Ep. 54: Celebrating Ten Years of Music Engraving Tips, with Justin Tokke

Well, Justin Tokke, welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

Very good.

Thank you.

Why don’t you introduce yourself briefly to our listeners?

Sure.

I’ve been a composer for most of my life, and I started 25 years ago doing that.

And after leaving college, I went into publishing because while I was doing composing, it was also doing music engraving work and learning Sibelius and trying to get to the ins and outs of how notation works.

So I moved into publishing, worked at Carl Fisher for several years.

And then I moved on to work for Sibelius itself, and in the meantime, through all of that, I’ve been running Music Engraving Tips, which is a Facebook group and community for Music Engraving.

And Music Engraving Tips just hit their 10 year anniversary, did they not?

We did, yeah.

As of this taping, I think that was like two days ago or something.

It is wild that it’s been going this long.

I’m so appreciative of all the people that have just stuck with me through all that.

It’s great.

Well, first of all, congratulations.

Thank you.

Could you tell us the story of how the group came to be?

Yeah, the origins are a bit muddled because it was just a spur of the moment thing.

I was like, we need to have a place for these questions that always came up.

There’s another group called Orchestration Online on Facebook, which is a bit older than Music Engraving Tips.

But there was a constant flood of notation questions that came up all the time.

So I founded Music Engraving Tips as a companion group to be the place where those questions can live.

And it kind of just snowballed from there.

And it also came about because I wanted to produce some content for notation stuff, which doesn’t really exist in terms of YouTube videos, explainers, things like that.

So I’ve done a few of those, and I’ll probably do some more in the future.

I’ve been kind of lax on actually getting stuff done.

I haven’t done anything since the pandemic happened.

So yeah, I would like to get some more of those out.

Well, I think you’re not giving yourself enough credit because you post a lot in that Facebook group, and it’s good content, and you’ve taken time to work it out, and all the little meme images you do, I mean, that takes some effort.

Yeah, yeah, it does.

Hosting happens all the time with me.

I really enjoy getting people to think about notation in a more critical way.

A big part of my, I don’t know if you call it work ethic or philosophy is the notation has to be practical, it has to be efficient, it has to be beautiful, it also has to be well-understood by the average musician, and that’s a really tricky thing to pin down because there’s, what is the average musician?

Well, that depends on who you’re asking and what group you’re talking about.

So there is a lot of nuance to that.

But that’s a big reason why the group exists is because what is this standard that exists in the world of what will, how will your notation be understood by the majority of people?

And that’s really what we end up pinning down.

If you want to really distill it down, it’s not just about how do I draw slurs or beams or whatever.

It’s also about musician psychology and what are they going to understand from the notation.

Well, and as you say, I think the level, for lack of a better term, of the average musician has changed significantly over the past decade.

Because technology has made it so much more accessible, I think you have a lot more amateur musicians, you have a lot more people that haven’t studied music, but are still able to create music and get into notation.

And so I definitely see what you’re talking about, that there is a need to get this information out there.

Before we get too far into the weeds, what would you say is the difference between music notation and music engraving?

Yeah, I mean, music engraving is a kind of an old fashioned term that has kind of stuck around.

The actual act of music engraving in the olden days was literally engraving into metal plates.

And those metal plates were printed.

You know, they would paste the ink on the metal plate and you would create a negative from that, which therefore would become the sheet music.

That’s not done anymore.

That particular method has been obsolete for probably about 30 years, really since the computer became dominant.

So now the act of music engraving is just doing the same work of creating the score but on the computer these days.

You occasionally get people who still do it by hand, but that’s usually more of an artisan kind of thing.

It’s not like intended for mass production.

And then the music notation is like the literal notation itself and the system.

How to notes and staves and lines and everything that goes on sheet music.

What’s the difference?

So, engraving is the process to create that music notation.

Who gets to decide the rules for music notation?

Yeah, it’s a bit tricky.

Usually, it’s the publishers, right?

