|
SongTrellis |
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||
|
SongTrellis Site How-Tos How To Contact David Luebbert, your SongTrellis webmaster. Please email your comments to davidlu@songtrellis.com. David's U.S. mail address is: David Luebbert P.O. Box 7103 Bellevue, WA 98008 USA His cell phone number in the US is 206-617-7663. How does Luebbert handle posts which improperly infringe on copyrights? The instant Luebbert detects that someone has posted music that extensively quotes the melody of an unlicensed copyrighted work or quotes the features of an arrangement of an unlicensed copyrighted work, he deletes it from the site. The statuatory fine for publishing a copyrighted work without license is $150,000. SongTrellis is only licensed to present a musical composition when the composer of the work has personally posted it to the site or if it is so old that it is in the public domain. Composers who submit their own compositions and chord progression arrangements to SongTrellis give SongTrellis a license to present their work on the site. Chord progression scores that do not copy rhythmic motifs or specific sequences of chord voicings from an existing copyrighted arrangement do not infringe the copyright of the composer that invented the chord progression and may be posted to Song Discussions or the Harmony Project section of the site. Compositions that include melody that were written by composers who are represented by ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or the Harry Fox Agency (ie, works under copyright protetction) may not be presented on SongTrellis unless the webmaster receives a verified communication from the composer certifying that SongTrellis may present the work. If a work has been composed by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, Bela Bartok, Arvo Paart, James Brown, Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Hillary Duff, or thousands of other copyright protected composers, only arrangements of the chord progressions from their music may be posted on SongTrellis. A composition, performance or arrangement that includes a substantial portion of the melody from one of their works infringes their copyright and may not be posted. If you notice a work on the site that you believe infringes on a non licensed work, contact Dave Luebbert immediately so that he can remove the offending piece. If you post work that infinges on the copyright of another composer, you may become party to a lawsuit for plagiarism. How To Post A new Message In the Song Discussions Follow the Song Discussions link which appears in the link bar at the top of most SongTrellis pages. Below the list of messages that were posted last on SongTrellis, click on the link titled "Create a new topic". A form will be presented to you with typein fields labelled "Title" and "Text". Type the title for your posting in the Title field and the text of your message in the Text area. When your message is complete, press the "Post New Message" button at the bottom of the form. Within a minute after you press the "Post New Message" button, the SongTrellis server should display for you the text of your message. The response will not necessarily be immediate because the server has to save a copy of the site's internal data structures to ensure that your message is permanently recorded. Don't press "Post New Message" a second time until at least a minute has elapsed. If you discover that you wish to revise your message after you have posted it, you will see that there is a Edit This Page button on the pages that you have submitted to SongTrellis. If you press that, an edit page will be launched that displays your message text in an edit field labelled "Text". Make your edit with that field. When you are done, press the "Submit" button at the bottom of the page. Within a minute or so, the server will display for you the changed message that you submitted. How To Download A MIDI Sequence From The Changes section of the SongTrellis site Select a tune from those that are listed on The Changes page and follow its link. When that tune's page loads you will see that it has a link entitled "Download/view this sound (in MIDI format)". When you click on this link, your browser will take it's default action for clicking on a MIDI link. By default, this will most likely cause a media player (Windows Media Player, QuickTime, Real Player) to launch which will play the tune chord progression in MIDI format. If you right click on that link with your mouse pointer when you run on a Windows web browser or Control-click from a Macintosh web browser, you will find that a menu popups at the location of the mouse pointer. On that menu, a command to "Save Target As" or "Save Link As" will be displayed. If you select that command, a Save dialog will be brought up which will allow you to select the location in your computer's file system where you wish the downloaded sequence to be stored. If you wish, you can change your browser's default action to launch an application which can display the MIDI sequence as a musical score. If you are running on Windows, MIDI Notate does a wonderful job of interpreting MIDI sequences as scores. If you run your web browser on Macintoshes, the SongTrellis Music Editor reads almost all of the postings in The Changes and The Rhythms, and those MIDI files posted in Our Composers which were created by that program. If a tune's