SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  10/25/07; 2:11:17 PM Msg#:  5346 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  5345/5347 Reads:  59363

Chas testifies on behalf of the Excerpt Service

There's a link to the Excerpt Service towards the bottom most music pages on SongTrellis. If you follow that link, you land on a form that will let you produce an excerpt of the published score (or rework the entire thing) to your order depending on how you set the First Bar and Last Bar parameters in the form. Changing Tempo field value in the form lets you perform your excerpt in a different tempo. The "Display:" popup menu lets you produce parts for transposed instruments. The "Transpose Original Score" popup lets you play the score in a new key.

There's a link to a Tunetext page that appears once the score is played once. That brings you to a page that is a factory for creating music examples for websites. You can also copy an excerpt to your Workscore on the site, one you've played it.

I received this nice thank you from Chas Schoonmaker on Saturday morning.

The cool part for me was to hear this: "Thanks for the tutorial on transposing with the Excerpt Service. I never realised it was so fast and easy! Now no tune will be safe from me in it's original key.."

What Chas needed

He wanted to have a version of  It's A Wonderful World transposed into a new key (from F Major to G Major) and he wanted a SongTrellis style chord chart to go with it. Chas is a guitar player and sometimes finds that playing a tune in the published key doesn't feel comfortable or musically right on guitar. He's found keys for tunes that sound and feel much better to him when he transposes.

I told him that I thought the SongTrellis Excerpt Service link would do the job for him and gave him this recipe:

 "If you use the SongTrellis Excerpt Link for What A Wonderful World, set First bar to 1, Last Bar to 32, and choose "Major 2nd up" for Tranpose Original Score: and press Play, the service will generate a new set of voicings for the score every time you play it. Save the printed score and MIDI files, and print the scores after each play attempt. You'll see each arrangement is a bit different. If you do this a dozen times, you may hear an arrangement that will fall right on guitar."

Making transposed parts for your musical group with the Excerpt Service

The Songtrellis site has a giant trove of music stored within it. Most visitors probably don't realize that most of it can be customized for their own needs.

When I first tried to play music with my friends back in Nebraska when I was a young man, I'd try to play scores out of the Real Book and then discover that a Bb tenor sax couldn't play the same score that my guitar playing friends were following. I would have to mentally transpose the music an octave plus a major 2nd higher so that I could play in unison with the guitarists or transpose a Major 2nd higher to double them an octave lower. That's the compensation that's necessary because tenor saxes play concert key scores a major 9th below the written pitches in those score.

Actually I did not do mental transposition easily, so I frequently had to prepare my own transposed score and write it down in a music notebook by hand, which took a lot of time.

Even in this day with music software available that can easily transpose a score, when you play in a musical group whose instrument's transpose differently it's always a hassle to gather all of the transposed scores necessary so that everyone can play together easily.

Transposing for other instruments is very easy if you follow the SongTrellis Excerpt Service links that appear for nearly every tune listed in The Changes. Following a link launches a Play Excerpt form with a popup menu named "Display" whose default setting is "in concert key". If I choose the "transposed for Bb instruments" menu option, when I play my excerpt, the score for the excerpt will be rewritten so that it is "Displayed transposed for Bb instruments". The synthesized MIDI track will not be changed at all by this operation, but if I follow the transposed score with my tenor sax, I'll play the pitches specified by a concert key score.

 An Eb alto saxophonist would choose the "transposed for Eb instruments" option and a violinist would choose the "transposed for A instruments" option to produce the scores they would need to play along with the track.

Knowing the size of a chorus

The chord progression sequences provided by  The Changes are recorded so that a visitor can download and play along with the sequence. This means that we usually include 8 to 10 choruses of music in the sequences we publish. That practice leaves users of the Excerpt Service in the dark because it's not necessarily easy to know where the first repetition of the music in the score ends in the published sequence. .

Until two days ago the tune database recorded for SongTrellis didn't have any record any information that described the number of measures recorded in each repetition of a tune.

 I've just started to add that information now. If you check the early tunes in  The Changes listing (from 245 to A Night In Tunisia) and follow their excerpt link, you'll see that the Last Bar parameter in the Play Excerpt form is filled in so that pressing Play, plays the tune's intro plus one complete chorus of the chord progression performance.

That way everything is premeasured so that it's easy to prepare a score for a transposing instrument and to change the entire key of the score if you wish to do that.

Since I have another 1202 tunes to size, setting the sizes for all of the music in the database may take another month or two. When this work is done, I think a lot of work that folks might want to do with the Excerpt Service will be much easier to accomplish.

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