Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project

Subject: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Irish sergeant
Date: 21 Mar 06 - 01:09 PM

I'm working on a Civil War song book that I hope to publish. This is actual songs of the era not anything written later. I need to trnscribe music for the songs I use in the book. Are there programs out there that do this? If so how much do they cost? I'm hoping eventually to seel the bok to Mel Bay. To date the book has been something I put together for reenactors and as I don't read music I only put tablature in. Thanks Neil

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: MMario
Date: 21 Mar 06 - 01:11 PM

I use NoteWorthy composer. there are a lot of others - most of which are more expensive.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Dave Earl
Date: 21 Mar 06 - 01:13 PM

Yeah Noteworthy does it for me too.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Irish sergeant
Date: 21 Mar 06 - 01:22 PM

Thank you both! How have you been MMario? Neil

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 21 Mar 06 - 01:42 PM

If you really expect a possibility of having someone publish your book, you should check with the potential publisher(s) to see if they have restrictions on what form your "originals" should be. Some publishers can print directly from some music program files, but generally the choices of programs you can use are pretty strictly limited for any particular publisher.

You can often print your pages individually using any progam that meets a publishers legibility and format specs, and then scan the printed pages to make graphics files (often .jpg or .gif works) for them to print from, but even if they allow this, they may have peculiar requirements on filesizes and bit-counts.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: GUEST,Barry T not at home
Date: 21 Mar 06 - 03:33 PM

There is a new product from the Finale family that appears to have potential... Finale Printmusic. I've seen it in stores for $59 CDN.

Check it out at... http://www.finalemusic.com/printmusic/default.aspx

I myself have not tested this, but Finale (the heavy duty version) is highly respected for music publishing. This may be an economic alternative for you.

Anybody using this software now??

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Irish sergeant
Date: 21 Mar 06 - 03:35 PM

John:
Mel Bay recommended Finale by Coda Music But also said if that wasn't possible to hand write it in "An iorderly, clean neat manuscript" And they don't want submissions on disc or in electronic format.
Hope you fared well through the storms out that way, Neil

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: MMario
Date: 21 Mar 06 - 03:40 PM

So they want hardcopy? Noteworthy would probably do for you then.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 21 Mar 06 - 04:13 PM

As long as they want printed copy, there are a number of programs that should be okay. Noteworthy is pretty good, but does have some "quirks."

Finale is one of the better programs, but is expensive. A problem, particularly if you don't read music fairly fluently and have to just "make it look like" a sample you have, is that the "better" programs can require a significant bit of study just to get them turned on and get started.

LinInKansas, my cellmate, has been using PrintMusic (2001 version) for a couple of years, and finds it adequate for printing her own tunebook. It makes decent looking scores as long as the defaults work for the stuff you're scoring; but lacks some of the "tweaks" I'd like to have for moderately more complex layouts. It is a pretty good basic program.

Encore is another that's frequently recommended for lots of chrome and go-fast stripes, and is perhaps a little cheaper than some other "professional" grade programs. They have recently offered a less fancied program called MusicTimeDeluxe that looks like it may have pretty good capabilities, (and that may be able to read the old files from my really good program that won't run on WinXP..). I've been "thinking about" trying it out when a get a spare $100 (US) or so.

The problem is that there are too many programs that might do what you want, and the only way to know if you've got the right one is to learn enough about one to know that you're driving it the way it should be driven - and you're getting results that satisfy you.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From:
Date: 21 Mar 06 - 04:29 PM

I suspect you DON'T want full orchestral scores and such. Since they LIKE Finale. I would recommend Finale Notepad instead.

This is the FREE little brother version of Finale. It does a number of things which are very useful. I used it for several years, until I got playing with MIDI files last year and upgraded to the inexpensive Notepad Plus which allows me to read and write MIDI files.

Looking at the Finale web-site, it looks like Notepad Plus has been replaced by Finale Songwriter

ANyway, they're great products, but I doubt you really need all the bells and whistles of the full Finale package. Either the free Finale Notepad (I HIGHLY recommend registering), or the Finale Songwriter would suit your needs.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Nick
Date: 22 Mar 06 - 11:33 AM

Not sure if this would help but I noticed you said you created tabs. If you used something like Power Tab Editor or Guitar Pro you could enter your tab - manually or via the keyboard - and it should then produce a score which you could output.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: M.Ted
Date: 22 Mar 06 - 01:23 PM

Since you don't write music, you need a program that will allow you to edit the kind of tableture that you use--and then you'll have to figure how you will manage to get the notes down on the page, and edit them, as well--my suggestion is that you find a publisher for this songbook first, then you work out all the details on how you are going to do what with the publisher.

