TubeNet

A local church music director wants to put together a brass ensemble for the Christmas services. He wants to use the basic hymnal SATB arrangements, but isn't looking forward to transposing the trumpet and French horn parts. He envisions scanning the music to something like a PDF file, importing it to the right computer program and having it transpose the parts, then printing them out.

So I told him I'd post the question on TubeNet- if any group of people would know of a program that can do this, we would........

Thanks in advance!

Ain't no such critter.

Even scanning into a notation program like Finale or Sibelius, you only get 80-90% accuracy, and then only if you have clean, high resolution originals. So you end up having to spend a LOT of time proof-reading to make sure all the notes imported correctly BEFORE you do the transposition. It'll be a heck of a lot easier (and cheaper if you factor in the cost of the time spent scanning, proofing, transposing, and printing) just to buy a set of quintet books.

Check out Caroler's Favorites. A complete set runs around $50. Not bad for 125 carols plus a few Thanksgiving songs and 8 additional arrangements. Plus, they include suggestions for adapting the carols for other instrumentation. My church's brass 5tet, woodwind, mixed wind, and string ensembles, and orchestra has been using them for years. You'll need to order Part 1 Bb, Part 2 Bb, Part 3 F, Part 4 C (BC), and Part 5 C (BC) for a standard 5tet instrumentation. If Parts 4 and/or 5 in Bb are going to be covered/doubled by a eupher who only reads TC, you'll need to order the Bb version for that part.

What hymnal are you using? I think the entire UMC hymnal is online as midi files. Others may be as well. That would save you the scanning part.

MIDI files can be downloaded easily and can be opened with most notation software such as Sibelius, Finale, etc. From there it is easy to transpose and edit.

We have a quintet that plays from the SA charts for the holidays.

The crowd always gripes about how short the tunes are...only a minute or so each.

Unless you just repeat them mindlessly...

DDG

As noted earlier, scans are error prone. By the time you edit them, you could have just entered them into a score program (Sibelius,Finale, etc) by hand. The program will take care of the transposition after you decide which instrument to assign to each part.

how may carols are oyu playing. It cant take more than 15 minutes to write out a few hymn parts. it would take much longer than that to do all the scanning and editing.
k

Borrow a C trumpet and ditch the F horn. Use a tuba and trombone to pick up the bass clef parts and read the tunes right out of the hymnal.

Thanks, all- I've sent him a link to the thread..... some good ideas here.

If you are going to be doing more transposing in the future, then it may very well be worth while to get scanning software, etc. You will need two separate software programs to get the job done.

1. Sharpeye2 is the best scanning software I know of for music conversion. It isn't all that expensive, and it USUALLY reads with a 95% accuracy. This is a Windows only program.
2. It works with Finale and Sibelius both I believe. I use it with Finale. Since a lot of people already have access to one or the other of these two programs then it isn't very expensive to set this up.

On average, it takes me about 15 minutes to convert a movement, from a modern advanced tuba solo with piano accompaniment, to a Finale file. There is a learning curve as with any software, so this is why I say it would likely save you time if you are planning to do more of the same in the future. Sharpeye2 is very good at note accuracy, dynamics and style markings. You will need to proof and edit in Sharpeye2 before converting to Finale, and then do some final editing in Finale before printing.