SHEET MUSIC The Printed Page. Warren Park Music can produce for you any type and form of sheet music for any purpose. Using the Finale 2003 program and a GCC Elite 1200 dots-per-inch printer, we can transform your manuscript (entering the notes into the computer manually) or standard MIDI file into professional-quality sheet music of remarkable clarity, matching what used to be called 'engraved' music. These printed master sheets can then be used, for example, as demo publications for the promotion of your music to the world. Or, with the addition of creative design work (which we do not provide) you will be able to use these printed master sheets to produce and publish your own music at a commercial printing company for sale in music stores. The print quality and appearance will match anything that is currently available for sale commercially. With choral and vocal music, words of the text are carefully aligned with the corresponding notes on the page to present maximum clarity. Piano and other instrumental accompaniment lines beneath the vocal parts are also carefully matched. Your compositions and songs for any type of music, soloists through small ensembles through large performance groups, can all be rendered accurately on the printed page for use in future performances.
PERFORMANCE PARTS Once the whole score for your composition is entered into the computer, extracting instrumental parts for the performers is nearly automatic. Special care will be taken to make these performance parts clear, readable and pleasing to the eye. Page turns, multi-measure rests, dynamics and articulations are all carefully planned to eliminate confusion, visual crowding and performance glitches. These performance parts will be identical in content to the score they have been drawn from. The pages themselves can be whatever dimensions you specify, and in whatever format you choose.If you prefer the 'booklet' format, we are able to produce saddle-stitched (folded down the middle and stapled) booklets of any size up to 8 1/2" X 11" (using 11" X 17" sheets). Some performers prefer the piano part (or other longer instrumental part) to be printed on two 11" X 17" sheets bound together lengthwise, which allows four 'pages' to be visible at one time, eliminating half the page turns. Common for orchestral musicians these days are parts that are printed in 10" X 13" size. Warren Park Music can work with this size, using the best available binding method, the VPC Music Master binding system (see below for details). Also available is the GBC plastic comb binding method (sizes other than 11" tall will need to be special ordered). Other types of binding with our printed sheets can be found through commercial copy and print shops.
MUSIC BOOKS Warren Park Music's computer-generated printed music samples can be used in music textbooks, instructional books, piano music collections, hymnals, graphics for posters, wherever the appearance of notes on a staff is called for. We are a small company that also likes working one-to-one with individuals who are creating their own projects. Are you writing a book on guitar playing? How to write for clarinet? Historic folk tunes from Appalachia? Original children's songs? Vocal techniques of the Balkans? American harmonica styles? Whatever you need music on the page for, we can help you.
LEAD SHEETS Lead sheets are printed music pages for songs with only the melody line, words and chord symbols printed. They are the most basic way for musicians and back-up players to be able to play your music. If you have some tunes you have written that you want performers to try out or perform, this is the minimum you'll need. Performers rarely learn songs other people have written strictly from a recording, solely by sound. Back-up musicians, guitarists, pianists, horn players, especially if they are non-classical players, can usually fake their way through songs by following the lead sheet, and inventing notes that fit with the melody and chords as they play along. For the untrained songwriter, this method is sometimes the only way to present his/her original songs to others at all. We at Warren Park Music generally can create for you a lead sheet from your recording, as long as you submit to us the words and the chord changes (names of the chords) that accompany them. This process works best when the performer/songwriter is able to play the music for us in person, which allows for questions and clarifications. Once we have committed your melody to the page, we can enter it into the computer and create a professional-looking printed lead sheets for you to pass out to performers to read.
BINDING SERVICES After you have made all the decisions about how you want your printed music to look, and once all the pages of sheet music are printed (either here at Warren Park Music or at a printing company), you will need to hold the pages together somehow. As mentioned above in 'Performance Parts,' there are several options. You may choose to create a booklet-format publication, where the pages are printed two-up, with two pages of music printed on a single sheet of paper and another two pages of music printed on the back side of that same sheet. Each sheet is then folded once down the middle, placed in a pile and stapled together at the fold (this method is called 'saddle stitching'). Of course, the printing is planned so that the pages are all in order once the booklet is put together. Our most common size for music books of this type is a finished size of 8 1/2" X 11," using 11" X 17" sheets of paper. Warren Park Music can also do short runs of GBC-bound books using the plastic combs you see all the time on brochures, reports and music books at the store. In this method, the printed pages are placed in a pile, holes are punched along the left edge and the plastic comb that holds the pages together is inserted in the holes. The finished book can be any size but is commonly eleven inches tall. For books that are different than 11" tall, specially ordered combs are required. Another type of binding that is available at Warren Park Music--and very few other places--is the VPC Music Master binding method, which makes use of a special type of tape to attach pages together and a unique machine to apply the tape. The finished product is a set of pages of any size attached together at the spine. This method is used especially for the performers' sheet music (see 'Performance Parts' above), and most often used in symphony orchestras these days for non commercially-produced sheet music. In other words, this is a system used by composers who want to have good quality, readable sheet music to present to the performers for any concert (or even for a play-through), but who have not yet been published by a commercial publisher (which would print the instrumental parts for you). The advantages of VPC Music Master binding system are that pages are silent when turned and they reliably lie completely flat as they are being played (nothing is worse than sheet music that wants to fold up or flip back to the previous page during the performance). This VPC binding is sometimes applied to piano parts (or other long instrumental parts) where two 11" X 17" sheets (with two pages of music each) are bound together length-wise to allow four pages of music to be visible at one time, thereby cutting the page turns in half. This generally is the maximum size that is useable on the music stands or piano music rack. Other types of binding for books or sheet music are available at commercial print shops.
