How do you annotate on sheet music?

iternabe · 2025-01-31T18:24:53+00:00

I am probably overly fussy on this. I need to alter the pedal marks on a piece in my paper book, but I don't want to make the markings permanent. Pencils a...

BartK

For this specific example, I would just ignore the pedalling and play it by ear, but I suppose you are asking more generally.

I never use anything else than pencil marks because my scores are too valuable to me. I normally cross out things I don't want and add my own annotations, which might be understandable only to me. It does get messy and sometimes I only write in a symbol or abbreviation to remember to play it my way but without crossing out any existing markings.

BartK

BTW, what's wrong with the indicated pedalling?

iternabe

BartK BTW, what's wrong with the indicated pedalling?

It muddies up the melody. Assuming the purpose of pedaling is to connect the chord changes, pedal only needs to be down before the chord change and that sounds much cleaner.

I suppose Faber is making the pedaling simpler for beginners. In doing so, in book 1 and 2 there are plenty of instances like this. My YouTube teachers changes it every time and explains why he does it.

iternabe

From my "How do you annotate on sheet music" thread:

BartK BTW, what's wrong with the indicated pedalling?

iternabe It muddies up the melody. Assuming the purpose of pedaling is to connect the chord changes, pedal only needs to be down before the chord change and that sounds much cleaner.

This is my (modified) pedaling. I probably put the pedal down still a bit too early and added some overtone to the last note before chord change. Still, I feel it's much better than muddying up the entire melody line by holding the pedal down through each entire measure.

rsl12

I've never heard of eraseable whiteout, but it certainly would be useful!

Here's my idea:

Put little pieces of white paper over the pedal markings. Use your phone to "scan" into a pdf (onedrive can do this). Adjust the contrast if necessary, and print.

iternabe

@twocats @rsl12 Since I recently downloaded ForScore, scanning is certainly an option. I am good at photoshop enough I won’t even need to cover anything during scanning. That said, pedaling is something I find needing changes often in lots of pieces in Faber book 1 and 2. Would be a lot of scanning, then.

iternabe

Just had an idea. Maybe I can write in the “Ped *” style of pedaling mark and ignore the original? That might be easier to read than what I am doing now?

pianoloverus

iternabe You could just write any new pedaling in any form below the original and play that.

iternabe

Related story: I recently found a set of 6 volumes of Bartok’s Mikrokosmos at a great price. The first book was full of ball pen marking: fingering, dynamics, counting, even dates of assignment on each piece. Luckily, book 2 and the rest are as clean as new 😉

WieWaldi

iternabe The first book was full of ball pen marking: fingering, dynamics, counting, even dates of assignment on each piece.

In "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", Harry got an old, used and shaggy looking copy of the "Advanced Potion-Making" book. On the first page, someone wrote "Property of the Half Blood Prince". The book was full of hand-written scribbles on every page. But those scribbles helped Harry to be better in potion brewing than anyone else in his course - including Hermione. 😉

thepianoplayer416

Pencil markings.
Next sticky notes so you can remove them later.
Photocopy or scan the sheet into the computer and print a secondary copy. Leave the original unmarked and put all the markings on the copy.

WieWaldi

Scan it.
Edit it in software.*
Print it.

*) You can use photoshop, gimp, or my favorite:
An office suite (e.g. Libre office draw), drag the scanned file onto an empty page. Best practice is to disable "moving" and "resizing" option of the picture-element of the scanned page. This saves you a lot of trouble when misclicking.

Then add rectangles with white filling and line style to hide something. Feel free to add text, and whatever you like.

iternabe

This works much better. Although now I can see why the "Ped ❊" notation is more cumbersome than the bracket style.

twocats

iternabe Although now I can see why the "Ped ❊" notation is more cumbersome than the bracket style.

I just write "P" and "X".

keystring

Sort of off topic somewhat, but I saw this reference ages ago on the question of pristine versus marked up scores. This belongs to Yehudi Menuhin.

keystring

I also found this article where a guitarist is advising TO mark up one's score, but he also suggests making copies. I do often make one or more copies of what I'm working on. (I have a scanner because of my work so I'm spoiled.)

https://douglasniedt.com/markupyourmusic.html

Animisha

iternabe But how to cross out things cleanly?

Gently put some correction tape on the pedal markings, copy the pages, remove the correction tape from the original score, and write your own pedal markings onto the copied score.

Stub

You could try using erasable colored pencil (Crayola sells them) to mark the wedges (which are what you want to keep). Use a bright or contrasting color to make the wedges stand out from the connecting lines (which you will be ignoring). After you're finished with the piece, erase the colored pencil marks. I use colored pencils all the time on my scores. They erase very well.

twocats

Stub You could try using erasable colored pencil (Crayola sells them) to mark the wedges (which are what you want to keep). Use a bright or contrasting color to make the wedges stand out from the connecting lines (which you will be ignoring).

That is a great idea!

I change the fingering markings so often from the printed ones that my brain now ignores any fingerings that aren't in my handwriting. So sometimes even if I'm doing the same fingerings as marked, I write over it in forScore. Same with pedal markings, the original ones are printed so lightly that I hardly notice them but if I want to pay attention I write P and X over them. Colored pencils might be able to retrain your brain to pay attention to only your markings.

iternabe

Stub brilliant! Ordering color pencils now!

ShiroKuro

If you do use forScore, there’s white in the annotation tools which you can use like white out. And because it’s digital, it’s erasable.

When I was still playing from paper, I used to always make a copy of the score and play from the copy so that I kept a clean version, and wrote only on the copy. (With multi-page scores, I had a system of taping them together like a booklet so the copies also served that purpose.)

These days I have my scores almost exclusively on the iPad though.

twocats

ShiroKuro If you do use forScore, there’s white in the annotation tools which you can use like white out.

There is?! Is it in the pens section? This would make my markings so much cleaner!