Chewing it over a bit, Jon, I wonder if you're having the same problem I am. Using Noteworthy Composer, I'm trying to get the songs I know into some kind of notebook. In writing out tunes, I frequently find situations where the tempo just doesn't seem to sound right. There's nothing wrong with my sense of tempo and rhythm, and I've had plenty of practice in writing out manuscripts (took a course in manuscript writing in school, and I've done a lot of it), so—why doesn't it sound quite right when I click "play" and listen to it played back?

I think it may be that written music can be too precise. For example, a 3/4 measure that at first I thought was simply three quarter-notes. It didn't sound quite the way I thought it should, so I tried a dotted quarter-note, an eighth-note, and another quarter-note. Still didn't sound right. The dotted quarter-note was too long, the eighth-note too short. I screwed around with that measure for a ridiculous amount of time, trying various combinations of dotted notes and tied sixteenth and thirty-second notes, until the measure was an absolute mess, and it still didn't sound right. So I went back to three quarter-notes, and of everything I tried, that sounded like the closest.

I think what it boils down to is a matter of phrasing and emphasis. There is a little phenomenon in written music called rubato. This is when one note "robs" a tiny bit of time from an adjacent note without actually changing the tempo or rhythm. It's more a matter of interpretation and too imprecise to notate. The only way I know of to indicate this is to write "rubato" into the score at that point, but that leaves it strictly up to personal interpretation. I figured that I know what it sounds like, and anyone else who might use my manuscript is going to do it their own way anyway, so three quarter-notes was "close enough for folk music."

Does this make any kind of sense?

Don Firth