Okay, so I am near the finish line with this choir engraving project (recap: guitarist working on their debut huge concept album for the past decade, they have a small session choir hired to record the choral excerpts in July (because if there's no choir are you even prog), I'm preparing the parts for the choir to read off of because if you just try and bounce midi files from guitar pro or any other program directly to the built-in pdf/sheet music editor it looks like garbage).
Have sent the second wave of deliverables to the client, so the last step is going to be touching base with the music director liason of the choir itself to see if they have any further requested revisions or layout preferences.
Here's a little before and after - client exported pdfs from guitarpro just to have something visual to send me (but also sent the midi files so 95% of the time I've just been looking at the midi in my DAW and not using the pdfs).
Before - bit of a mess
After - maybe still a mess? But you can hopefully see what information I've been trying to include for each excerpt:
- timestamp of the excerpt
- cues showing what the track will sound like right before the choir enters
- then the actual choir parts with hopefully reasonable splits and reasonable ranges for each voice.
- What syllable to sing on (most of the parts throughout the album don't have lyrics, so a small range of Ahs, Ohs, and Hmmms depending on the vibe.
- subdivision for some of the more rhythmically dense/additive measures.
Isn't this NIFTY.
Top comments (1)
This is so insane! And the time signatures 😩
Also some more context:
So engraving is just sort of the more 'professional' presentation of sheet music. Like transcription is the act of writing out some music, but it doesn't indicate any sort of standard - lawd knows I've got tons of shorthand transcriptions I've done by hand that just serve to remind me what to play, but might not be super helpful if someone else were to try and sight read it. Left over term from when they had to engrave/chisel sheet music into metal plates for block printing.
In this case, since the choir will only be punching in specific sections of long meandering prog songs, I need to not just A.) write out the parts and set up divisi and voice leading that is manageable and readable by a halfway decent choir with not much rehearsal time, but also B.) need to include enough cues and time stamps so that when they jump around from spot to spot when recording, they can quickly figure out what to listen for to grab their pitches and not get lost in the sauce.
(trying out an embed, pardon me if this doesn't work I am an absolute baby, not used to working in such feature rich platforms).
hopefully this shows timestamp, sort of aggregate cues before the voices enter, then the layering of the voices (SATB with splits for S1 and S2, B1 and B2). Still need to go through and add lyrics, phrase markings, and breaths. Also want to make all the cue staves smaller so it's more obvious which are the Actual Choir Partsâ„¢ vs the cues.