CD BURNING, WORK WITH RECORDED MUSIC Have you a recording you would like make a demo CD from? We can help. If you are a composer or musician who wants to have other people hear your music or your performance, the best method these days is to get it into digital form and 'burn' it onto a CD. This produces the most realistic sound and highest fidelity, and virtually everyone owns a CD player now. We at Warren Park Music are able to produce up to 50 demo CDs of your music for distribution to performers who might be interested in taking on your music, or to interest music CD companies in making you one of their performance artists. If you want to make more than 50 CDs you should plan to go to a CD burning company that can produce, label, design, box and shrink-wrap everything for you (they often can make a small number of CDs to thousands). We can help you produce the master CD from which those others are burned. If you have DAT tapes, home-made CDs, cassette tapes (or some reel-to-reel tapes), we usually can get the music into the computer, where it becomes digitalized, and can be edited and cleaned up, audio-wise, using Pro Tools LE. If you have a raw recording of a studio session or a home recording session that you want to have edited down or even have individual spots edited together, we can help. We often can combine various 'takes' of the same tune into one smooth and mistake-free professional-sounding recording. Once the editing is completed to your satisfaction, the demo CDs or master CD can be burned right here. We have basic labeling software to print the stick-on labels for the demo CDs as well.
SYNTH PLAYBACK OF YOUR MUSIC Once you've written your music down (in a hand-done manuscript usually), we can enter the notes into the computer where the work to make it look like good sheet music takes place. If your music is already entered into the computer, all the better, we can usually make use of it, no matter how basic your work is. We can adapt your score for whatever instruments you specify. Sometimes this entails our making a basic arrangement of your music (see 'Arranging' under the 'Composition' heading). Once the music is spread out onto its designated staves in the computer, it is easy to assign individual synthesizer voices to each of those staves. This allows you to hear the music played back by the synthesizer just as you have written it, with the replication of the sounds of various instruments included. We have a Proteus 2000 synthesizer with orchestral instrument cards added which allows for fairly true-to-life recreation of the sounds of the violin, sax, trumpet, piano, bass, flute and everything else. We are able to make you a cassette copy of your music as played back by our synth, so you can make decisions about what improvements you may want to try in the way the music itself is written, or in the way the instruments are scored. This allows you to try out, and revamp, revise and polish the music to your satisfaction before actually asking live musicians to play it. In this way, when you want to record or perform your music, money can be saved by using musicians only for the polished end product, rather than for experimenting and trying things out. It's always good to know what your composition will sound like exactly as you've written it, before the sheet music score and parts are printed and handed out to the players. This synth playback option can be very helpful.
A UNIQUE RECORDING OPPORTUNITY FOR SOLO PERFORMERS This is an opportunity that soloists can take advantage of only by appointment in person in Minneapolis, MN. Warren Park Music owns a matched pair of Neumann KM184 microphones, a Digidesign 001 unit and a power Mac computer running ProTools LE which allow for fine digital recording directly into the computer. Solo acoustic instruments such as guitar, cello, fiddle etc. can produce fine recordings with this system. After editing of the sound files for the best combination of 'takes' (including careful editing out of mistakes as much as possible, and instant-by-instant recombination of the recorded music, as needed), the finished sound file can be bounced to disk to create an on-the-spot demo CD. This opportunity is especially rarified for performing pianists due to the availability of a one-of-a-kind restored antique Steinway concert grand piano, manufactured in 1877, when the Steinway company was only twenty-one years old. This is the time when Brahms, Listz, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky and Wagner were actively composing music. This piano is Steinway's first overstrung (bass strings crossing over treble strings) full iron plate grand piano, and in its restored condition it is a joy to play and hear. The piano has been restrung but the action, still original, has a little lighter touch than later Steinways. For a sample of this piano's sound, go to the 'Warren Park compositions' area of this website and listen to the sound sample of the piece called "Unexpected Changes Rag." The sound reflects the piano's unique character, including its quirks and slight aural imperfections. Recording sessions on this instrument need to be carefully planned, so advance reservations are required.
WE ARE A MEMBER OF ASCAP Warren Park Music is a publisher member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. As such, if you choose to contract with us, we are in a position, to serve as your 'publishing company' for the purposes of collection of royalties for performances and broadcasts.
WHAT WE DON'T PROVIDE For most of your musical service needs Warren Park Music will have something to offer, or be able to refer you to someone else who may be able to help. The following services cannot be provided by us: Design work for sheet music and CD labels and case inserts. We can print basic demo labels and case inserts for your CDs but they could not be considered saleable in that form. Likewise, a basic title page & cover for your sample of printed sheet music is available, but for commercial sales you will need to find professional design help (or do it yourself). Promotion and distribution of your sheet music or CDs is not our territory either. You will need to find a professional distributor of sheet music in order for the saleable finished product to reach music stores around the country for sale to the public. You will need to find a way to publicize the music and the CDs if you hope to become known, and there are professionals who can manage that sort of campaign. Publishing of your music is not what we do either, other than the steps already described for the production of the basic sheet music. We cannot invest any funds to help your sheet music or CD be printed, manufactured or sold; that will all be up to you. As mentioned above, if you choose to contract with us, we, as a member of ASCAP, can serve as your 'publisher' for the purpose of collecting royalties for your performances and broadcasts of your music.