Because the publishers have decided that this is how notation ought to work, but they’re running from a feedback loop from the musicians as well, right?

The musicians ultimately will decide because they know what the notation is supposed to mean.

They will read it.

They will interpret it and therefore create the literal sounds, right?

The standards around the edges will vary depending on which group you’re talking about, but there is a core set of rules like the fact that a quarter note equals one beat in 4-4, staves have five lines, the pitch goes up on the staff, therefore the notes go up line and space.

Things like that, that are just core fundamentals, the luxography, if you will, of the notation.

So those are universal.

Everyone understands that.

And those developed over centuries, right?

There was no grand council of notation that decided these are the things.

Those developed over a long period of time.

And most of those rules are actually very good rules.

And they’ve stuck around for a reason because they are good practical rules.

And there’s a lot of little details in those rules that most people don’t know about.

They just intuitively understand.

For example, stems should generally be an octave in length, right?

The various angles of how a beam should be on eighth notes or sixteenth notes or whatever.

All the spacing choices of that, the thicknesses and everything, all of that has been pretty much set in stone, and the best practices have been established over a very long period of time.

And you can see that going back historically, how if you look at editions from like 200 years ago, how they’ve changed since today, right?

Obviously, the technology has influenced that a lot, right?

In the olden days, it was all metal plates or writing with quill and ink.

So there were different practical considerations from back then compared to today, where it’s all in computer.

So there is a lot of subtleties there, but I think there is this core group of rules that is just universally understood, and that’s what I would consider like the rules, right?

Elaine Gould in her book Behind Bars did a very good job of trying to codify what that is.

She would be on the Grand Council, right?

Well, if there was one, yes.

I think we should start one, and I think you’re the guy to do it.

You know, I’ve always seen myself in a robe to have the gavel.

But no, it’s really interesting how engraving, the art of engraving is so much about where do you make decisions in these rules.

And that’s why to be an engraver, you have to be a very competent musician because you have to understand what’s going on in the musician’s head, right?

What are they doing with the interpretation?

How they literally read the score, you know, going left to right down the staves.

All of that’s really critical to understand when you’re making these decisions, right?

So there’s only so much you can learn from roles and rule books, like Behind Bars, like that’ll get you the fundamentals.

But that can really spiral out of control because music notation is, I would call it infinitely complex.

There’s so many possibilities with how notes can exist on a staff and just so many different combinations that you really have to understand scores, how they’ve been built historically, so you know what is a good choice, what is a bad choice.

Sorry, there’s a bit of a long-winded answer, but it’s a really fundamental aspect.

Well, I think the hard thing about learning the rules, for lack of a better term, is just the fact that there are so many different situations you encounter.

I mean, I’ve got, here’s my, oh, the screen’s blurry.

I mean, I got my copy of Beyond Behind Bars right here, and it’s massive.

I got mine right next to me too.

Yeah, okay.

See?

And, but like, I probably know what’s in like 20 pages of that thing, because I only really, I mean, just being honest, I only learned the stuff that I need for my job.

And I think for most of us, we tend to gravitate to specific areas of the industry, right?

You know, I do a lot of choral music, you know, some orchestrations.

I don’t do a lot of avant-garde music or contemporary music which has kind of its own set of rules.

And so in that area, I basically have no idea what I’m doing.

I’m a newcomer like any, you know, college student would be.

But I guess that’s what makes it challenging to find the resources that I need because I’m looking for really specific things.

And it seems like most of the stuff that’s available is sort of this just all encompass.

I mean, if you’re looking at books, right, there’s sort of these all encompassing tomes that you have to kind of pick through to find what you need.

And I think that just makes it challenging.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of the biggest problems with music engraving resources today is there’s nothing comprehensive for the modern engraver.

Like even behind bars is dated, right?

She came from a different era before computers existed, right?

So she did a really good job of getting the fundamentals down and her perspective because she was an editor at Faber for decades, right?

So she was very much into the contemporary stuff as well.

