Lead Sheet Formatting
Posted July 20th, 2008 by hone
Hi Folks,
Great resource you've set up here. Really great work.
Comment - I think most jazz musicians would prefer an output format which looks more like that found in the the real book, etc.
* 4 Bars per line
* Even spacing of bars
I can come close to forcing that layout in lilypond, but I have not found a way to force it when using musicxml and one of the translators to lilypond (I'm guessing that's how these lead sheets are rendered). Anybody know how to do this?
Brian
lilypond lead sheet layout
Interesting idea Brian. Could you send us the lily code to force the even spacing of the bars? The 4 bars per line is quite easy to do, but the even spacing is something we didn't try yet.
lead sheet format
I too think that the lead sheet style is best defined by those found in the New Real Books and other Chuck Sher publications. In addition to the above standards, I also think that the lead sheet should be 1 page long whenever possible. If the song with lyrics really must go to two pages, then the sheets should be re-spaced that the the second sheet is at least half full. (A second page with only 1 or 2 lines is not ideal)
This site is amazing!! I love how users can transpose a song and then print it out. That is so incredible for keying up songs up for different singers.
best practice
Wikifonia has indeed no 'best practice or guidelines' yet on how the lead sheets should be formatted. However, the contributor has total control because the Wikifonia Score Renderer does recognize system and pages breaks in the uploaded musicxml files. So if there are 1 or two lines on the second page, one can optimized this by adding a page break at e.g. system 6 or 7 at page one.
No even bar spacing, please
I disagree about the even bar spacing thing. I think it makes music sheets more difficult to follow, if all bars are exactly the same width. Bar spacing is one aspect of visual separation (or visual character) between systems, and it's easier for the eyes to find the right spot ("where was I again" when you've looked elsewhere for awhile) if the bar spacings vary a little from system to system.
I think it's actually a traditional music engraving practice to avoid 100% similarly spaced bars in consecutive systems. Even in a score with all 1/4 notes, it's better to make some bars deliberately a little bit narrower or wider, just to get the systems look different. I'm not talking about big differences, even a couple of millimeters can be enough.
What comes to music spacing, I prefer spacing music according to the notes' musical lengths proportionally. Lyric syllables should disturb the proportional spacing as little as possible (in Sibelius I keep "Allow space for lyrics" unchecked in Layout / Note Spacing Rule), and I try to maintain proportionality at least within each bar. In Sibelius it's easy to adjust spacings one bar at a time by selecting a one-bar (or multiple-bar) passage and pressing the arrow keys left/right while holding down Shift+Cmd (maybe Shift+Alt on Windows?). Keeping notes proportionally spaced while at the same time having all syllables and hyphens visible requires some manual work in Sibelius, and I doubt if LilyPond can do it either. In Sibelius the manual work means adjusting bar widths and system breaks, and carefully moving syllables by hand.
even bar spacing
Well it depends on whose reading and what. For sight-reading rhythm section players, the space in each bar represents time. (Think of an imaginary bouncing ball over each beat space) So if you have 4 quarter notes in a measure taking a space, then two half-notes taking the same space, then two whole notes in two measures combined taking the same space, then 4 quarter notes taking the same space, all on one line of 5 measures. A common sight reading error will be to mistakenly play the measures 4&5 as one measure of two half notes, because of the way it is spaced. Equal space means equal time. This gets very useful when reading syncopated rhythms. Classical music is often written in a different manner than jazz music because of this.
I also think it's easier to find one's place in the music, after looking away, if the spacing is even. (eg 4m / system) Because space = time, I can count off the beat , not look at my page and when m.9 rolls around I know I'm on the third staff, 1st measure. m.15 beat 3 is 4th staff, 3rd measure right in it's middle. Keeping the form as the beat plays on becomes easier.
Proper spacing for lyrics is important too, and may be more important in a lead sheet if the words won't cleanly fit into a standard measure. It's a balance. But a good balance is easier to do if there is at least a logical grouping of measures in a system so that new sections don't start in the middle of a system.
shrinking an existing lead sheet to fit on one page.
Hi,
Sometimes, I download a song PDF (letter size) and find that it's a two page lead sheet with only one line of page 2. I first try to get the song to fit onto 1 page by downloading the longer A4 size and sometimes this works. Sometimes it does not. This happened tonight with "The Girl From Ipanema". So to fix this, I downloaded the XML file and opened it in Finale Print Music. Here, the chart very easily fits into 1 page.
How can we keep it on one page, once it is submitted to wikifonia, and a PDF download is generated?
thank you.
ongoing work
Thanks for raising this issue.
It's something we are aware of and have been working on since the start of Wikifonia. The ultimate goal would be that the Wikifonia score renderer spaces out the score over exactly the same amount of pages as set by the editor in his score writer of choice.
It was harder than we anticipated because Lilypond, the typesetting engine Wikifonia is using, does not have an option to scale the score to fit into one page.
First we reduced the fixed size of the header and footer, as well as the default staff size. Also some margins where tweaked in order to gain space. The result was that we could fit lots of sheets on one page now, but as you mention, transposing the sheet or the US Letter format could still return two pages.
Regarding The girl from Ipanema: pulling it through the most recent Wikifonia score renderer gives a better result now. Still the US Letter pdf is on 2 pages. Also some transpositions are 2 pages as well. Perhaps we can solve this by making the footer notice even smaller.
We'll post a follow up when there are some new results.
Solution implemented
We implemented a solution which should result in a similar output for US Letter and A4. The The Girl from Ipanema has been rerendered.
Additionally, we made the footer smaller in order to gain some space. This should hopefully solve the inconsistency between your score writer output and Wikifonia.
Thanks again for the report longfinger! Don't hesitate to post if you have other questions or remarks.