The real reason for doing this is simply that you want to avoid wasting a lot of time putting together something in a form that a publisher can't use.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Anglo
Date: 22 Mar 06 - 01:26 PM

Mel Bay works several ways. They might accept anything between "finished product" and handwritten manuscript. If the former (which it sounds like what you want to do), you need to make sure you're using a program which they use and can print from. You'll need to use their page format, margin requirements, all that sort of stuff.

Or you could send them a handwritten manuscript, and they would then either set it in-house, or more likely ship it out to a freelance "engraver" (that's the term still used, though there hasn't been any actual engraving for a good while) such as myself, who would typeset the music and text if needed (though it's more likely you could send that as a text file), assemble the book, and send them th finished product.

I'd imagine you could get a better deal for yourself if you sent them everything set to go, but then your sales would likely suffer if your end-product didn't look good. Most of the work in music notation programs comes from making it look good - entering the notes is the quickest part of the job.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Howard Kaplan
Date: 23 Mar 06 - 08:36 AM

I have been using Noteworthy Composer (NWC) for several years, and I've recently looked at some of Finale's capabilities. Some of what I write here is relevant to music transcription in general but not necessarily to submission of material to Mel Bay.

NWC is quite acceptable for the entry of melodies and lyrics, but it has limitations on the entry of chords. In NWC, chord names appearing above the staff are only text fields; they do not transpose when the melody is transposed, and there is no special font that matches lead sheet conventions for chord names. An add-on program called "Noterow Assistant" was once available in beta test mode, providing both a chord name font and a fretboard grid font; strangely, the help page for this program is still available
here, although the program is not. However, if you can find any other TrueType chord-name-friendly font, you can specify that NWC use it for chord names.

Compared to other entry-level notation programs available at the time I selected it, one advantage of NWC was that it could output the notation as a Windows Metafile graphic image. This is better than a bitmap image (such as .gif or .tif), which is in turn better than a screen capture, which in turn is better than nothing, because the metafile is scalable: as you enlarge the image, your notes and text do not develop "jaggies". If you enlarge the image enough, you may notice that the note heads and stems do not align exactly, but I have only rarely needed such enlargements. Also, if you shrink the image, Windows uses font hints to make the text look as good as possible at the point size you're using. Therefore, the graphic output from NWC is optimal for pasting into word processing documents, allowing you to notate one verse of a song and to enter the remaining verses and any supplementary comments as ordinary text. I was surprised, when recently helping a friend with Finale (one of the higher-end versions, I'm not sure which one), to find that it did not have the ability to similarly export its notation to any convenient graphics format.

I agree that the optimal strategy is to enter notation using whatever program a publisher will eventually want to use to prepare the final copy for printing. However, the alternative is not simply to print hardcopy pages for someone to re-key into different software. Almost any notation program can export and import MIDI files, which will save some of the work of re-transcription. Depending on the programs, it might be necessary to make minor adjustments such as filling out the first measure to the full number of beats instead of leaving it as just a pickup note. Also, there is a not-very-expensive program called Harmony Assistant that claims to be able to import and export native notation files from NWC, Finale, Encore, and a few others, as well as handling ABC notation and MIDI. You might be able to use this either for conversion between two other programs or for original note entry prior to final formatting by another program.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Irish sergeant
Date: 23 Mar 06 - 03:50 PM

Mel Bay doesn't want electronic submission strcitly manuscript.I entered the chords or rather I should say the letters correponding to the proper chord all of which I was able to do in word. Thanks all for your input and I'll keep you all apprised. I love this site and it's members! Neil

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: JohnB
Date: 23 Mar 06 - 05:43 PM

Surely they will need at least a melody line in music notation as well. You can't really get the melody from just the chords.
Are you the re-enactor Neil from Brampton Ontario? if so I can possibly help you.
JohnB

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: GUEST,M.Ted
Date: 23 Mar 06 - 09:35 PM

Howard--thank you for that wonderful and comprehensive assessment--it adds a lot to the ongoing dialog here on music notation programs--

Neil--Am I right in supposing that you are submitting a proposal for a project to Mel Bay, and not a finished manuscript? If that is so, I think you should seriously consider adding the melody notation as well, as per JohnB--