So you can see in that book, there’s all sorts of contemporary, extended technique stuff that’s defined, which is nice because no one had defined them on paper before other than the scores themselves, right?

But like, yeah, very few resources to deal with finale, Sibelius, Dorico, MuseScore, whatever else notation program, right?

Other than like the how-to guides, which doesn’t help you with engraving, that’ll just tell you how to make a certain bit of notation, but like the subtleties of how I tame these softwares to like do what I want them to do, right?

And to know the difference between the defaults of the software versus what it ought to be.

And that’s a really thorny topic.

I don’t know if you want to go down that path, but.

I’m probably going to make people mad with this, but I kind of feel like if you were to change the definition of engraving to sort of fit our modern context, I think engraving would be essentially like the settings that you choose in your notation software, right?

Sure.

Because I think most people, myself included, don’t change a lot of the defaults.

I mean, I have a template where I’ve gone in and change things, but once I’ve done that, I don’t spend very much time thinking about, you know, the length, the width of this stem or the length of this, you know, I don’t, I’m focused on my music, and I let the software sort of take care of the rest.

Nor do I, right?

Like even me, who is really sensitive to some of those really small details, once I have the settings pretty much okay, I don’t have to think about the beam angles and the stem lengths or whatever.

I will have to think about the arcs of the slurs, because no notation program does those well.

Absolutely none of them.

So like those have to be done by hand.

You know, in the music spacing, like you need to take some attention to that, but.

Music notation, yeah.

Music notation, spacing.

Anyway, the point is, yeah, I’m similar, right?

Even doing high level work, there are settings that you just set and then you never have to touch them again.

The issues come in the details, like when you have a really tight passage, like there’s not enough room and you gotta move something around to make it fit and so the things aren’t colliding with each other.

No setting is gonna help you there.

So the knowledge of the engraving is to know what to do in that situation.

Do I move the dynamic out of the way, or do I move the expression thing out of the way, or do I force the staves apart more, right?

When do I not force the staves apart?

Like that’s a really subtle thing.

It’s not subtle, actually.

It’s actually very important.

It just feels subtle, because most users don’t think about it.

They just assume the computer knows.

And the computer doesn’t know.

The computer can try.

It will help you get to something that’s reasonable.

Perhaps.

It depends on how complicated music is.

But the real art comes to getting it from reasonable to excellent, right?

That’s what the engraver is there for.

It’s to really go for that extra level.

And it makes a huge difference if you put them side by side, right?

So that’s why I’m really cautious to people to not trust the defaults of software, but also to trust them at the same time.

Like, there’s certain parts of it, which they’re fine, right?

And if you tweak your settings to your liking or to your publisher’s house style, whatever, then you don’t have to think about them, right?

It’s really in those details that, you know, you really have to dig in and adjust things, move slurs around so they fit, all that stuff.

When you come across these situations where there’s conflicting rules or you’re gonna have to break a rule or there’s not a clear solution, do you have a mindset or a philosophy that you use to make that decision?

Yeah, it will depend on…

It’s so context dependent, unfortunately.

But yeah, generally, there is kind of like this, almost like a hierarchy of rules that you can break in a given situation.

You see this all the time with like layout of parts, you know, single staff parts for every person in the band or whatever.

Sometimes, for example, some publishers really insist on having the bar numbers on every single bar, right?

And it’s a total nuisance because they get in the way of everything.

Oh, but see, I love it.

I’m team bar numbers every time.

They’re helpful in certain contexts.

In some situations, like in film score, things like that, they insist on them.

They have to have them, right?

But they get in the way of dynamics.

They get in the way anytime the music gets below the staff.

So one of the rules you break is move them out of the way.

They’re not important compared to the notes themselves and the dynamics.

So you set the dynamics as if they weren’t there, and then you put the bar number wherever else it can fit.

Fingerings on a piano part as well.

You don’t sacrifice the notes to make the fingerings fit.

You just fit the fingerings wherever they can fit.

So there’s things like that.

That really comes down to just like information hierarchy kind of stuff.

