On Transcribing Some Music

by Peter Saint-Andre

2001-02-16

I've been working a lot on my music lately, inspired by the purchase of a shareware music publishing program for Linux called Mup (only $29 -- a lot cheaper than Finale, which isn't available for Linux anyway). Over the last month I've captured all my longer pieces for guitar in standard musical notation using this program, and I've placed them on my website at my Aubade page.

I'm excited about this because it reduces what in my line of work we call the "bus factor" (the likelihood that the project will go down the tubes if any one person gets hit by a bus). I rest easier knowing that even if I don't get to record these works, at least they'll be available for someone else to record if they have the interest. I also plan to send them into the copyright office so they're protected.

This has been an interesting and valuable experience for me, since I'm not all so highly trained musically. Three of these guitar works I had previously transcribed using Finale back in my Macintosh days (this was in 1993, I think), and this time around I found all sorts of errors in my earlier transcriptions, especially an over-reliance on tuplets when I was in doubt about the timing of notes.

Now that I'm finished with these instrumental works, I'm going to move on to capturing the songs I've collected together under the title Hagiography. These might be a bit more of a challenge in some ways since I need to work in the lyrics and probably also the chord fingerings as is usually done in songbooks.

Onward and upward!


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