I am reading between the lines here, and assuming that a client has given you grief about some of the spellings in a transposition?<<
This is a client who had me make a cut-out of "More" from Dick Tracy, and transpose it down a whole step. It left it full of double sharps and flats, and there are no guitar chords above the staff. The work was, I think, picked up from my doorman and taken directly to an audition.
In addition to these doubles, there was a measure in which I had input a chord incorrectly, then copied it throughout. I have no argument that this is a correction which needed to be made for no charge. The piece was also marked with repeats which did not appear in the original, and a couple of phrases which the client thought should have automatically been transposed up an octave. I thought these phrases were not too far below the treble clef and had left them as they were. My policy is that corrections are made free of charge, but edits must be paid for.
I have posted this query here because I, too, feel that if a client is presenting music for transposition which is going to end up this way, they should be charged more. This is only three pages, and so I will make this concession one time only, and plan to give the corrected music back to the client with the explanation that in the future he should expect to pay more for this kind of work.
This is dangerous ground to tread upon, but I might venture that you should charge more for difficult pieces like most of Sondheim, and your regular rates for the Lloyd-Webber and Richard Rodgers works, which contain much fewer notational problems than Sondheim. If the client balks, point out that he won't like the results unless you go through and spend the extra time to make the spellings right. I remember an early transposition I did of "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" and just the last eight or so measures gave me fits about which spellings to use. There was no excellent solution, just a series of bad ones, so like Captain Jack Aubry, I had to go with the "lesser of two weevils." ;-) <<
I have handed back work with double flats and sharps previously, and have wondered if I would get any complaints back, and never have. I think, though, that these other pieces have contained guitar chords above the staff, or have been pieces that generally lend themselves to improvised playing.
Thank you for your input here, especially since you agree with me!
Crystal Premo [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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