Fundamentally, it’s the notes first, then the articulations, then the dynamics.

Unless you’re doing choral, then there’s lyrics.

Lyrics are more important than dynamics.

So like there is this informal kind of hierarchy of information and you would move things out of the way.

It’s almost always just moving things, preventing collisions of symbols because there’s just too much information in one point in time, right?

And so much of engraving is graphical and trying to, you know, how music goes left to right in time to make sure that it’s extremely clear when in time, the symbol you want is happening.

And you can fudge that sometimes.

For example, like I have on one particular beat, I have a forte, I also have a marcato written out in text, and I also have, I don’t know, tenudos or something.

All of those happen in the same instance, but I can kind of nudge the marcato over a bit to make it fit.

They don’t have to like all overlap with each other.

So things like that, that’s just run of the mill stuff.

There’s going to be hundreds of those little decisions when you’re making an addition.

And that’s really what engraving is about when you get into that stuff.

So what advice would you have for composers that are just getting started?

Maybe they’re in school, maybe they’ve recently graduated.

What advice would you have for them to learn these rules and these hierarchies and these unwritten things?

I mean, is it just a matter of studying scores or are there other resources you can go to?

It kind of is.

Unfortunately, the best resources scores themselves, for sure.

And not just the full scores, but the parts as well.

Very, very useful to see.

Just to take an extreme example, look at a Mahler Symphony, you know, and look at the string parts and how they correspond.

Where are the symbols different compared to the score and the parts?

And if you go really into the extreme, you find sections where there’s the VZ and they’re split differently in the score and the part, things like that.

So, yeah, score study is absolutely essential.

Composers theoretically have enough score study to know what a lot of these rules is.

I’ve just found that in my experience, it’s usually not enough.

You know, you have to study hundreds of scores to really get a feel for, like, what is a good solution to the problem I’m going to face?

So then that’s the other half of it is just practice.

You know, just like you practice your scales on a piano, because you’re practicing for situations that will happen in repertory later.

You also practice doing your engraving.

I mean, one thing that a lot of engravers have done is try to reproduce old editions exactly, right?

So it really gets into your brain and your fingers about how I need to move these symbols compared to what Sibelius or Dorico puts there first, right?

So it really gives you a good insight as to the differences between the defaults versus what the publisher actually did, right?

And you got to be careful to pick good editions.

There’s a lot of junky editions out there.

So, you know, just be careful on that if you’re going to pick scores to study because there is a lot that I wouldn’t consider good quality enough to bother with.

It’s hard to tell what that is if you don’t know what to look for.

You know, certain publishers are just more reputable than others.

You know, Henley Universal Edition, for example, are very good for the most part.

Not all publishers universally good for all time either.

So it’s a bit tricky.

You can always ask on Music Engraving Tips if you want to know more.

There’s lots of pros who will guide that.

Yeah.

And it’s fun watching those conversations getting heated sometimes.

You know, it’s a very active and passionate group.

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know why it’s so heated sometimes because it’s just like, sometimes people really get really stuck in there in what they think is right.

I don’t think this is a notation thing in particular.

I just think.

I think it’s a people thing.

Yeah, it’s a people thing.

But you know, it’s just funny to get on there and have like a hundred different posts about, you know, how thick should my slur line be?

And I’m kind of over here going like, I don’t know, does that specific thing really matter?

Like, just pick one you like, you know?

Like, what’s the big deal?

But music engraving is an art.

I mean, I would consider it an art form.

And so I think that’s where they’re coming from, right?

Is trying to preserve this art and make it accessible in our new sort of world that we live in.

But I also think for composers and publishers, it’s a matter of business, right?

Because the more time you spend engraving a piece, the less time you have to work on others.

And so I think at a certain point, you have to kind of say, you know, this is good enough for this, maybe.

Or…

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, well, that gets into an interesting discussion because it depends on the type of publisher, first of all.

Like, if the edition is intended for posterity, then it doesn’t matter how much time you spend on the engraving, because that engraving is going to live for 100 years.

