#061. How to Write Easy-to-Read Handwritten Sheet Music 1

Recently, anyone can easily create sheet music that looks just like what is published.

However, have you ever encountered a disappointing piece of sheet music where you felt, 'Something is hard to read...'? It looks just like professionally published and bound sheet music, but something is different.

Even though it is printed music created using fonts like those used by major publishers, it is somehow hard to read because some rules regarding spatial balance and positioning for writing sheet music are not being followed. For example, for instruments commonly used in wind bands and orchestras, dynamic markings are placed below the staff. On the other hand, most tempo instructions are above the staff, and rehearsal numbers are also above. If these positions were reversed, it would likely become a very difficult-to-read score where many people would overlook various pieces of information. Can you read the following sheet music?

This is terrible. How difficult it is to read.

Even if we don't know the specific rules for how to write sheet music, as we look at many scores, we unconsciously predict that 'that is written there' as we read. Therefore, when unexpected symbols are written in unexpected positions, it causes problems like overlooking or misreading. Hard-to-read sheet music uses energy (which is essentially unnecessary) just to read it, which can affect the quality of the performance.

Aural Training Lessons

I started writing sheet music when I began aiming to enter a music college. I say 'started writing' in a rather grand way, but the reality was that the music college entrance exam included 'aural training' (some music colleges and majors do not have aural training exams).

Aural training is an exam where you transcribe melodies or chords you hear into sheet music, and I was very bad at this. I started getting involved in music when I joined the wind band in my first year of junior high school, so for the first year or so, I played the trumpet without being able to read sheet music. Throughout junior high school, I read sheet music with a fairly rough understanding, and every time I received a new piece of music, I would listen to the audio source to memorize it, and I got by with the brute-force method of playing the instrument while having it memorized.

How to Write Sheet Music

A person at that level decided in their first year of high school that they wanted to go to music college, and when I started aural training in lessons, there was no way I could do it. I was really struggling, so I thought that to improve my level of perfection even a little, I would acquire the 'skill to quickly write clean sheet music that won't be misunderstood.' It feels like my direction was a bit off, but that was when I encountered 'How to Write Sheet Music' by Naohisa Senda (Ongaku no Tomo Sha).

I think this book is already out of print, but it was a guidebook for writing sheet music using a 'music pen (calligraphy pen)' that was widely used in the era when there was no (or it wasn't common) music notation software, and I bought it because it also touched on writing with a pencil at the end of the book.

Music Pen

You might not have a clear idea of what sheet music written with a music pen is, but if you are an adult, you might understand if I say it's like the old-style sheet music from Music Eight for wind bands. The music notation software Finale (which will come up again later) also has a jazz font, and you can create sheet music that looks like it was written with a music pen. There are still quite a few big band scores written with music pens.

And while looking at this book, I wanted to try writing sheet music using not just a pencil but a music pen, so when I was in high school, I found a music pen for sale at Yamaha and bought it.

A music pen has a shape like a line marker with a straight tip, and it becomes thin or thick depending on the angle at which you draw. Using this, you can draw note heads and beams thick, and stems thin.

However, this pen is difficult to get used to. I couldn't write well at all. I had no choice but to write a lot and get used to it, but this was incredibly fun, and even without being asked, I rewrote all the part scores for my junior high school's school anthem and created scores for music that only had part scores.

Writing is fun, but there were many times when my enthusiasm dropped all at once. Mistakes, writing errors.

If it were a pencil, I could erase it quickly with an eraser, but since a music pen is ink, that's not possible. So, I would use a method of cutting and pasting staff paper of the same size to rewrite it, but this is very troublesome. It's my fault for making mistakes, but because of this, I gradually stopped using it.

Encounter with Finale

I was already a music college student at the time, around 1996, when a friend told me that I could create sheet music that looked like published scores using PC software called Finale. I couldn't sit still, and although it's very embarrassing to admit, I begged my parents to buy me a PC. By the way, at that time, Finale was Mac-only software, so I remember getting a series called PowerMac. This was the start of me being an Apple user ever since. Conversely, I have never used Windows, and I have so little knowledge of how to operate it that I get stuck just trying to input text. I don't even know how to convert hiragana to katakana.

Well, as expected, I got hooked on Finale, and even though no one asked me to, I enjoyed the inexplicable act of inputting and printing published scores I found everywhere. However, before long, I wasn't satisfied with just copying them, and I wanted to try arranging them myself. The biggest reason I started arranging was that Finale allowed me to play back what I input, making it easy to get an image of the finished product.

Without any know-how on arranging, I would create brass quintet scores, drag my college friends into playing them, and then be dumbfounded by my own terrible arrangements. I repeated this many times, so my friends must have been annoyed.

Hard to read even though it's printed

Now, setting aside the talk about arranging, there was one thing that bothered me while using Finale. That is the point I wrote at the beginning: the sheet music ends up being "somehow hard to read..." The reason, as I already wrote, is that the spatial balance and the positions of the symbols go against the rules. To make sheet music easy to read, it is important to aim for a state where information flows into the eyes without stress.

I wasn't aiming to become a professional music engraver, but when you are involved in music, including for memos, you end up writing sheet music quite frequently. Therefore, I would like to talk about the points for writing readable sheet music with a pencil and the rules for writing sheet music.

…Or so I thought, but the introduction has become long, so I will talk about it next time.
Since sheet music is relevant to everyone involved in music, I would be happy if people other than trumpet players would also take a look.

See you next time!

Akira Ogiwara