page includes a link to the "SongTrellis Excerpt Service", the Editor can display a score for the downloaded sequence. As we continue to beta test the editor we expect it to be able to read nearly all MIDI sequences which it encounters. How To Download the printable chord progression score From The Changes section of the SongTrellis site Select a tune from those that are listed on The Changes page and follow its link. When that tune's page loads you will nearly always find that the page includes links titled "Printable GIF image" or "Printable JPEG image". When you press those links, you will see yor browser will launch a page that displays a page from that arrangements score. If you right click (Windows) or control-click (Mac) on the score image you will find that a menu popups at the location of the mouse pointer. On that menu, a command to "Save Target As" or "Save Link As" will be displayed. If you select that command, a Save dialog will be brought up which will allow you to select the location in your computer's file system where you wish the downloaded score page to be stored. How To Submit a new score in MIDI format to Song Discussions. Your score will immediately be listed in the Our Composers section of SongTrellis once it has been submitted Follow the Song Discussions link which appears in the link bar at the top of most SongTrellis pages. Below the list of messages that were posted last on SongTrellis, click on the link titled "Create a new sound". A "Submit a new sound" form will launch. Type the title of your composition in the field labelled "Title". Press the Browse button to locate the composition that you would like to submit to SongTrellis on your computers file system. When you have selected it, the path name of the composition will appear in the field labelled "Choose A MIDI, WAV, AU or AIFF" file. SongTrellis promises that it will carry non-copyright infringing MIDI format submissions for as long as the site exists. Submissions made in other formats are thousands of times larger than MIDI sequences and may be deleted from the site at any time by the webmaster at his discretion. The server assumes that you are the most likely composer of the work that you are submitting and fills in the name you gave us when you registered with the site and displays that name in the Composer field of the form. If you are not the composer of your submission, you should type that person's name in the Composer field. No matter who the composer is, you will be listed as the person who submitted the sequence when it is recorded on SongTrellis. Fill in the text of the Copyright Notice for the piece, if it is a copyrighted work. If you have composed it, and do not wish to assert copyright for it, clear the Copyright Notice. In the edit field titled "Text", you may type any explanatory text that you think might be interesting to people who listen to your composition. When you are done filling in the form fields, press the "Post New Sound" button at the bottom of the page. The process of transmitting and recording your composition on the server can take many seconds to complete. Do not press Post New Sound again until at least a minute or more has elapsed, otherwise you may end up posting it multiple times to the server. If you cause a double posting, email the webmaster so that he can supress the duplicate posts. How To Use Your Workscore To Create A Chord Progression Arrangement You can type a new chord progrssion into your Workscore using the Workscore Chord Entry page. The Workscore Chord Entry page allows you to enter a chord into the score by specifying its root, chord type, and duration. You will have all of this info for each chord laying in front of you if you have sheet music that displays chord symbols for the tune that you are arranging. You select the chord root and chord type using the dropdown menus that are available on that page, and press the "Send Chord To>>" button (the >> is an attempt to indicate that you are adding the specified chord to the progression displayed in the workscore on the right), to add it to your workscore. This page won't play your score, until you press the Play button at the top of the workscore panel that appears on the right. Keep entering chords until you have entered all the chords specified by your source score. This method of chord entry corresponds exactly with how Dave Luebbert created most of his submsiisions to The Changes in SongTrellis using the SongTrellis Editor For Mac. Using that tool, at a flashing insertion point cursor in the chord voice of a score, he selected a chord by selecting its root and type in a selected Chord entry control group on the score's control bar, and pressed enter to record the specified chord in his score. He pressed the Play button on the score's control bar to have them voiced so that he could audition the arrangement produced, saved a MIDI and JPEG version of the score and submited the results to the site. Most progression MIDI sequences and scores were prepared in five or ten minutes, when the source score was uncomplicated. Webcast Video: How to enter a chord progression into a Workscore using the Workscore Chord Entry page on the SongTrellis site How to submit an MP3 performance of your score SongTrellis will carry MIDI format submissions of music for as long as the site is in operation. SongTrellis will carry MP3 performances of submitted compositions on a