Like, those guys doing the Mahler symphonies from 1906 or whatever, they knew those were going to last because they were proven in the concert hall and they did very good jobs on them.

And it must have taken an enormous amount of work to do them, because even back then, you know, to do a single sheet of metal engraving took eight hours.

Over 300 pages of score, you can just multiply it and figure out how much effort it was.

So certain publishers, if they’re doing the high end editions, that’s not much of a concern.

The concern is the higher quality, right?

But on the flip side, if you’re doing publishing for volume, like how Leonard would do, or a lot of the educational publishers that are publishing hundreds of works per year, there is a low bar, right?

There has to be a minimum standard.

But there is also like a ceiling where we can’t spend hours and hours fiddling with this coral that might sell or might not.

And there is absolutely this thing where maybe if the publication succeeds and will sell many thousands more copies, then they’ll go back and maybe improve the engraving on a second run.

But that doesn’t always happen.

Well, because you can do that now, right?

Because you’re not using the metal plates.

So if you do catch something, you can go back and, especially if it’s a digital-only product.

Much, much easier to do corrections than it was in the olden days.

So that’s true.

It didn’t happen very often when I was working in publishing, but it did happen, you know?

So there would be a rodder or something that came in from some customer.

So whenever there was another print run or something.

And these days, print runs are really small compared to the old days.

In the old days with offset printing, you had to do thousands of copies to make it viable.

Today, you can get away with 200 copies on a digital printing method.

And that’s fine.

And that really lowers the risk for the publisher.

So they can try out new things and see if it will stick.

Of course, with self-publishing, it’s a totally different business model.

Well, and I think that’s a lot of the people listening to this episode.

And so there’s so much involved.

It would be impossible to give everybody a sort of clear map for their situation.

But where would you have them start?

If a self-publishers listening to this and they want to improve their engraving, if they want to improve the look of their scores, like what are two or three things that they should start with and absolutely do?

Well, if you can afford it, like if your business is cooking and you can really afford it, having an editor is really helpful, especially if you have no experience doing editing and engraving, right?

It’s not even the actual engraving work, because you can hand a fully finished score to an engraver and they can act function as an editor, right?

They can get their red pen out and say, here’s the things you ought to fix.

And in this day and age, music engravers are almost always editors these days, because in the olden days, those were two separate roles and they’ve kind of merged into one thing, unless you’re at some really like high level thing where the editor is a separate paid position.

But that’s not the case in a self-publishing situation.

So if you can do that, if you can’t, try and first of all, make sure the notation is correct as much as possible.

Rhythms and harmonics are really important, that they are logical.

Get rid of collisions.

If there’s any collisions in the score, that’s really terrible.

Try and make the staff size large.

Like this is a huge mistake that a lot of self-reliant engravers try to do, is they’re trying to put too much on the page.

So, their solution is just to make the staff really small and have essentially very big white space in between the staves, which is very distracting when you’re trying to read the score, apart from the fact that it’s very small, so it’s hard to read.

So, I mean, there’s a really tricky balance there, depending on how many staves per page and even the page size will make a difference.

So, that’s something I actually want to do some videos on, because it’s a really, really essential area, but the layout and having a logical size for it, good paper size, try and avoid letter if you can.

Letter is terrible.

It’s too small.

It’s an awkward ratio.

Nine by 12, if you can afford it with your printing.

It’s so much better than letter.

I think almost everyone’s letter now in self-publishing, because it’s all digital and people have to be able to print it at home, theoretically, right?

Yeah, that’s the thing.

You can’t print nine by 12 at home usually.

So, I mean, what you can do, and I’ve seen some publishers do this, is format it for nine by 12, which will scale to letter pretty well.

Like the actual reduction in size is something within like 8% or something like that.

It’s not a huge difference, right?

So it will fit on letter, okay.

It’ll just be a little bit smaller.

But then you have the option to go either way if you’re going to print it.

Sort of like resizing if you’re printing to a PDF.

