David W. Fenton wrote:
On 6 Jun 2005 at 10:33, Allen Fisher wrote:
I can't justify an hourly
rate, because I can move through note entry fairly quickly (If I'm
motivated, that is <g>).
What am I doing wrong?
Now, I'm not a professional engraver, but when I work in Finale, note
entry is the one part of the process that is fast and painless. I'd
even include the addition of dynamics and so forth in that.
It's the editing, layout and part extraction processes that are
tedious and difficult and take hours and hours of tweaking to get
ready for print. Those always take me 2-3 times longer than the
actual entry of the raw music.
From my experience, I don't think you're doing anything wrong, David.
The layout issues, in order to get a final product that looks good to my
eye, take a lot of time, and can't simply be glossed over in switching
from scroll view to page view.
And if lyrics are involved, add 2-3 times the note-entry additional for
spacing issues.
I can justify an hourly rate easily, with a minimum as somone else
mentioned for lead-sheet work (I don't get much call for that, with or
without a minimum) because they can be churned out very quickly.
But choral music with lots of expressions and dynamics, divisi parts,
with a keyboard accompaniment? Definitely time consuming, and comparing
a lead-sheet to a choral work as I have just described, a per-frame rate
is totally out of the question.
Of course, a clever engraver will have a sense of how long the total
project will take, multiply that by your per-hour charge, then present
that to the client in any method they want.
The bottom line is the bottom line -- if a project will take me enough
time to warrant a $1000 total fee, I can present the bill in per-page
terms, per-system terms, per-frame terms, even per-note terms (that
calculation adds to the bottom line, though, since I would have to count
a lot more things and that takes billable time).
Whatever sort of quote the client wants, the client gets. Whatever sort
of paycheck I deserve and will have earned is what I get. It doesn't
matter how the client perceives it, I get my hourly rate no matter what.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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