For vocal jazzers who might be interested...my standard order of work for writing an adaptation chart the the one I'm doing on "A Case of You" at the moment: (I'm procrastinating at step 8 to do this).
1. Communicate with the commissioning director about their vision for the chart, including ranges, any soloists to be featured, difficulty level, orchestration, length, extent to which creativity should be used in the arranging, etc.
2. Determine the key and tempo and create a Sibelius layout of the parts to be written.
3. Transcribe bass line and the form, add double-bars and rehearsal letters.
4. Transcribe the lead (solo line), with lyrics (because I hate doing that later, and it helps keep organized in the rest of the process).
5. Lift key elements of the orchestration and place in appropriate voices (could include piano/guitar stuff, if that's in the tune...in this chart, those aren't used).
6. Fill out the rest of the harmony for the whole chart, keeping with whatever the voicing is supposed to be and adapting the voicings to fit vocal ensemble sonorities and voice leading considerations, as needed for the commissioning group. Disregard breathing spots in this step.
7. Add breaths to the chart as needed, and as artfully as possible (sometimes layering by section to avoid full ensemble breaks).
8. Write a drum part, giving just as much information as is needed, and no more. Use slashes, cues, rhythmic notation and text.
9. Add all wordless vocal syllables, using the time-tested "oo" "oh" "ah" vowel progression to create dynamic and tonal color, with consonants for articulation, of course, and others like "way" for extra color and contrast. Possibly utilize the lyric for backgrounds (although I generally avoid this).
10. Add all dynamics, slurs and articulations to the chart.
11. If not already done (and in this case, it's not), write in the chord changes on all melodic and chorded parts, including (most definitely) on the top line of the vocal part (to help the director and the students in the learning process, if for no other reason).
12. Lay out the score (I'm only recently creating these for vj charts), the vocal part (which may include piano or other instruments), and rhythm section and horn parts (as needed). Make everything look lovely and avoid collisions and weird, out-of-place items on the page. Lately, I've been avoiding using D.S.'s like the plague, especially since I'm sure we'll all be on tablet devices in three years anyway.
13. Create the pdf document of the pre-demo recording version of the chart and send to the director for perusal, meanwhile, start preparing the Digital Performer file for making the demo. (Create all needed tracks, probably from a template with plug-ins already somewhat tweaked for the job. Also, create a conductor track that sets up the click and any tempo/meter changes).
14. Play and edit the MIDI instrumental parts, and bounce/print them so I can turn off the soft-synths to save RAM during audio tracking.
15. Sing the guys' parts, ususally stacking the vocal parts three times, panning one left, one mid, one center, and summing to busses for each part, where I'll compress and control vocal EQ.
16. Export the guys parts and do pitch and timing editing so they sound lovely and clean. I use Celemony's Melodyne for this step, and it's invaluable because of it's ease of use and non-wacky sounding pitch and timing correction.
17. Import the cleaned-up guys' parts into Digital Performer so Julia (who won't need pitch correction) has something solid on top of which she can stack her parts.
18. Record Julia (sometimes she runs her own sessions, as we did on the Maria project).
18. Do edge editing and any last tweaks on Julia's tracks before mixing.
20. Mix it.
21. Check the mix off-axis and on various speakers, then bounce the final version.
22. Create rhythm track and part tracks.
23. Make changes to the chart to reflect what was done in the demo session.
24. Upload everything to my server.
25. Send the whole package to the commissioning director.
-- That's, at least, what I'm doing NOW, with this adaptation project. I've done many adaptations over the years...these are charts that put someone else's arrangement in a vocal jazz setting. I've most often called them arrangements, but to be fair, the job was really making it work for the vocal jazz idiom, and...doing all the stuff listed above. There's plenty to do, for sure, and I really love doing it, thankfully.
There are more steps for pure arrangements and original compositions, but the nuts and bolts of the technical side of things are all the same as are listed above. With these, though, there's more freedom, creatively, of course, so major changes might be made late in the process that cause a lot to be redone again. With adaptations, it's usually pretty obvious that the chart will work, once it's initially done, and only minor changes are needed after the demo's done.
Hope you've enjoyed this peek into my writing studio!
Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 10:15PM