handslive | Sheet music

I finally got around to printing up sheet music for The Sun Comes Up with basically empty bars for the vocal track. It actually wasn't even hard once I worked out how to do it (Lilypond usually drops empty bars of music to conserve space). I took it downstairs and fiddled around for a while and eventually got the voice line transcribed. I'm still putting it into the Lilypond file along with lyrics, but it's going much faster now.

Some interesting things I've noticed along the way. Playing back the transcribed voice line sounds very different from when I'm singing it. For some reason, the voice line I came up with makes extensive use of intervals of 5ths and 4ths from the melody line. Only they're really 4ths and 5ths when you take into account that I'm singing an octave below what's written. I'm going to have to look at that closely.

Also, although I thought I'd managed to capture the piano part pretty damn accurately for a change, it turns out that the left hand is ever so slightly more complicated than I gave it credit for. I'm not sure how I'm going to resolve that. It sounds so close, but when I was trying to work out the voice line it was suddenly glaringly obvious. There's a few inconsistencies in the right hand, too, and at least one whole bar missing in one of the transitions from verse to chorus.

The good news so far is that the variations in voice line between the two verses is actually almost non-existent. I've got the sheet music laid out as just a straight line right now with no repeats or anything, but now I'm thinking I can probably go back to trying to make proper use of repeats. This should shorten the finished work from 7 pages to maybe 4. Much better.

Oh, and the version of Lilypond I'm using makes a very nice DVI file from LaTeX source. In turn, this can be made into a very nice PDF which was really easy to move to purplejavatroll's machine and print out.