space available basis. The server has space available to store thousands of MP3s recordings but millions of MIDI sequences and printable scores. When the server runs out of filespace, the webmaster may delete mp3 performances at his discretion. If he likes your work he will keep it. If he doesn't appreciate it he may delete it. The webmaster believes there is enough room on the server that it will be unnecessary to do any triage on mp3 submissions for several more years. Before you submit an mp3 performance, please first use the "Submit a new sound" link in Song Discussions to post a MIDI sequence for your tune. This will cause a page to be created which will play a preview of the composition in MIDI format when they visit the page for your composition. Mp3s currently cannot be played as background sounds on web browsers and thus are not appropriate to play as a preview. Your submission of a MIDI sequence through "Submit a New Sound" will also cause a listing for your submission to be indexed under the composers name in the Our Composers section of the site and under your name in the "Our Contributors" listing. An MP3 submitted by itself will not be indexed. Your mp3 performance will be submitted to the site via the "Submit a new document" link on the Song Discussions page. Follow that link. On the form that is displayed, type the title for the document that will appear in the SongDiscussions article listings and archives. Press the Browse button to locate on your computer's file system the mp3 performance that you would like to submit to SongTrellis. When you have selected it, the path name of the composition will appear in the field labelled "Choose A Document". In the "Text" field type what ever explanatory text that you would like the user to see in the performance's SongTrellis page before they launch your performance. When you are finished press the submit button to send the performance to the SongTrellis server. Because mp3 files are so large, it may take several minutes to post your performance. When it is completely recorded, the server will show you your submission's page in Song Discussions. Next copy the URL for that page, and visit the tune's MIDI preview page. Press the Edit This Page button there, and type text in it that indicates that there is an mp3 performance for your composition. Press the Link icon on the top fringe of the "Text" typein field, and paste the URL in the form that comes up. Press the OK button, and a link from the selected text to your MP3 performance will be created. How To Submit A Workscore Arrangement To the Harmony Projects Once you have a finished score recorded in your Workscore, you can submit its chord progression to the Harmony Projects section of SongTrellis via the Workscore Chord Entry or Chord Entry By Grid pages. There is a "Submit To SongTrellis HarmonyProjects" button on each of those pages. This will launch a form that will allow you to describe your submission. Type a Title for your submission, credit the composer of the progression you typed, and type any explanatory text that you would like SongTrellis visitors to see. When you press the "Submit Your Workscore" button, at the bottom of the form, your Workscore contents will be transmitted to Harmony Projects and will be indexed under your name. How Your Harmony Project May Be Promoted To The Changes If your Harmony Project is a chord progression of a well-known song or if the webmaster finds the harmony of posted to be attractive sounding, he will promote your arrangement so that it is listed in The Changes. If you think it is worthy of this treatment, send him email. How To Invent New Harmony (a new chord progression) using your Workscore The Chord Entry By Grid page of SongTrellis provides a chord grid, a rectangular grid whose rows are labelled by the names of different chord types. Each row contains 12 squares that contain the names of the possible root pitches upon which a chord of that type can be built. Pressing the pitch squares in the grid cause the server to instantly play an instance of the selected chord and display the notation that describes how that chord was arranged by the SongTrellis server when it was played for you. With this you can quickly audition different harmonic ideas. When you find a chord that feels like it belongs in your progression, you add it to your Workscore. You keep doing this till you have created a large enough progression to improvise with or to accompany an original melody that you'll compose. With just a single chord entered in your Workscore, you have enough harmonic material so the you can use the Workscore Composer to compose a new melody that uses that chord for accompaniment. The Chord Entry By Grid page is a three-panel design, with the left side of the page devoted to the chord grid, the right side devoted to the display of your Workscore, and a middle panel devoted to an audition panel which demonstrates how the last chord selected in the grid sounds. In the center panel, pressing the button "Send Chord To>>" button, which appears above a selection radio group and a menu that sets Duration of the chord to be entered, causes a chord of root and chord type last auditioned by using the chord grid to be added to the workscore at the location specified by a selection location radio button. If "end of workscore" is selected, the auditioned chord is added to the end of score. This is default. When "beginning of workscore" is selected, the newly entered chord will become the new beginning chord in the progression. The "replace last chord of work score" setting causes the auditioned chord to replace the last chord in the progression, and the "replace first chord of the work score" setting causes the chord that begins the progression to be replaced How To Compose A New Melody Upon a Chord Progression using Your Workscore Once you have even one chord recorded in your Workscore using Workscore Chord Entry or Chord Entry By Grid, you can use the tools provided by Workscore Composer to invent a melody which harmonizes with the chord or chord sequence recorded there. On the Workscore Composer page, the controls that help you find new notes for your melody reside in the left panel of the page. Your current Workscore display resides on the right side of the page. When you add a new note or rest to the melody you are composing, you need to decide how long it should last. Workscore Composer provides two methods to specify the durations of the notes you enter in your score. The first control group in the left panel allows you to specify the duration of the next notes you enter into your Workscore. There is a Duration radio button group and a Rhythm Pattern group, which determine the durations of the next notes you enter in the score. If the Duration group is selected, the next notes you enter will given the Duration selected in the Duration menu. If for example, you have selected "eighth note" duration all of the notes you enter after this will be given eighth not duration until you make a different duration selection. If instead the Rhythm Pattern group is selected, the next notes you enter will have their durations specified by the rhythm pattern that is currently named by the Rhythm Pattern popup menu. The rhythm patterns are cycles of note and rest durations that are usually a half bar, full bar or two bars in length. When a rhythm pattern is selected, the Workscore Composer notices the location in the score where you are entering a new note, and aligns the beginning of the selected pattern with the beginning of the bar, half bar, or two bar cycle that you are working in. It chooses the duration of your next note, so that it's initial attack and duration is the same as the note in the pattern that corresponds to your current location within a cycle. If you selected a ryhthm pattern that consists of a dotted eighth note, a sixteenth note, a half note, a quarter triplet and an eighth triplet, which in total defines a one-bar length five note pattern, and started typing pitches into your score, the first note you enter would be given a dotted eighth duration, the second would be entered as a 16th, the third would enter as half note, the fourth would be a quarter triplet, and the fifith would be an eighth triplet. If you entered five more notes, their durations would follow the dotted eighth, sixteenth, half note, quarter triplet, eighth triplet cycle specified by the selected pattern in the next bar of your score. The second control group in the left panel, provides an Improvise New Idea button that tells the server to improvise a new melody phrase to add to add to the end of your Workscore and play the score so you can hear how the new idea sounds. If you like what you hear, you press Improvise New Idea again and add another new idea to your score. If the entire improvised idea doesn't fit, you press Delete New Idea and try again. If the early part of a phrase fits your melody and then goes astray, you count the number of bad notes at the end of a phrase, delete only those using the Delete button and do Improvise New Idea again. The third control group in the left panel specifies what part of the score should be played whenever you do an action that adds or deletes notes from your melody. It's cool to hear the entire score as you add notes, but after awhile it gets tedious to listen to your ever longer score, so the radio button selection here let you restrict the playback to smaller sections at the tail of your score (last idea, last four bars, last eight bars). The fourth control group in the left panel provides four different rules for adding pleasing notes to your melody, one note at a time, a type-in box that lets you name the pitches of the next notes that you'll enter (if you are quoting existing music or know tons of music theory), and two transpose controls that let you revise the pitch of the last note you typed if it doesn't sound right to you. The fifth and last left panel control group, lets you change your selection so that you can touch notes in the middle of the melody you're composing and revise their pitch, if you decide that's necessary. Webcast Video: how to compose music using the SongTrellis Workscore Composer How To Notate A Melody Using Your Workscore You can type a melody into the melody voice of your Workscore on SongTrellis by using the Workscore Composer page. Using the typein field labelled "Enter notes on pitches" you can type a list of pitches for notes that you would like to enter into the score. You can enter as many pitch names as fit within the typein field separated by commas. Valid pitch names are the characters a, b, c, d, e,f, and g followed by an optional accidental symbol. You can also enter the pitch names as capital letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. The accidental symbol which