Recording - April 2018 - 20

A SONG OF
CONVENIENCE:
Cool Tools For
The Songwriter
Speed your songwriting along with these handy resources
By Samantha Blanchard
In today's world of modern technology, creating music has
never been easier. While many of us still remember a time
when making a record meant getting into a car and traveling
to a prohibitively-priced recording facility, the last 20 years
have afforded any after-school jam band with a few bucks the
ability to make stellar-sounding recordings in the comfort of
their own closets.
But while the tools have advanced, at times it's seemed like
our natural ability to write songs has regressed. In 2007,
Atlanta-based record producer Polow da Don was the recipient of
some intense backlash after the release of Usher's "Love in This
Club". Beat-making aficionados all over the Internet brought
the heat after it was discovered that an unaltered stock loop
from Apple Garageband had been used to create the main
melody of the track. To this day, a quick spin around YouTube
will produce countless "Polow EXPOSED" hate videos.
When all is said and done, though, one can't help but wonder
if all that harsh judgment is really warranted. It's true that
many of our gadgets have taken most of the hard work out of
songwriting... but isn't it also true that, given a long enough
timeline, pretty much everything used in modern composition
would be seen as lazy to someone? What would John Bonham
have thought about Drumagog, for example? What would
Ella Fitzgerald have thought about Melodyne?
The secret to songwriting is to use tools that speed along
the process of creation without handing off the essentials of a
song to someone else. With that in mind, here are four tools
favored by modern songwriters and composers that would
leave our musical forefathers in awe.

NOTEFLIGHT

Before the advent of the printing press, the struggle of the
15th-century songwriter wasn't limited to hunting for ideas.
Composing a piece of music meant readying your inkwell if
you didn't want your masterpiece to fly out of your head!
Long before that, the ancient Greeks were finding clever
ways to document their ideas. Unearthed from a small city
near Turkey in the late 1800s, the Seikilos Epitaph is the oldest
example of a complete musical transcription. It exists on a
stele-a heavy, cylindrical piece of marble often used as a
gravestone. Its notation, in the form of old Greek text syllables,
is playable even today. So as Seikilos chiseled away at his
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RECORDING April 2018

giant chunk of marble, imagine his bewilderment if he'd have
seen something like Noteflight.
Noteflight (noteflight.com) is a cloud-based transcription program
with multiple membership tiers. For seasoned players with minimal
experience writing out scores, it's a welcome shortcut, but for anyone just wanting to take some of the tedium out of notating musical
compositions, it's a powerful tool. See Fig. 1 on the next page.
To join, one can sign up for the free Noteflight Basic account
or choose from two paid membership types: Noteflight Premium or Noteflight Learn. A Basic account allows users to create
scores from imported XML or MIDI files, or from scratch using
the notation toolbar or virtual keyboard at the top of the screen.
Completed scores can be exported, shared directly to social
media, or featured on Noteflight's public forums. A Premium
account offers essentially the same thing, but for a few bucks a
month it grants users access to what is perhaps the platform's
biggest selling point: realtime notation.
The realtime notation feature in Noteflight gives composers the
ability to record directly into the program via any external source,
while transcription is written simultaneously on the screen. That
transcription can then be edited, rearranged, or changed to different instrumentation. This same feature is available to students if
you're an educator with a Noteflight Learn account, which allows
an instructor to create groups, lessons, and integrate seamlessly
with Google Classroom. Students can then access their accounts
from a desktop or any mobile device.
While it may feel foreign to some of us creating and storing
our musical works in other ways, whether on paper, our home
computer, or in the cloud, the new way of working is worth
getting used to once you consider the vast applications a platform
like Noteflight can empower.

MIXED IN KEY

In the days of the Industrial Revolution, the music business saw
some of its most formative years. The collection of music publishers
and songwriters in early 20th-century New York came to be
known as Tin Pan Alley-the widely acknowledged birthplace of
music publishing. At that time the primary focus of a publishing
house was to push the sale of sheet music. Songwriters from all
over the world would storm the offices of the Brill Building,
peddling tunes they had written alone in the hopes of getting printed.
With the onset of copyright law, many songwriters banded
together in an effort to gain bargaining power with the bigger,

http://www.noteflight.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - April 2018