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Tootler
Date: 24 Mar 06 - 03:04 AM

If you want a "quick and dirty" solution, Robert Algeyer's collection of music true-type fonts may meet some of your needs. It includes fonts for simple notation, guitar fretboard symbols plus others all as true type fonts, so they can be entered directly into a word processor. They are all available for free download and can be found here

These fonts can also be used in conjunction with low cost notation processors to add symbols not readily available.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Grab
Date: 24 Mar 06 - 07:25 AM

Melody Assistant is the cheaper version of Harmony Assistant. It does almost everything I need (apart from support for barre), and it's a damn sight cheaper than just about everything else on the web. I've been using this for a year or so for guitar arrangements, so it's plenty capable enough for a single melody line. There are freeware tab editors, but I didn't find any that I liked, and I couldn't find any at all that would also show stave.

Graham.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 24 Mar 06 - 07:44 AM

A side note on the use of WMF filetype (also see Howard Kaplan post above):

While the .wmf image file type can generally still be used in recent Windows versions, it's use has been minimal, and Win2K and WinXP, and compatible programs, don't use it much. It has been usable, but "deprecated" as a preferred file type of recent Windows OS and applications.

A vulnerability has been found that allows a malicious specially crafted .wmf file to be used to remotely take over control of a computer. The malicious .wmf file can be downloaded directly, or can be embedded in another file such as a Word document. Such malicious .wmf files have been found in circulation and an unknown number of successful exploits have been reported.

The exploit requires both the presence of a maliciously created .wmf file, and a vulnerability in the image rendering program used by the OS. The security patches to correct the rendering program vulnerability are listed as Critical Updates for WinXP, Win2K, and some Windows Server versions.

The vulnerability appears to be present for Win95/Win98, but there is no patch, and it's listed as "not Critical" for these and older Windows systems. It is possible that machines running the older Win versions are considered "not capable of useful exploit" or that the installed base of machines using these older systems is considered "too small to be of interest" (like Macs ;-) to those likely to use the exploit method.

The Microsoft Security Bulletin describing all this is at Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-001 (05 Jan 2006). Users of the main affected Windows version who get automatic updates should already be "patched." Other affected users should probably get patched.

Those who object to believing anything Microsoft puts out can look at SANSFire for a typical "unbiased(?)" – and a little less terse – description.

I have not seen any reports of non-Windows users being affected, but the presence of "Windows emulators" could present some risk that the vulnerability exists in some other systems. The greater danger, perhaps, is that a user of another system could pass on "infected" .wmf files to others, probably without ever knowing it happened.

Users of .wmf files may also encounter others who have simply "unregistered" .wmf files, making them less useful, since this is an action recommended in "hotfixes" for people who might have trouble installing the more general updates, and according to the SANSFire site was probably used by a number of people before the Microsoft patches were released.

Note that most rendering engines do NOT use the filetype from the file extension to identify how to render it. They rely on descriptors internal to the file, so a .wmf filetype can have any file extension in the filename, and still be detected as being a wmf filetype and when opened can trigger the exploit on affected machines.

This is not a "Major Panic" issue, but anyone using wmf filetypes should be aware of the possibility of a few glitches, even if not using the "affected" programs.

Now back to music.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: GUEST,J C
Date: 25 Mar 06 - 04:23 AM

Which Civil War, presumably The American one (the Irish had one too!)
Did you know that Francis James Child wrote a song on the subject?

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Snuffy
Date: 25 Mar 06 - 08:46 AM

But the English had one before either of those.

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: Sorcha
Date: 25 Mar 06 - 11:07 AM

Have you checked what is already on the market? I know this has been done before....

Subject: RE: Tech: Transcribing music for songbook project
From: samirich
Date: 25 Mar 06 - 10:08 PM

Oh there are other alternatives in the lower end market for note entry. I personally have grown to depend on MusicEase Professional Ver. in that it will allow me to be just as sophisticated as I can stand. It compares very nicely with NWC but may not be quite as intuitive as NWC but it does handle the guitar chords and their transposition nicely. There is a learning curve with either product, I suppose I have stuck with Musicease primarily because it does handle the chords so well. The text is trying at times, but not really difficult. You can add as many verses as you can stand, usually only 4-5 but up to 25. $100 range for the professional version, I am not sure about the other version.

OK: I would like to know of the song that FJ Child wrote on the Civil War. I presume it was the American, but it may have been elsewhere.