Hi everyone, thanks for your quick responses. I should have said "as much of the RUBATO as possible", vibrato isn't a huge concern here. I do realize that total accuracy is impossible, and that an arbitrary decision has to be made about how many 'significant digits' to use in a score (i.e. whether to round to the nearest 8th, the nearest 8th note triplet, etc.).
However, it seems to me that many rock scores ignore what are actually very 'phonemic' differences, to take an analogy from linguistics (explained below)--to give you an idea where I'm coming from, in addition to wanting to transcribe/study/analyze/perform popular music, I'm a composer who grew up writing into metronomic sequencers long before i started playing an instrument, and found rubato confusing and 'out of time' for years until I had actually been a pianist for a several years. Recently I've been writing more at the piano rather than on paper/screen, which has slown me down a LOT, but writing on paper seems almost useless to me because the 'changes' in pitch and tempo that I'm making while I work on the piece are often subtle enough that they wouldn't show up in most notations. Furthermore, these differences seem to actually be phonemic to me in that they can make the difference in whether what was played was the 'right' note, so to speak. When I hear a singer sing a particular Beatles song without a particular bend in a certain place, to me that can often be equivalent to changing a note in the melody, that is, it sounds like wrong note. Similarly, while I was working on a song this week, I was trying all the possible notes to end a certain phrase on, and had eliminated all but two options, which included eliminating G. Suddenly however, I hit upon singing G with a 'scoop' and it seemed to function entirely differently in the piece--the scoop was about a whole-tone, and the hidden presence of the F there helped carify the harmonic function in the way I wanted. Now if I were to notate this and hand it to a singer, I'd want to make sure that scoop was there. However I wouldn't want them to immitate every detail of a vocal demo I'd give them, because I'm not the best vocalist in the world, and many of those little details wouldn't be intentional or essential, and I'd be open to hearing different ornamentations there. So, I need the ability to insist on certain details in certain places, but to leave the notation lax in other areas where it's not as important. I'll check out the examples mentioned so far, please keep up the great reccomendations :-) 2008/10/7 dhbailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Adam Golding wrote: > >> I've always been dismayed by how poorly most attempts at notation capture >> a >> lot of vocal performances (even the "Beatles Scores" is woefully >> straight-jacketed in its notation of the vocal parts, of of many rhythmic >> aspects in general.) Are there any treatises on notation or examples of >> well done scores that might show me how to notate a lot of the subtle >> inflections of vocal performances? I need to notate all the little >> scoops/turns/slides, not to mention as much of the vibrato as possible.. >> let >> me know any of your thoughts! :-) >> _______________________________________________ >> Finale mailing list >> Finale@shsu.edu >> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale >> >> > > I don't know if this will help, but Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire > used a "new" sort of sing-speaking, so you might check out how he notated > that and follow his lead. It never really caught on widely, but it might be > a good starting point. > > I think you might need to invent your own use of accents, or slightly > sloping very short lines, to indicate whether the syllable goes up or down. > With many singers, the slides aren't even a quarter-step, so I don't know > how you would do it without special markings which are obviously going to be > very open to interpretation. Just listen to a Billie Holliday vocal, for > example. If you use some notational device to tell people to start high and > fall onto pitch, or start on pitch and slide a bit, you could get someone > who sings only a caricature of Billie's original. > > What might be possible would be to use markings and then suggest that they > listen to a specific recording by a specific artist to know just what sort > of inflections are intended. Even on an original work, you could say "a la > Billie Holliday's 'My Mother's Son In Law' from 19xx on Decca." > > Finally, I would urge you to reconsider your need to notate "all the little > scoops/turns/slides, not to mention as much of the vibrato as possible" -- > attempts to control too much of those very personal devices can result in > horribly stilted performances, exactly the opposite of what you're trying to > accomplish. Those Beatles scores, as with most pop/jazz notation, are even > more of a "guideline" to performance accuracy than classical music notation > is. > > -- > David H. Bailey > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > _______________________________________________ > Finale mailing list > Finale@shsu.edu > http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