flats a pitch is 'b'. ('b' is the keyboard symbol that looks most similar to a musical flat symbol). The accidental symbol which sharps a pitch is '#'. When you press the Enter key that's in front of this typein field, a sequence of notes is entered into the score that is recorded on the list of pitches that was typed into the typein field. They are all given the duration that is specified by the duration setting options that are displayed in the top group of controls that are displayed in the left panel of the Workscore Composer page. Example: typing the characters 'a,Bb,f#' into the "Enter notes on pitches" type-in field and pressing enter while "eighth-triplet" is selected on the Duration menu, will cause three eight-triplets to be entered on the pitches A, Bb, abd F# in your score. These will all be in the octave, measured fron C to the next higher B, in which you last entered notes into the score. You can include the words 'up' and 'down' between pitch names, to force the composer to enter the new notes an octave higher or lower than the last note you entered. Typing "D,up,C,down,Bb" would cause a D note to be entered in the next higher octave, a C in the same octave as D, and Bb in the original octave that is in the octave range immediately below the D and C notes. How To Use The SongTrellis Excerpt Service links which appear in many sections of SongTrellis (The Composers, The Changes, The Rhythms). If you encounter a link to the "SongTrellis Excerpt Service" on a tune page, follow it. A page will launch which will allow to capture an excerpt from the tune that you were viewing when you pressed the link. By default the form on that page is setup to request a four bar excerpt that includes bars 1 through 4 from that tune. When you press the "Play" button on that form, the requested excerpt will be delivered to the web page as a downloadable MIDI file and will start to play, If you wish you download the excerpted MIDI file from this page. The excerpt service will also deliver a printable score in JPEG format of the excerpt. If you change the First Bar or Last Bar fields in the form, you can request that a different excerpt from the original be delivered to your browser. How To Transpose An Excerpt Into A New Key Using The Excerpt Service Once you've opened the Excerpt Service page for a tune, you can request that the excerpt service transpose your requested excerpt into a new key. By default, the "Transpose Original Score" menu reads as "don't transpose". If you change the menu to another setting and press play, the excerpt will be transposed by the selected transposition interval. How To Prepare A Score For A Transposed Instrument Using the SongTrellis Excerpt Service Once you've opened the Excerpt Service page for a tune, you can request that the excerpt service provide you with a score that is playable by a tranposing instrument. By default, the "Display" menu selection is as "in concert key". The other options on this menu read "Tranposed For F Instrument", Transpose for Bb Instrument", etc. Each of the 11 tranposition possibilities is listed. If you change the menu to another setting and press the Play button, the score produced for the excerpt will be rewritten in tranposed form so that instruments of that type can play in the same key as the MIDI sequence that is produced. How To Copy A Selection From A SongTrellis music sequence into your Workscore using the SongTrellis Excerpt Service When a tune page on SongTrellis displays a link to the SongTrellis Excerpt Service, you can copy the chord sequence from an excerpt that you choose inside that tune and move it to the end of the chord voice in your Workscore. Then you can use the Workscore Composer page and create a new melody on top of the copied chord progression. To copy the chord sequence from an excerpt, follow the "SongTrellis Excerpt Service" link from the tune page. On the request page that appears, select the excerpt that you would like to copy by changing the values of the First Bar and Last Bar fields to point to the boundaries of the excerpt you would like to have and press the Play button to verify that the excerpt is what you wanted to hear. Then press the "Add Excerpt Chords" button at the bottom of the Excerpt page. The chords from your excerpt will be copied to your Workscore How to find the newest submissions to The Changes At the bottom of the header for the The Changes, right before the tune listings begin, follow the link which reads List 100 newest chord progressions. That list shows postings listed by date arranged from the newest to the oldest. How to find a list of a particular composers tunes that are listed in The Changes SongTrellis maintains an individual index for each composer who has a tune listed in The Changes section of SongTrellis. If you look on the right side of The Changes listing, you'll see that links to the chord progression pages of 50 of the most requested composers are listed there. At the bottom of the list, is a All Composers (alphabetical list) link. If you follow the link, an alphabetical listing of all of the composers who have tunes recorded in The Changes will be displayed for you. When you click on one of the composer links in the list, a page will launch that will list the tunes by that composer which are in The Changes. blog comments powered by Disqus
|
|||||||||||
|
Last update: Sunday, July 9, 2006 at 7:26 PM. |
|||||||||||