SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  1/17/06; 4:40:36 PM Topic:  workscore? Msg#:  4674 (in response to 4673) Prev/Next:  4673/4675 Reads:  856

Charlie,

  I'm glad you asked about Workscores. Just so everyone knows, every member of the SongTrellis site has their own Workscore, a musical score that they can write music into. If you've never done anything with it, it's empty, and just shows a tiny musical staff with no notes recorded on it. You need to be logged in to see your Workscore.

Since SongTrellis has The Changes, a section of the site that currently presents the chord progresions for 1170 tunes, I thought it would be cool to give users a way of creating chord sequences and scores for themselves like those that are presented on the site.

As the webmaster, I've prepared more than 98% of the submissions in The Changes. Those were done using the SongTrellis Editor For Macintosh, a software application I've written. That app has been in perpetual beta test mode as I slowly improved its stability and feature set to the point where I think I could support a large number of folks using it.

I think the editor is nearly ready for use by Macintosh users, and hope to start a public beta test before the end of the month. It being a Mac application, the fact that it exists does little direct good for Windows, Linux or Unix users. Indirectly it has made the production of scores for SongTrellis into pretty easy task, which does benefit those users  when they visit the SongTrellis site. 

This summer I figured out how to create a special version of the SongTrellis Editor that can run on a Macintosh server that performs operations requested by the SongTrellis website server, which runs on a Windows box. This allowed me to write new code for the website that provides the Excerpt Service, the Chord Grid, and creation and editing of Workscores.

With these new website pages available, any user of the SongTrellis website can use some of the coolest features that are in the Macintosh SongTrellis Editor to create music using their web browser, no matter what their home operating system is.

One feature of the Editor that I think is highly valuable, is its ability to revoice chord progressions whenever a user asks that a score be played. Because the editor has rules built into it that know how to arrange the notes of each chord in a sequence of chords so that each chord sounds like it fits with what sounds before it, it's possible to enter the new chords in a progression by specifying only their root note, chord type and duration.

Chord entry in existing music apps is exceptionally tedious, because the person who's voicing a chord sequence has to memorize the formulas for a large number of chords, and has to continually apply a set of rules to decide which notes in adjacent chords should be placed close to another to make the progression play smoothly.

It's a physically tedious process because each chord is a stack of several notes that are all played at once, and the person who is arranging the chord has to specify individually the position on the musical staff for each note in every chord in a score. The number of notes in chords varies from 3 notes up to as many as 6 or 7 notes.  

If your music editor can do a decent job of assigning and arranging the notes in a progression, then the only information needed to write down a progression is just the info that's provided in a progression's list of chord symbols, the chord root pitch and the chord type,  plus the duration of the chords in the progression.

Folks who are practicing to improvise, like most jazz and rock and roll performers, do not expect the chords played as their accompaniment to be played in any fixed arrangement as they make up their solos. They expect the members of the rhythm sections of their bands (pianist or guitarists, bass, and drummer) to continuously vary their chord and rhythm accompaniment and that they will have to accomodate what the rhythm section invents during a performance of a tune. Autovoicing simulates what a working band will invent  for its soloist.  

When a composer invents a new chord progression for a new piece of music, they can first experiment with the general sound of a chord before deciding on the most effective way to voice that chord. A music editor that can autovoice a chord sequence, can let the composer try out many harmonic alternatives before he has to commit to a particular chord arrangement.

 The Workscore Chord Entry page  is of most value if you possess sheet music that displays the chord symbols used in the chord accompaniment of a piece. The page allows you to type a chord progrssion from written sheet music into your Workscore and listen to it very quickly.  The automatically generated chord voicing provided by the SongTrellis Editor For Macintosh makes this possible.

The left side of the Workscore Chord Entry page displays controls which allow you to specify the chord root, chord type and duration of a chord that you would like to add to tour workscore. Whenever you press the "Send Chord To >>" in the left panel of the page, a chord of the currently specified root, type and duration is added to the Workscore which is displayed in the page's right panel.

The Chord Entry By Grid page on the SongTrellis site is most useful when you are trying to invent new harmony for a new musical composition or when you are trying to understand what the musical effect is of moving from one kind of chord to another.

On this page, the chord entry controls that are provided by the left panel of a Workscore Chord Entry are replaced by a Chord Grid, which allows one to listen to any of 44 unique  types of chords built on any of the 12 possible chord roots extremely rapidly. The grid rows are labelled on the left with the name of a chord type followed by 12 squares which contain the names of the 12 possible chord roots: C, Db, D, Eb, E, F, Gb, G, Ab, A, Bb, and B. If you pressed the Ab square in the row labelled with the chord symbol mi7, an Abmi7 chord would sound a moment later with the middle panel of the page displaying the chord voicing played for that particular Abmi7. Pressing the D square if the grid on the row labelled "MA7", would cause a DMA7 to play in an instant in your web browser.

The idea here is that you would listen to whatever chords are currently in your workscore and audition new chords quickly by touching grid squares to find one that is a worthy addition to your score. Once you've located a new chord that extends your progression, you copy it from the middle audition panel  by pressing the "Send Chord To>>" button which copies the auditioned chord into the Workscore, which is displayed in the page's right panel.

The Workscore Composer page provides a toolbox that can help you invent an original melody that fits a chord progression that you entered into your Workscore by using Workscore Chord Entry or Chord Entry By Grid. Your Workscore chord progression could also be an excerpt that you copied into your Workscore using the "Add Excerpt Chords" button from an Excerpt Service window.

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