Ok, lots to talk about here with music. Before I dive in, I’ll mention that the weather has gotten a bit warmer. It’s still down in the 20’s at night, but it’s creeping up above freezing for a couple hours in the daytime and last week’s snow is beginning to disappear. Still, I’m not going start biking again until the roads are clear and clean.
First off, my jazz group Spacecats has a show coming up on April 2nd at a place called Jazz on Main in Mount Kisco. We’re hoping to build on the momentum of our last gig, add a bunch of new material and sharpen up the songs already in our repertoire. More on this as the date draws closer.
One of the songs we’re working up these days is Son of the Sun. This is a fairly long and complicated song with lots of changes in meter and open jamming sections linked up with thru-composed parts. I feel really lucky and grateful that the Spacecats want to tackle such a challenging song, and in fact we’re gonna knock it out of the park. But I needed a better chart than my old hand-written one to get the music across to the group. My drummer Rick suggested I try an app called MuseScore, a notation package from the sam people who make Audible. In the past I’ve used Finale, which I found hugely slow and cumbersome although hugely feature-rich, as well as things like the built-in notation for midi in ProTools, which I found quick but not very good. MuseScore hits the sweet spot in the middle, rich and full featured enough for jazz charts, but pretty fast too. It’s not tied to a midi sequence or performance (although you can import a midi file); the focus is a hundred percent on the notation, and you can do things like add repeats, fermatas, a D.S, or coda, hash marks for soloing over, and chord symbols. This is a big step up from writing out charts by hand. Hopefully now I can write out and teach my band a bunch more songs that I’d been afraid might be too much to try and notate. So here I present to you my very first lead sheet made in MuseScore. Enjoy!
