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Friday, May 21, 2004

Today was my Friday off, but I got up at the usual time anyway so I could spend a chunk of time working on the Stardust County score. I've been re-learning Sibelius and discovering some of the features new to 3.1. For example, there's a plug-in that sketches a simple guitar or piano accompaniment from chord symbols. The result's probably not what you'd want for a final product, but it takes some of the drudge work out. The downside of all these new features is that the manual is now huge and the indexing system is obtuse in places. It took me forever to find a reference to notating simple strum patterns for rhythm guitar, and it was in the noteheads section.

Putting Stardust on paper - first as the songbook, and now as a complete score - has been educational. All the songs & arrangements were originally done without recourse to staff paper, committed to memory, and transmitted via oral tradition to the cast. Working on the songbook, I became convinced that if the cast had been able to actually see how complex some of the melody lines were, they'd have fled from rehearsal in panic. Now I'm starting to capture the finger-picking and get a visual understanding of what I've been playing for the past X years.

# posted by Nancy @ 9:23 PM
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4 Comments:

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By Blogger Nancy, at 9:11 PM  

I cringe in a sort of "golly I have a lot to learn" sort of way when I see the complexity of some of the music in the existing songbook.


I'm just a simple mandolin-picker...

By Blogger Patrick Connors, at 9:53 AM  

Fortunately, "My" song, (that is, the lighthouse keeper Paul's song, which I've performed more than any other song in the piece and which I like so much I've even performed it at gigs) is a pretty straightforward three-chord folk-rock blues-based hunka-chunka easy-to-play fun-to-sing rock-out kick-ass song.

Hunka-chunka?

TT

By Blogger Tom, at 8:40 AM  

What I find interesting is no-one had major problems with those meters before they were written down.

By Blogger Nancy, at 8:41 PM  

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