Yeah, exactly.

You can print it on whatever paper you have available.

I do want to ask a little bit more just about the behind the scenes of the Music Engraving Tips group and how that works and your experiences in starting the group and the challenges you faced as it’s developed.

Because building a community of that size is something that a lot of us have tried to do.

I mean, it’s something I’m trying to do with this show, and not a lot of people have succeeded.

So, I guess first question is, what’s the secret?

You know, I don’t know if there is a secret, per se.

I mean, you know, it’s not like I took a course or read an article or something to just make this thing happen.

I think the one thing that’s really important is persistence, right?

Continue doing the thing, doing the content, right?

Making sure that people are engaging with it.

And then the other thing is having rigid standards for your rules in the group.

And those are the two things that Music Engraving Tips has always had from day one, right?

And in terms of the rules, what that means is no unprofessional posts keep the flame wars to a minimum.

Shut threads down once they’ve passed their use, right?

I’m a huge believer in a heavily moderated forum means an effective forum, right?

Because I remember the olden days of the Internet when things were just absolutely free for all, and people could say whatever they want.

And it’s nice, in theory, to have complete freedom like that.

But it doesn’t work because people start being mean and hateful and terrible.

All of that’s got to go, right?

So I have a very capable moderating team behind me, and I can’t thank them enough for all the work that they do.

They keep the conversation useful, civil, effective, all those things.

And it doesn’t, you know, it’s not just like, oh, we’re going to ban hate speech, like obviously, right?

It goes beyond just hate speech.

It’s like you have to be professional.

If you’re going to be putting down other musicians, that’s not going to fly, right?

So things like that are really important.

You really want to have people understand that this community is professional and we’re meant to be nice to each other.

Well, I also see you turning comments off of posts that have already been answered.

It’s like we don’t need 60,000 people to all jump in and say the same thing.

We’ve actually had a lot of problems with that particular issue.

Parroting, which would be the term for it, where someone asks a question, someone comes up with a response or a few people at the beginning, and then more people come in with the exact same response, and the exact same response, and it just snowballs.

And because it’s more engagement, the posts get seen more, which just spirals out of control, and no one can see any actual nuanced discussion because everyone’s just saying, oh, it’s A or B.

So we’ve actually implemented a policy where anyone who asks a question that’s like an obvious binary or has just like, here’s three options, which one should I choose?

It’s got to be posted as a poll, and then people vote on the poll essentially.

And if there’s anything beyond just A, B, or C, they can put it in the comments and have more nuanced discussions.

There’s this really funny thing that came about in the first couple of years called Tokke’s Razor.

You know, it’s like a philosophical razor where people would create these poll questions.

Is it A or B?

And the answer was usually C.

It was something else that they hadn’t proposed.

That’s Tokke’s Razor, because I would come in there and I’m like, no, it’s neither.

It’s neither of these options.

Spoken like a true grand council member.

Yeah, really.

I must say.

Yeah, no, it happens a lot where, and I don’t blame people.

They just didn’t know.

They didn’t think it through all the way.

I mean, that just comes from experience.

So it happens.

And you just try and keep those discussions relatively lean.

And once they’re past their prime, once the comments have slowed down, just close the thread.

We’re done.

We’ll have another one next week, if you like, if you want to talk about it again.

Another thing on threads that’s really important, I try to keep the topic singular instead of having like all these weird branching topics.

Like if someone’s asking a question and someone wants to take it in a completely different direction, that’s not encouraged.

I tell people, just go make your own thread.

Make your own thread.

We’ll talk about it separately over there.

Cause usually it’s actually quite an interesting topic, but no one’s going to find it in the middle of this other thread that we’re talking about of this one thing.

So that’s another thing is keeping the topics on topic.

How much of the growth of the group was organic versus you going out and actively like promoting and pushing and inviting people?

I didn’t do any of that.

It was all organic.

I didn’t do any actual promotion per se.

The only promotions would be probably in the early days when we were just telling people that the group existed on orchestration online.

