So that piece of music that no one commented on is an excerpt from Nothing Else Matters, by Metallica, arranged for two cellos. A favour for my friend Greg, who is getting wedded this fall. He thought it’d be cool to have Metallica on cellos as incidental music at his wedding. Since I play cello, and know the words to Enter Sandman better than the words to the Canadian national anthem, I had to concur. When he brought up the topic and mentioned he had a coworker who also played cello, I thought I’d take a whack at it.
The first thing to do was to convince ourselves this particular bit of music could be adapted for two cellos, and that also with rusty cello skills I’d at least be capable of making it sound presentable. Hence, piece of software number one: GarageBand. A little bit of history with it: when I first heard saw Steve Jobs doing the keynote presenting GarageBand, I was excited and immediately bought the iLife upgrade, and along with it a M-Audio Keystation 49e keyboard. My enthusiasm waned quickly when I actually got my hands on the software. GarageBand’s default software instruments aren’t that interesting (at least for a classically trained musician like myself), and the loops seem suited mainly for assembling really bad techno - which is just about all I’ve done with it so far - example noodling (MP3, 1.4 MB). Beyond a certain number of software instruments (I think it caps at around 7 on my G4 laptop) playback was impossible, and GarageBand’s method of dealing with this - baking out the track to a iTunes file and reading it back in as a loop - seemed seriously clunky. However, on this project, GarageBand did serve a useful purpose: it allowed me to easily record a first cello part while playing a metronome beat, and then I could play that recording back while recording the second cello. I recorded a little over a minute with the laptop, sent it off to Greg, and got an enthusiastic response. Audition successful!
Greg mentioned he had a coworker who also played cello, and that he might pay his coworker’s cello teacher to do the arrangement. I figured if I was going to play a part I might as well do the arrangement myself, and so volunteered to tackle the arrangement. One rainy weekend in February I dug up unused manuscript paper dating back to my counterpoint classes, and set to work. Greg provided Apocalyptica’s rendition of Nothing Else Matters, I looked at some guitar tablature online, but ultimately it was back to the source: Metallica’s Black Album studio recording. Back in the day I guess people used tape players for this sort of thing; nowadays we have iPods (which, by the way, has a terrible interface for scrubbing - click, click, rotate wheel, wait too long and you have to click, click again, otherwise you’re fiddling with the volume) and iTunes, although ultimately I settled for some generic media software that shipped with my ATI graphics card. It had the most useful property of skipping back about 2 seconds with a single keypress, which proved most useful for figuring out exactly what note was being played.
Pen and paper quickly got old. Susan pointed out that we have these wonderful things called computers, so I went looking for music notation software. I had a vague requirement that it run on my Mac, so after some googling I found Nightingale X. This was my first experience with this sort of software, and it was like night and day compared to manual transcription, especially when I realised the MIDI keyboard which hitherto had been gathering dust in the corner of my office could be used to enter notes. Playback proved especially helpful since I was transposing as well, and writing one part in tenor clef, which I find highly error prone.
Yes, I’ve been living in a cave when it comes to audio software, but what do you expect? I’m a computer graphics guy.
By the end of the weekend, I transcribed a little under half of the piece. If you were to look in on my spare bedroom/office then, you’d have seen: a G4 laptop with music notation on the screen, a PC desktop showing ATI software playing a Metallica MP3 on its monitor, an iPod playing the same file on a loop, and a 49 key MIDI keyboard, all competing for space with me, a cello and a music stand. It was quite fun.
At this point, I’d learned enough to realise the shortcomings of Nightingale. To be fair, the pros: I found its single note keyboard entry to be quite efficient, particularly since it used sensible keyboard shortcuts (Q for quarter notes, E for eighth notes). It also has a (what I think is a) singular approach entering notes in the middle of bars, allowing the dynamic expansion of a measure to accomodate an arbitrary number of notes, while marking the bar as being rhythmically incorrect. And best of all, it allows for a flexible page layout on the screen, so for example five pages can be up at once and you can see the music flow across them easily. As I found later, these pros proved to be sorely missed. Now the cons: Nightingale is barely Carbonized and as a result is prone to crashing, and for some reason consumes all CPU cycles even when idling. It seems to be fairly picky about layout, and I had to spend more time thinking about note spacing and how tight the bars needed to be. Trumping all these cons: it was also the only thing I found that had a 30 day trial without any limitations.
Due to its lack of integration with OSX, Nightingale has some quirks when it comes to its PDF output - decent output requires saving to PostScript, then converting to PDF from the command line. Also, I ended up purchasing the Sonata font from Adobe - separate purchases for both Windows and Macintosh! - in order to get the best output. This might have been a mistake in retrospect, but in the end I had printable output to show for it.
Meanwhile, it was time to look for replacement music notation software. I concluded that Nightingale X was a little too unstable and didn’t look like it was being actively worked on enough to justify its price tag. I tried NoteAbility Pro briefly, and was very quickly discouraged - and I really wanted to like it since it’s a projected associated with my Alma Mater. However a look at the interface and you can see where I’m coming from.
In the end, after trying some evaluations, I settled on Finale Allegro. Despite some initial misgivings (especially after shelling out a couple of hundred bucks) it’s proven capable of handling everything I throw at it, as long as I’m willing to scratch enough to find the functionality buried beneath the surface. The dual computer licensing proved attractive as well. After a few more weekends I finished the arrangement. Since I can’t be bothered to figure out ASCAP print licenses, here’s a sample of the final result which I will claim under fair usage (click the image for a legible view). It’s the guitar solo, played by James and not Kirk. If you’re familiar with the music you’ll note that it’s been transcribed down to D minor, somewhat following Apocalyptica’s lead - it makes a couple of harmonics much easier to play. Yes, this is pretty high on the fingerboard for a cello, so if I end up doing Cello 1, it’ll be fun to see whether I manage to pull it off.
Oddity: Finale comes with some limited OCR functionality, so on a whim I converted Nightingale’s PDF output to monochrome TIFF files and fed them into Finale. Notes actually came out - not accurate to avoid having to start from scratch, but certainly an impressive result. Imagine: TIFF files as a common music software interchange format.
To wrap up this blurb, here’s another music notation sample, much more complete this time - well, at least an entire movement: Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major, 1st movement (PDF, 412 KB). As an exercise in learning Allegro I picked something fairly random that I had the music to, wasn’t available online, and was interesting from a notation perspective. Unfortunately the music I picked had nine parts, which wasn’t ideal for an introductory project; and Finale definitely has problems scaling to projects of this (medium!) magnitude. In any event, the result looks pretty good, and is quite suitable for following along to your favorite recording.
By the way, most people have heard the G Major Brandenburg - that’s No. 4. Royal Conservatory of Toronto History 3 students from my era should be familiar with the F Major though.
If you don’t have a favorite recording, fear not! Finale Allegro has an interesting playback feature, taking advantage of both SoundFonts and something they advertise as “Human Playback”. Here’s the result of its music interpretation (MP3, 5.08 MB). It’s not bad - for a computer. The default SoundFont, while far better than your standard MIDI fare, are badly balanced between instruments (e.g. the trumpet is mostly inaudible), but at least Finale does a commendable job of interpreting markings and even trills, although it doesn’t handle figured bass - that’s a little too much to be asking of it, I suppose.
More comments about Finale to follow. Anyone have music they want transcribed?