, and Jim had asked them to visit the class to help him demonstrate a few principles of the physics of sound, primarily the impact that genetics has on vocal production (all four members of Power Play are from the same family). At one point, Jim excused himself to go locate a piece of equipment he'd thought he had in the classroom but couldn't find, telling the quartet to keep us occupied... "sing 'em a song or something". Ironically, they couldn't think of anything they wanted to sing without duplicating what they'd be performing later anyway, so on a whim I handed them a copy of my tag. I'd been teaching it to people at random for a few days and this was the first time a quartet nailed it on the first attempt. I couldn't help chuckling when the bass turned to the others and said, "okay, let's try it again and get it right this time". He must have heard something I didn't, because, sure enough, they sang it again and it sounded even better. The lead turned to me and said, "That's a really cool tag. Where'd you find it?" Trying (rather unsuccessfully, I suspect) to appear nonchalant, I replied, "Oh... Jim and I wrote that." Which is sort of the barbershop equivalent of saying, "Oh... ya know, that's just some song I wrote with Sting."
