Berklee Contemporary Music Notation A Comprehensive Guide to Music Scoring | Learn Notation for Staffs Lead Sheets Guitar Tabs and More | Create Professional Sheet Music

by Jonathan Feist

(Berklee Guide). Learn the nuances of music notation, and create professional looking scores. This reference presents a comprehensive look at contemporary music notation. You will learn the meaning and stylistic practices for many types of notation that are currently in common use, from traditional staffs to lead sheets to guitar tablature. It discusses hundreds of notation symbols, as well as general guidelines for writing music. Berklee College of Music brings together teachers and students from all over the world, and we use notation in a great variety of ways. This book presents our perspectives on what we have found to be the most commonly used practices in today's music industry, and what seems to be serving our community best. It includes a foreword by Matthew Nicholl, who was a long-time chair of Berklee's Contemporary Writing and Production Department. Whether you find yourself in a Nashville recording studio, Hollywood sound stage, grand concert hall, worship choir loft, or elementary school auditorium, this book will help you to create readable, professional, publication-quality notation. Beyond understanding the standard rules and definitions, you will learn to make appropriate choices for your own work, and generally how to achieve clarity and consistency in your notation so that it best serves your music.

Genres: Music

200 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2017

Reviews

[Nicolas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it's fair to assume, that people who read books about music notation do already work with music notation (and nowadays many of them software based).

For these types of people, this books spends to much time focusing on the obvious while not going deep enough into the rest. Case in point: ties & dots. They basically just get one page after which you know what they are. Thanks for that. But how e.g. should I best handle a tie going in to a repeat with two different endings? How should I handle ties on large chord clusters? What if only some of those notes need to be tied and the rest changes into a melodic line?

And that's the type of information I was looking for. Answering "design choices" that my notation program can't or won't just solve for me out of the box. This book does contain a few interesting points. A key point restated I really liked and never thought about was not crossing the imaginary bar between 2&3 to make it easier to feel the pulse for the performer. But it was just not enough to make it a really great book to be honest.

So I feel like this is the right book if you find yourself in the extremely uncommon situation of wanting to know more about music notation, while not having much experience with it so far.

PS: "A Comprehensive Guide" is definitely the wrong wording for a 180 page book out of which 40 feel like they are spend on explaining to you what a note is...

[mirabilos]

From the Amazon book preview, I’m not impressed. Short and focussed on only the modern thing, and, of course, not accounting for vocalists.

There’s a couple of pages I’d probably like to read, but it’s not worth buying the whole book since I have Gould on my shopping wishlist (I already have the ability to peek into Gould’s occasionally, and while she’s also a bit too modern on the occasion I found her more agreeable).

This is not a full review. I’ve only read a couple of pages of this one, and several couples of pages of Gould’s, yet. Shelving this mostly because it was a musician forum’s rec.

[Chris Morrow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a Berklee grad myself, I may be a bit biased in liking this book so much. That said, having read more than a few of Berklee's other theory books, this was by far the most entertaining. Feist's tongue-in-cheek humor is quite uncommon in these kinds of music-trade manuals. I fell out of my chair laughing when the author described what to expect when you write a double coda. Anticipate confusion indeed....