General Archives - Page 6 of 6 - Great Scores Sheet Music Blog

We've been busy…

We’ve not posted for a while – very remiss of us! However, we have been very busy over the last few months, adding two new languages to our site: Dutch and Swedish as well as adding Swedish Kroner as a currency.

So a big welcome to our new users in Sweden and Holland, even if this blog is in English :-).

Soon we will also add Danish and Norwegian (as well as the local currencies to go with these new territories), which means we will have added a total of 7 new languages in the space of 13 months.

What else has been happening? Well we have been preparing the new videos that we have promised you in previous blogs, so get ready for more regular videos, blog postings and fascinating downloads that will open up the world of Jazz to you in the new year.

And finally we’ve also been celebrating our 4th birthday in October. The site went live in October 2005 in English and German with just a 1,000 arrangements. Since then we have grown to over 30,000 arrangements and have welcomed users from another 5 new languages to our site.

So to finish, who better to play us a little Happy Birthday tune than Wynton Marsalis and his Septet:

Susan Boyle (Britain's Got Talent): Sheet Music For "I Dreamed a Dream" (Les Miserables)

Hi everyone

If you are living in the UK, then you would have be hard-pressed to miss the furore about Susan Boyle, the 47 year old contestant on the TV talent show Britain’s Got Talent. For anyone who did miss, here is a link to youtube.

Even for someone like myself who has no interest in TV Talent show this is worth watching, as it’s great tv/theatre and a great story. It’s also a great lesson that you cannot always judge a book by its cover. The quick run-down is that the 47 year church-going Boyle, who has a very friendly, unpretentious, but also un-flamboyant appearance, walks on stage to general sniggering of the audience.

The panel also looks distinctly un-impressed. But then she sings, with what is a truly angelic voice, and seeing the reaction of everyone in the hall is priceless. If you’d like to emulate Susan, then you can get hold of the sheet music for I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables here.

Take care

Lincoln

Answer To Teaser Question

Here is the answer to our teaser question about musical notation.

Just a quick reminder. I had given this one bar example, where there appear to be too many notes (6 beats worth) in the right hand:

The reason why this works is because there are two separate voices in the right hand.

This is the first voice:

And this is the second voice:

As you can see, there is a two beat rest at the start of the bar in the example above. Normally you would show this when adding the two voices together:

However, as you can see this means that the rest would have to hang in between two staves, which does not look very neat. As the second voice does not enter until the third beat of the bar, it is therefore fine to omit the rest at the start of the bar, as it does not lead to any rhythmic unclarity.

***

The second, more complicated example I gave looked like this:

Again, there are two voices, here is voice one:

And here is the second voice:

As the piece (Debussy’s Claire de Lune) consistently uses triplets, it is quite common the omit the triplet sign, which was done here. Furthermore the notes on beats 2 and 3 have been written into the right hand stave, indicating the the left hand part may be played by the right hand. So the entire left hand part written in the left hand would look like this:

And finally, as the two voices share the same note on beat three (G Sharp), you have to take the note head of the longer value as done here, or write the notes next to each other, which the editor did not choose to do. Had he done so it would look like this:

Hope that all makes sense.

Official Great Scores Blog Launch

Welcome to our official blog launch.

We want this blog to be about you, the customer. We invite your feedback and active participation, be that in suggesting new ideas for tutorials, guides, sheet music, videos, or in answering your (sheet) music specific questions.

We already have a few plans in mind with regards following on from our videos on our youtube page.

Our Jerry Lee Lewis Boogie with it’s tutorial and videos has proved extremely popular:

Click here for the sheet music.

Following on from that we added a Rock’n’Roll licks collection with 4 video tutorials and accompanying sheet music download, here is the first of those four videos:

Click here for the sheet music.

We are planning on doing more of these instructional videos that include accompanying pieces/guides as downloads.

We have already had the suggestion to create a piece from the Rock’n’Roll licks collection (thank you Hendrik).

Further ideas include a guide to how music works – but not your usual boring theory guide, but a more practical view on harmony, and how you can use this knowledge to fully understand music (it’s easier than you think). This series of guides would enable you to work pieces out from your ipod yourself.

Other plans include guides on improvisation, walking bass lines, time signatures, etc, but of course we will try to make these fun.

We’ll also try to answer any questions, and have regular Q&A sessions. To get things started, here is a little teaser question. You often come across bars of music that seem to have many more beats in them, than the time signature suggests. How is this possible?

Here is an “easier” example to solve; there seem to be eight beats of music in the right hand, when there should be four:

For the more seasoned pros, here is a more difficult one. There appear to be two beats missing in the left hand, and extra quavers (8^th notes) in the right hand, but 6 of them, plus a minim (half notes) and some strange note that seems to be a minim (half note) and a quaver (8^th note) at the same time on beat 3:

Now it’s over to you, suggestions on upcoming guides, videos, sheet music and answers to our little teaser question are very welcome.

Take care

Lincoln

All Blogs are not Equal

f you type Sheet Music Blogs into Google you will find that the early matches are not what I would call blogs. However, this blog intends to alter that by actually writing about the sheet music itself.

If you type Sheet Music Blogs into Google you will find that the early matches are not what I would call blogs. They are just sites listing public domain and, quite often, illegal copyrighted sheet music or lists of sheet music, and simply trying to earn some Google Adwords money out of it. Of course this blog is a direct dependendent of our Great Scores Sheet Music Website and so has a commercial background. However there appear to be few sites dedicated to sheet music itself which is one of the reasons we started this. Maybe that’s why this blog, although very new, appears in Google’s first ten results for sheet music blogs.

The subject of sheet music can be quite wide ranging and I intend to cover a fair amount of ground in the coming months. This will include the history of written music, a discussion on sheet music software and file formats as well as how these could be developed by harnessing the power of the Internet to use collaboration and ease of use to allow new music to be developed without having to master complex and expensive packages. I will also cover the interesting world of Public Domain and Copyright and how it effects how sheet music can be offered to you and how it is still dependent partially on where you are downloading it.

Of course the purpose of sheet music is that it is played and we will cover various genres and instruments and how they may be adapted to create interesting new pieces.

So the next post will have a little more depth and detail to it and I am eager to get feedback and comments. Please note that if you login at GreatScores you will automatically have an account on here so you can post comments.

Grahame

Why?

Blog introduction

Welcome to the Great Scores Blog. But why write a blog? Well we know it’s fashionable and our marketing friends recommend it but, the real reason is to share some of our thoughts with our customers and others and hopefully get some useful feedback.

So onwards…..