During the past week I started laying out the notation for Black Crow via the Cubase score editor. As I have’nt used the score editor for quite some time it took me a while to figure out how to do a few things again such as sorting the staff spacings and A3 print size. From what I’ve heard its not half as intuitive or fully featured as Sibelius or Finale but I think it’ll do the trick for what I need it to do: writing/printing top lines for session players and guitar TAB/notation for my acoustic material (tunes for voice and guitar). As I have feck all experience with this I’m using the song book from O’ Brother Where Art Thou as a formatting guide. I was thinking of notating in A4 but seeing as I have a decent enough A3 printer I thought I might as well space things out some more and include a treble clef version of the melody and chords above the TAB. By rights this should be the notated voice line but seeing as the song is half rapping/half singing I didn’t think there was much point in it. The other benefit to notating to A3 is that it will give me more margin space for adding in my own illustrations based on some of the elements in the song, something similar to this :)
As soon as I started adding in the lyrics I realized the font size is going to be an issue, its not small enough (9pts minimum in cubase) for me to fit in enough words per note! Due to the nature of the material I write the lyrics do flow quite fast in some sections. If I don’t figure out another way of getting smaller font sizes in Cubase I’ll have to import the score into Photoshop and add the fonts in there instead.
