• A Charlie Brown Christmas
• Charlie Brown's All Stars
• It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
• You’re in Love, Charlie Brown
• He’s Your Dog, Charlie Brown
• It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown
My library has grown substantially since then, and recent years have been a true Renaissance. As a sidebar to all the recent Peanuts soundtrack albums released by Lee Mendelson Film Productions, Sean and Jason Mendelson also worked with Hal Leonard LLC, a music publishing and distribution company that dates back to 1947, to publish many cues and songs never before released in sheet music format, as I covered in an earlier post.
I recently realized, as a result of my ongoing collaborations with Sean and Jason, that I had an “in” to answer a question that has long intrigued me:
How does a song get transcribed? What’s the process?
Sean put me in touch with Ben Culli, Hal Leonard’s Vice President of Editorial and Production, who turned me over to keyboard publications editor Mark Carlstein. He and I had a delightful chat a few weeks ago, and all my questions were answered.
The first one was obvious: Are transcribers musicians themselves?
“Yes,” Mark replied, “that’s absolutely imperative.”
So ... when starting work on a new tune, Mark — a pianist himself — handles the initial steps.
“The first thing is to get a good recording that’s indicative of the song. If I’m looking at Bill Evans, he might have recorded a given tune half a dozen times, and I’d want one that best represents him playing that music.”
Next: “catalogue” the tune.
“Every song has a road map. In the same way you’d follow a route, to get from A to B, a given song will last a certain number of bars, in a certain time signature, and in a certain key signature. Some sections may repeat, or not; typically in jazz, you don’t have exact repeated sections, as often is the case in pop music.
“I then send the representative tune to one of our transcribers, along with my road map; they listen to it, and write down everything they hear. All the parts are important. If words are part of the song, those words also must be transcribed. All of the melody’s rhythms must be notated precisely.
“What you look at, when you sit down to play something from a songbook, is a finished document that the transcriber built from the ground up.”
In the case of a Guaraldi trio composition, the transcriber pays attention to both the keyboard work, and the bass, to pick up the latter’s supplementary notes.
“The trio musicians will be playing the same harmonies and chords, but not necessarily the same notes. (We always ignore the drums, because that’s a non-tonal portion of the recording.)”
Vocalists, often backed by larger ensembles, are trickier.
“Take a Taylor Swift recording. It’ll have a bass line, a guitar player, a piano player, perhaps another keyboard player, perhaps a secondary guitar player, the vocals and the words. All of that must be distilled into something that can be played — say, in the case of a pianist — by one person with two hands. As a result, a lot of compromises are involved, and it’s necessary to focus on the essence of the song.
“How much of what the bass player does should be included? Some of it can’t be played by a pianist, and it’ll never be in the same octave, because what the bassist plays sounds too low on a piano keyboard; the two hands must be kept closer together.
“You also can’t play a busy guitar part at the same time you’re playing the melody and bass line.
“Everything can’t be included, and that’s the biggest challenge for our transcribers who handle vocals, because we always include the melody in the right hand, and everything else must be inserted around that. Our transcribers therefore start first and foremost with the melody, because it’s imperative that it be presented in a way that can be played by that one person with two hands.”
Are vocal pieces easier than instrumentals?
“Yes, because you’re looking primarily at the melody and bass line; far fewer parts must be coordinated into a single playable score.
“Alternatively, right now I’m working with one of our best transcribers on a jazz piano Omnibook, which includes classic recordings by Herbie Hancock, Oscar Peterson and everybody else you’d immediately recognize. But few of the pieces are solo piano; most involve at least bass and drums, and perhaps one or two horns. In such cases, you can’t include every single thing that every instrument plays, but all of the piano stuff is transcribed precisely — everything exactly as was played by that particular artist, on that particular recording — and the other instruments go onto other staves. One pianist can’t possibly play everything, but an Omnibook like this serves as a reference of sorts.”
What determines the necessary skill level required to play the result?
“That gets into arrangements. ‘Exact transcription’ means note for note, and the result can be quite complex and extremely difficult to play, because we’re talking about musicians who have extraordinary skills. If you’ve tried to play anything by Oscar Peterson, you know right away; it’s next to impossible. But something like the Omnibook isn’t what Hal Leonard does most. The bulk of what Hal Leonard does, is to take songs that people know, and to present them in different ways: different grade and skill levels. “Looking at just piano, we have at least a dozen different skill series, and of course we also have stuff for clarinet, violin and all sorts of other instruments. So, one person might do the initial transcription, and then several other people will handle the various arrangements.”
Why are some transcriptions in a key that differs from the original performance?
“We try to present things with no more than four sharps, or four flats. When we transcribe and arrange what we call ‘sheet music’ for the consumer, 1) the melody must be in the piano, so it can be played; and 2) it can only be reasonably difficult, at worst.
“We’re super-conscious of keeping things at an average consumer’s ability level, so that almost anybody can pick up that sheet music and make use of it, and enjoy it. Part of that involves avoiding complicated key signatures.
“A lot of jazz and pop musicians like keys that have five and six flats, because it works well under their hands, like certain sharp keys work better for guitar players.
“But the rest of us,” Mark added, with a chuckle, “don’t like seven sharps or seven flats.”
Indeed, some books are deliberately signature-simple.
“One of our most popular series is My First Fake Book, and every song is in the key of C major. We make it easy for the consumer, and of course you can transpose a song into any key you want.”
During my childhood, almost everybody I knew had a piano in their home, as also was the case in ours. These days, though, one sees very few pianos in homes. Has that affected sales of songbooks and sheet music singles?
“No, because all sorts of electronic keyboards are available these days; they’re less expensive and portable. The nature of the product has changed, because so much is available online; a lot of people download sheet music, as opposed to walking into a store and pulling something off a rack.”
Mark laughed at my next comment: One of my ongoing pet peeves has been the annoyance of square-bound songbooks. I’ve long felt that every songbook should be spiral-bound ... but I guessed (accurately) that must be too expensive.
“As far as I’m concerned, having the book stay open, while on the music rack, is the most important thing. So for Hal Leonard’s jazz piano solos series, at 96 pages, we switched the binding to what we call ‘lay-flat binding,’ so you can open the book anywhere, and it stays open and doesn’t split the spine.“As it happens, the Guaraldi volume in that series is one of my favorites.”
That book is pictured at left; check it out here. Click on "closer look," below the photo, to see sample pages from "A Day in the Life of a Fool (Manha de Carnival)," "Great Pumpkin Waltz" and "Skating."
In the case of the Guaraldi cues and themes recently released in The Peanuts Piano Collection, Ben then explained that one final step was involved: “Sean reviewed the transcriptions prior to release, and offered a few very small suggestions and tweaks.”
And there you have it.
Many thanks to Mark and Ben, for fully satisfying my curiosity.