And the couple of videos that we did back then, like the name was posted more, right?

But other than that, it’s been all organic.

I don’t bother with ads or anything of that nature because there is a point where it just kind of snowballs, right?

Enough people know about it that they start inviting their friends.

You also got to be really careful about just the nature of these social media groups is that the people will change over time.

You will never have the same core active group at any given moment.

Some will leave.

A lot of people just leave Facebook.

They have a feeling that’s going to be another issue.

Just given the direction social media is going, a lot of people just leave.

That’s something I want to try and work on, see if we can find a way for this community to live on other platforms as well.

We’ve done a little bit of that, but it hasn’t succeeded much on other platforms like Reddit or Discord or whatever.

So we’ll see.

We’ll see what happens.

Facebook just succeeded because I think, particularly of people of my generation and perhaps Gen Z, they just were on Facebook.

So they were there.

They wanted to talk about this stuff and it just grew from there.

Well, thank you, Justin, for taking the time to talk to me today.

We’ve covered a lot of interesting ground and barely scratched the surface.

So I would encourage everyone listening to head over to the Music Engraving Tips group on Facebook.

Not only can you ask your weird specific question, but you could also just use the search functions within the group to find just an unbelievable amount of content about every conceivable topic.

It’s really an amazing community to be a part of.

So thank you for creating that and for the work you put into that.

Absolutely.

I assume mostly out of the goodness of your heart, because most people don’t tend to make a ton of money off of Facebook.

Yeah, no, there’s no money in this.

Not at all.

No, it’s totally a passion project.

Because it’s like the one big thing I care about.

It’s notation and making sure to further that art form.

I mention that a lot whenever I’m posting things.

I’m like, this is important.

Thousands of people, millions even, all these musicians, they use this stuff, they use the sheet music, and we have to make it for them.

It’s really important what we do, because it’s cliche, but music is really important spiritually, emotionally, all that stuff.

It has to come from somewhere, and we’re the group to at least make it.

Do you have a favorite engraving, like a favorite work or piece of music, or something that it’s just like, this is the best ever?

Yeah, I think the Mahler scores from Universal Edition.

I think I mentioned that earlier, but it’s a masterclass in how to be efficient with notation, because Mahler’s music is so tricky to engrave, because he never has the entire orchestra playing at once.

It’s almost always like a small subset of instruments, and it’s just this complicated web of orchestration and color.

And it’s really hard to notate, because if you were to show every staff on every page, it would be mostly empty.

So what they do is a very cool and efficient French scoring, which is where you hide the empty staves and combine the instruments in all sorts of different combinations.

Look at the Third Symphony, where there’s eight horns, where they start all eight horns on one staff at the very beginning of the symphony.

It’s just like, it blew my mind when I saw that, because I was so used to the more standard concert band kind of style, where everything’s all shown all the time, all in one score, all the staves are shown.

At first, I thought it would be difficult to read, but it’s not really.

You just have to get used to the system.

But I just like, I always look to those as like, you can really tell these engravers put time and thought into it.

And they’re some of the best engraving I’ve seen.

In terms of like more modern stuff, Shot has done some really excellent things.

I really like their edition of Carmina Burana.

I don’t know.

It’s got its quirks, of course, because it’s Orf.

So he did things a little differently with the time signatures and all sorts of strange things.

So it’s cool to see how they solve those problems in that context.

So yeah, those are two things, I would say.

Awesome.

Well, before we let you go, anything you’d like to promote, where can our listeners find you outside of that Facebook group?

Yeah.

So the Facebook group is the main thing.

There’s also a YouTube channel for Music Engraving Tips.

That’s the main place where any new videos will be put.

I’m definitely going to be working on some of those in the new year here.

And if anyone has any topic suggestions for videos, I’m all ears, because there’s so many topics, like I need to prioritize what people actually want to see.

So definitely get in touch about that.

Awesome.

Well, thanks again.

And we’ll see you in the chat, I guess.

Yeah.

Thank you very much for having me.