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Post by Kapitan on Feb 3, 2022 23:32:20 GMT
In the early-to-mid '90s I became aware of a glorious tome colloquially called "The Beatle Bible." It's a Hal Leonard book actually called "Beatles: The Complete Scores" and it is spectacular. It is what it sounds like: every song recorded and released by the Beatles written out in notation, not just in piano reduction or guitar tab, but in full.
Now, it isn't technically a perfectly accurate transcription of what happened. Rock musicians weren't necessarily playing every verse of a song with four verses the exact same way every time, but the transcribers weren't notating that some barre chord George played in the third verse had a more audible high Bb or something. But generally speaking, we've got the drums, the bass, the guitar parts, the vocal melodies and harmonies, the lyrics, the horn parts, the piano or organ, and so on.
One of my dreams has always been a Beach Boys Bible. It would be a tremendously difficult effort. Considering the complexity of so many of the recordings, I'd imagine it would dwarf the 1,000+ pages in the Beatles version, even if covering that same time period.
That said ... I'd buy it. For sure.
Does anyone know whether such a thing has ever been attempted? Does anyone have an idea what kind of cost it would take to fund the creation of such a work (*cough cough* joshilynhoisington)? I'd assume publishers wouldn't be thrilled to fund the effort, but I'd also bet they'd accept and fund one for print and distribution if its creation had been funded.
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Post by joshilynhoisington on Feb 4, 2022 0:51:55 GMT
Well, I am currently working on such a project. I am happy to do it, as I have been, for free, but obviously getting some funding would be great. My plan has been to do Select cuts from Today, Summer Days, all of Pet Sounds and most of the Smile tracks, and then start shopping it around and getting some extra funding to properly set the engraving in a professional way. I'd assume I'd need to get Beach Boys or Iconic or BriMel involved somewhere to cover copyright stuff, so I'm hoping my old connections to the band come in handy at that point.
I'm doing pretty well, with roughed in outlines of a lot of tracks. It is very time consuming, though, and I really only trust myself and a very small group of people to get it right. You can hear on youTube a few "recreations" of Beach Boys tracks that are great in spirit but not very accurate as to what is actually played on the recordings.
I think it's important to notate Brian's best arrangements for the sake of study and preservation; if we ever somehow lose all electricity or something in a nuclear holocaust I'd hate to lose record of these great pieces. (And that's true of music beyond the Beach Boys.)
I am mostly saving my work to be revealed as part of the whole oeuvre, but I'd be willing to share one here so people can see what it looks like. And if anybody knows somebody at Hal Leonard or something, hit me up!
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Post by joshilynhoisington on Feb 4, 2022 0:57:53 GMT
I'll also add that a huge piece in getting this right is getting access to individual discrete multitracks --depending on the track, it's the only way to get close to ensuring accuracy, and I'm hesitant to publish anything I'm not >95% sure about. So we'll see if I can make that happen.
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Post by Kapitan on Feb 4, 2022 1:50:28 GMT
What's your preferred method of receiving donations?
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Post by joshilynhoisington on Feb 4, 2022 2:08:40 GMT
Oh, that's very kind. I haven't "officially" launched my website yet, but it's there and has a donation portal: www.joshilyn.com/donateThat will go into the Beach Boys musicology fund. And incidentally, the website will be the place where I will put out snippets of my transcriptions to accompany the forthcoming videos, so look for that at some point this year when it all comes together.
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Post by joshilynhoisington on Feb 4, 2022 2:25:39 GMT
Here's a very roughed-in score for I'm Waiting for the Day, so you can see what most of my transcriptions look like at the moment: static1.squarespace.com/static/5ff9d99d6bbc7c34529a6785/t/61fc8d6fbaa4d754121981eb/1643941231464/IWFTD+Roughed+in+score+3+Feb+2022.pdfThe most important thing with these is to get the notes, I have not gone back over to make everything enharmonically proper, sometimes the rhythms are weirdly rendered (ties, etc), and more funky/bluesy performance conventions are not accurately rendered. Sometimes in the conversion to pdf, things shift around in an unsatisfactory way, as well, which is annoying. It's all there, though, just needs careful editing and further consideration of how to notate certain pop/rock idioms that do not lend themselves to perfect notational representation.
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Post by Kapitan on Feb 4, 2022 18:50:43 GMT
This will sound silly, but I get a kick out of your choices in trying to spell out the non-word background vocals: "ah be do bi doo" and "duhp" and the like. I say that because when I'm trying to discuss parts I like, I struggle with it. "Is that an 'aaaah' or an 'ahhhh?' A 'ditttit' or a 'diddit' or a 'dit dit?'"
More seriously, it's loads of fun looking through this score. It's precisely what I was talking about above (except that it's only one of what ought to be hundreds of songs).
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Post by joshilynhoisington on Feb 4, 2022 19:20:19 GMT
It can be fun! I've thought about using the IPA for that, but then we get into super pretentious territory. It ensures accuracy though!
"Run, Run, We-ooh"? "run - run, reooo"? "ɹʌn, ɹʌn, ʋiu"?
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Post by joshilynhoisington on Feb 8, 2022 18:32:29 GMT
I've been thinking about doing a sort of promo video for this idea. Anybody have any thoughts on what might make a good sort of "general pitch" to drum up some interest for random YouTube-nauts?
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Post by Kapitan on Feb 8, 2022 20:33:56 GMT
I've been thinking about doing a sort of promo video for this idea. Anybody have any thoughts on what might make a good sort of "general pitch" to drum up some interest for random YouTube-nauts? I wish I did. As of now, I don't. That said, I'll think about what might appeal.
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sambfc
Denny's Drums
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Post by sambfc on Mar 4, 2022 21:03:49 GMT
This is so cool and something I'd have died for a few years back when I had time to devote to such things.
I am not a particularly proficient musician at all, but a long long time ago I tried to pick out the different parts of I'm Waiting For The Day and record (and bounce) them to digital 3-track (sampling rate was 32 kHz (!))...very much an amateur attempt, maybe some time soon I can dig it out and see if I got any parts down at least fairly accurately.
Surely Darian or perhaps Probyn would be very willing to support a project like this is any way they can?
As a starter, I suppose a promo could try to connect with what I suspect is a fairly widespread frustration, that most available sheet music comes in that limited piano reduction form.
I have a Hal Leonard book somewhere that at least tries to be a proper guitar tab book that somewhat transcribes actual guitar parts for the early guitar driven songs. I was quite excited to find something like but get to Good Vibrations or something and again it becomes a case of "forget it" (2nd to 14th fret slides for the theremin part...why bother).
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