Transcription: Flight For Freedom – 01

Posted on by Todd Bishop

OK, first complete transcription using Musescore, doing basically everything I need it to do for this site. Same recording I’ve been working with, Flight For Freedom by Oliver Nelson, from his record Skull Session, with Shelly Manne on drums. There was some dispute over whether it might have been Jim Gordon instead— we’ll listen to one of his tracks from this record and check out the difference. 

This is the first minute of the track: 

I think he’s using a four piece set plus a couple of concert toms. Mostly rides on the hihat, and he hits that ugly sounding swish cymbal quite often. And a crash cymbal, and he gets onto the ride cymbal at the end. Towards the end there’s an unusual percussion sound I can’t identify— I think he’s playing it, but it could be someone else. He did quirky stuff like that at times. 

I really want my thing of notating half-open hihats with a tenuto mark to catch on. 

Check out this track with Jim Gordon for comparison: 

Gordon hits harder, and is more aggressive, has a little sharper edge as a pure groove player— he seems more polished for this kind of music. Manne perhaps makes some more unusual choices, and is looser. They’re both playing with a lot of forward momentum, I can’t define the difference in quality of groove between them— Manne feels more “behind the beat”, but I’m not sure that’s accurate at all. These are pretty nuanced impressions— they’re both right on it, and have done a thousand sessions at this point, and are great. I enjoy Manne’s playing more, he’s warmer; Gordon is like a machine for this kind of playing. Not to say he sounds machine-like— do you dig the distinction? 
Feelings and impressions are hilarious— the words that come into your head may not be the actual thing happening on the recording. 
Listen to the rest of the record. Gordon plays on Skull Session, Dumpy Mama, and Japanese Garden.
 
Musescore notes: 

I’ve actually got it pretty close to where I want it, with the appearance of my template, and with using it. Two or three days of fussing around is actually not bad. 

Stem length
A lingering visual annoyance was the general stubby appearance of the notes. Under format > style > notes I saw that the shorten stems box was checked by default. I set the shortened stem length to 2.95sp— a little shorter than the default non-shortened stem length.  

Work modes
Navigating the various work modes are still a little obscure. I’ll be hitting the Esc key often to switch from note entry mode— which doesn’t always act the way I expect it to— to doing general stuff mode, where I can select measures and individual notes/articulations/text to do something with them.  
Note entry
Entering notes I use the keys a lot— hotkeys for the major drum sounds, arrows for navigating, number pad for rhythm value, + shift key to enter two notes in unison. For drum sounds that don’t have a hotkey, I highlight the note/rest then mouse click on the thing I want in the key at the bottom of the window. For anything else I use the mouse to select it. 
Using the arrow keys, sometimes moving L-R selects the next note or articulation in a stack, sometimes not. 
Exporting
Really easy. For some reason my version of Finale sucked for exporting pdfs and jpegs— I had to use a pdf printer app (cutepdf, it’s quite useful) to export to pdf, and then actually upload it to a web site (online2pdf.com, also quite useful) to convert it to a jpeg. Really dumb, and time consuming. 

Musescore has a nice friendly PUBLISH tab at the top of the screen that lets you output it any number of ways quickly and easily. 

Note entry is the main thing I need to get sorted out. I’ll do a dedicated post for that in the next few days. Or not— I’m not sure how helpful my personal notes will be for people. Just read this page on entering notes and this page on navigating the document. 

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