Transcription: Flight For Freedom - 01

OK, first complete transcription using Musescore, doing basically everything I need it to do for this site. Same recording I've been working with, Flight For Freedom by Oliver Nelson, from his record Skull Session, with Shelly Manne on drums. There was some dispute over whether it might have been Jim Gordon instead— we'll listen to one of his tracks from this record and check out the difference. 

This is the first minute of the track: 

I think he's using a four piece set plus a couple of concert toms. Mostly rides on the hihat, and he hits that ugly sounding swish cymbal quite often. And a crash cymbal, and he gets onto the ride cymbal at the end. Towards the end there's an unusual percussion sound I can't identify— I think he's playing it, but it could be someone else. He did quirky stuff like that at times. 

I really want my thing of notating half-open hihats with a tenuto mark to catch on. 

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Check out this track with Jim Gordon for comparison: 

Gordon hits harder, and is more aggressive, has a little sharper edge as a pure groove player— he seems more polished for this kind of music. Manne perhaps makes some more unusual choices, and is looser. They're both playing with a lot of forward momentum, I can't define the difference in quality of groove between them— Manne feels more “behind the beat”, but I'm not sure that's accurate at all. These are pretty nuanced impressions— they're both right on it, and have done a thousand sessions at this point, and are great. I enjoy Manne's playing more, he's warmer; Gordon is like a machine for this kind of playing. Not to say he sounds machine-like— do you dig the distinction? 

Feelings and impressions are hilarious— the words that come into your head may not be the actual thing happening on the recording. 

Listen to the rest of the record. Gordon plays on Skull Session, Dumpy Mama, and Japanese Garden.
 

Musescore notes: 

I've actually got it pretty close to where I want it, with the appearance of my template, and with using it. Two or three days of fussing around is actually not bad. 

Stem length
A lingering visual annoyance was the general stubby appearance of the notes. Under format > style > notes I saw that the shorten stems box was checked by default. I set the shortened stem length to 2.95sp— a little shorter than the default non-shortened stem length.  

Work modes

Navigating the various work modes are still a little obscure. I'll be hitting the Esc key often to switch from note entry mode— which doesn't always act the way I expect it to— to doing general stuff mode, where I can select measures and individual notes/articulations/text to do something with them.  

Note entry
Entering notes I use the keys a lot— hotkeys for the major drum sounds, arrows for navigating, number pad for rhythm value, + shift key to enter two notes in unison. For drum sounds that don't have a hotkey, I highlight the note/rest then mouse click on the thing I want in the key at the bottom of the window. For anything else I use the mouse to select it. 

Using the arrow keys, sometimes moving L-R selects the next note or articulation in a stack, sometimes not. 

Exporting
Really easy. For some reason my version of Finale sucked for exporting pdfs and jpegs— I had to use a pdf printer app (cutepdf, it's quite useful) to export to pdf, and then actually upload it to a web site (online2pdf.com, also quite useful) to convert it to a jpeg. Really dumb, and time consuming. 

Musescore has a nice friendly PUBLISH tab at the top of the screen that lets you output it any number of ways quickly and easily. 

Note entry is the main thing I need to get sorted out. I'll do a dedicated post for that in the next few days. Or not— I'm not sure how helpful my personal notes will be for people. Just read this page on entering notes and this page on navigating the document. 

Very occasional quote of the day: practicing vs. playing

Most important thing on this site: 

DL: How important is it to play, and how important is it to practice on your own?

SM: It's more important to play. I've always felt that playing is the most important thing. You learn something every time you play. It's the experience of playing that, over the years, makes you a good player. Under any conditions, whether it's Lawrence Welk, a wedding, or a bar-mitzvah, you learn something that can be used someplace down the line.

- Shelly Manne, Modern Drummer interview by Dave Levine, 1981

Transcription: Shelly Manne - What Laurie Likes

Here's Shelly Manne playing a funk jam— What Laurie Likes, by Art Pepper, from Pepper's album Living Legend. This is really just to get you to listen to Charlie Haden— that's a bassist— who is AWESOME on this whole thing. The drumming is great too though. Longer transcription than usual, because Mr. Manne was kind, and this was an easy performance to write out.

I have a number of notes on this one: 

This isn't a mono-volume funk jam. At different times Manne plays a 2/2 funk groove, or a fast 4 groove, or running 8th notes, or he'll improvise on the cymbals, or on the hihats. Occasionally he'll play soloistic stuff on the snare drum. He always sounds like he's going somewhere— much of the time he's building or backing off. He's not waiting for the soloist to lead on that; he's making it happen on his own, acting as a conductor. 

The 16th note fills usually crescendo. I think a lot of us do that routinely, but it's not the only way to do it. A funk drummer might take more of a bam bam approach, with the fills at basically an even volume all the way through. That's stronger for maintaining the groove. You can hear that done greatly by Ndugu Leon Chancler, or crudely by Ginger Baker. Manne's fills usually crescendo, but they don't necessarily end with a big cymbal crash on 1. There are relatively few actual crashes here.

Manne often plays bass drum through 16th note fills. I've noticed several 70s LA guys do this— Jeff Porcaro and John Guerin, for example. I don't think this is just a carryover from jazz drumming. The music settles a little bit when you come off the cymbals, and playing the bass drum keeps the intensity of the groove through the fills. Something to think about when playing groove music. 

We're not hearing a ton of funk vocabulary; there are a few basic moves he uses again and again. The three-8th note RRL pattern, or even plain old RLRL played between the hihat and snare drum; a cinquillo rhythm on the cymbal when he's grooving. Much of this is not unlike things on my EZ Tresillo Orchestrations page, or what we get from my cut time funk drill.  

There's a lot of open hihat here, usually with a half-open sound, indicated with a tenuto mark. 

As a personal taste thing— to me many of the 16th notes are kind of gratuitous. The groove is strongest when he's just doing 8th notes and quarter notes. Drummers generally always want to go to double time, to the hand-to-hand stuff, to prove this is a jazz performance, and the result is... not that great. Here, even with a lot of improvising and playing around, the 8ths and quarters still sound better. And Charlie Haden doesn't need to play a lot of 16th notes to sound F— KILLER. We'll talk more about this another time.

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Groove o' the day: Shelly Manne — Way Out West

Here are a couple of very famous things by Shelly Manne, from the album Way Out West by Sonny Rollins. Sonny could be a little perverse in his tune selections, often choosing things that would be considered hokey or uninteresting by many jazz musicians; and here, on the occasion of making a record in LA, he did a couple of cowboy songs. Manne, who was by all accounts a funny, creative cat, chose to use a woodblock to give those numbers a little bit of a horsey flavor.

Swing the 8th notes on Johnny Mercer's I'm An Old Cowhand:

On Wagon Wheels he plays a little backwards hemiola thing:

Audio after the break: