Ep. 55: Greg Gilpin: When a Publisher Says "Yes!"

Greg Gilpin, welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

Hey, I’m doing good.

I’m staying warm.

It’s incredibly cold out today.

It’s January’s.

Oh, anyway, good to be inside.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show.

A lot of our listeners know you as the composer, conductor extraordinaire.

And we’ll probably get to some of that.

But today I wanted to talk about something that doesn’t normally get discussed.

And that’s what happens behind the scenes at Publishers, getting music ready for publication.

The editing, the engraving, the printing, all that stuff.

And since we’ve done that process a number of times together, you editing my music for publication, I thought it would be a natural fit to have you on the show to talk about it.

So let’s start with the editing process.

Your job is to find mistakes in a piece of music, but also decide what things are worth publishing, decide practical things.

You know, this voicing isn’t going to work.

I mean, talk us through, talk us through your mindset for that.

What does an editor do and how do you approach the job?

All right.

Well, I can, you know, give you basics.

Every editor is a little different, but we all do basically the same thing.

We’re always looking for great music, right?

And our job is to do that is we have relationships with our writers.

We are always looking for new writers.

You know, I love, I love teachers that write.

I know a lot of them may be brand new.

Like they go, I want to just get published, you know, and then if they’re, you know, we’ll work with them.

And if it works out, it does.

If not, I’m real honest, and I had really good editors.

When my first editor was Audrey Snyder, who just passed away.

And she, oh my God, she’s not been a day that I don’t think about Audrey when I’m editing and when I’m writing.

And that was a long time ago.

And I learned a lot.

All my editors, Mary Lynn Leith has been a fantastic editor.

Emily Crocker, Scott Foss.

I’m trying to think of all my editors.

Victor Johnson is an editor of mine, and we both write for each other, so we edit.

And then Andy Beck is a fantastic editor.

I learned a lot from my editors.

And anyway, we’re looking, and then, you know, when a piece comes to me, I look at the title.

The very first thing I look at the title, because what?

Teachers do the same thing, right?

You do when you’re picking out music or when you’re thinking about writing.

And I think it’s really important that we have a really good title.

It makes me want to open up the file.

It makes me want to look at it.

If I get a title that says Silent Night, I’m like, oh, how many Silent Nights do we have?

So it may be very different, but using that doesn’t get me to open it up as much.

I’m not as excited.

But anyway, we look at that, and I look at the lyric right away.

I’m looking at the lyric, and I’m looking at what it looks like on the page.

I can look immediately now, after many years, I can look and see if somebody knows how to notate and how they can write in a compliment.

You just see it.

And teachers are the same way, man.

They can open up music, and that’s why they go to different writers, because they go, I can trust that writer.

I can trust that one.

When I open it up, I know it works.

But I look at that, look at the lyric, and then I play it.

A lot of people will send a recording, and that’s all right.

I will eventually listen to it.

But I sit down, I play it, I sing it, I really look at it.

And then my job, then after that, is to figure out if it’s worth it.

I’m an effort to go into it with editing, or maybe it’s like, here are a lot of things you need to think about, and it might be a rejection.

I usually never, ever send a rejection without whys.

I want that writer to know why.

And usually everybody’s really, they love that.

Especially if it’s writer, I don’t know.

They love that because they learn.

They learn from that.

But then my job is to look at it and go, I love this, I love this.

Could we think about this?

This voicing will be great for middle school.

That is awesome.

I’m looking for pieces that teach.

I’m looking for pieces that are interesting to rehearse.

Because we spend most of our time rehearsing.

30 minutes in the concert, right?

Three months in rehearsal every day.

You got boys and girls, you got guys that don’t want to do anything, but they’re in your class.

What is going to make them want to do this piece?

And usually a piece that if it’s not Mozart and you’ve written a piece that says hallelujah all the way through, probably not going to be something I want to do as a teacher or publish.

I’m always looking really now for really great acts, really great lyrics.

So that is the beginning of that, where I’m just looking at it and I’m putting my teacher hat on and go, what I want to teach it, what I want to perform it with these kids love the lyric, what am I going to teach with this?

So it sounds like the first step is just taking everything through the funnel and filtering out what you want to focus on for the year.

How many pieces of music would you say you review every year?

A hundred, maybe?

A hundred, we publish 30 plus all the voicings.

So it’s generally about 80 different chorals, and I may get a hundred or more.

I’ve never counted that because they’re always coming in.

I’m always getting, every day I get something to look at.

And it’s a lot, a lot of things I get from people I don’t know.

And then the writers, I do want things, they’re all busy.

So it’s like, come on, come on, write, just like my editors are going, we need you to write.

But I get lots of things from people I don’t know.

Well, and that’s something I should have mentioned before.

You, in addition to managing Shawnee Press or editing for Shawnee Press, you also publish with or have published with a lot of the other publishers.

So you’re on both sides of the job.

And I hear a lot of people both on the show just and in real life, you ask, what advice would you have for a composer?

And a number of them, they always say, get an editor, find an editor.

I’m going to throw that back to you.

How does one get an editor?

Well, you get an editor when you submit, right?

And you look up the editors at the different publishers.

My number one advice is know the publisher that you’re submitting to.

Does your music reflect what they want?

I get a lot of music that’s got this weird instrumentation, or they sent me a band arrangement.

And I’m like, you don’t know what we publish.

We don’t publish band.

Not anymore, years and years ago.

So really know that.

And then when you send it in, you have a better chance.

And I had to learn with back in the day, it took me a while to get published with Shawnee Press.

It took me even longer to get published with Heritage Music Press.

Years.

And then eventually my editor, Mary Lynn Lightfoot, she goes, that’s it.

This is what I want.

This is what I want.

And what I did was I sat down out of frustration and I sat down and went, what are they publishing?

Why is it?

And that’s what I should have done at the beginning.

And I looked at what they were doing and went, all right, now I know what’s right.

And I went that route.

So that is a big piece of advice right there.

At the same time, today’s publishing industry looks a lot different.

And I’m wondering if you were starting your career today, if you were fresh out of college, how would you do things differently?

Knowing what you know about just what gets published and how much gets published, and there’s all these options for self-publishing.

Composers don’t need to wait to get their music out into the world, and that changes the whole dynamic.

Right.

It does.

It’s very different.

Again, I still think everybody needs an editor.

I need an editor.

We all do.

There’s a lot of self-publishing that is not being edited, and it’s not looking good.

There’ll be mistakes.

Notation will be wrong.

There are directors that don’t care.

That’s all right, and that’s all right.

It opens it up.

There’s a lot of music and creativeness that is out there, that you can look, and that’s okay.

I think we’ve all learned to accept that.

But teachers need to know that if it is officially published with a publisher, not self, it has been curated, it has been edited and looked at.

And there’s been a lot of thought and money that has gone into it to make it work.

But when I was younger, there were more publishers.

There was so much more music being published.

I think I had a better shot at it, maybe.

But when I first sent a piece in, I did it through another writer with their editor, and the writer introduced me to their editor and said, hey, look at this.

This is Greg.

I think he’s got talent.

And they looked at it and went, yes, let’s work on it together.

We love it.

Now, that doesn’t mean every piece I sent the editors that the beginning got accepted.

They didn’t.

I got lots and lots of rejections.

But I just kept at it, and that was a little break.

But now, it’s smaller.

Everyone’s doing less, and not everybody’s looking at everybody’s music, and that opens the door to all the self-publishing.

And that’s okay.

That’s all right.

I think we sometimes get a little hung up in the semantics of this conversation because there’s the editing like choosing what’s worth publishing, but then there’s the editing of like, this word is spelled wrong.

And how do you balance those two sides of the coin?

Is it first choosing what we’re going to publish and then digging in and fixing mistakes?

Or is it the other way around?

How do you look at that?

Yeah, I think it’s a balancing.

There is, I definitely will look at the piece at the beginning, especially if it’s a writer I don’t know, and go, my goodness, this is fantastic.

Yeah, we got misspelled words.

Yeah, there’s some notation not right.

This is all inexperience about it.

And I’m open to that.

It’s like, look, oh my gosh, this is beautiful.

We don’t really need note changes.

This is great.

We just need basic editing or whatever.

But as a writer is more published, they need to be aware of that.

They need to be aware that, no, you need dynamics.

No, you need to write your lyrics, clearly, and they need to be grammatically correct.

We all need to learn to be better at it.

And this is why you’ll have less mistakes at the end, right?

Mark Hayes, which I adore, a mentor of mine ever since the beginning, he told me once long ago, he goes, Greg, you write on the page whatever you want to see in print.

If you are misspelling words, imagine those are going to go into print.

Is that really what you want?

Everyone needs to look through their music.

And I get music that writers that I work with, and I’ll send it back and go, great idea, you need to edit.

You need to work on this because I’m doing all the work now.

I don’t want to do all the work.

And when I submit my own music, I work really hard at making it as mistake free as possible, you know, because those editors they love you even more because they go, oh my god, you write great music and I don’t have to spend as much time on it.

You know, they don’t want to, editors don’t want to spend hours and hours and hours on music to make it look better in the editing.

And we don’t want to make our engravers do all that work either, you know, where you just send it off in the engravers going, oh my gosh, I have to re-engrave this whole thing.

You know, we don’t want that either.

And it costs more money, right?

So anyway, yeah, I think as you as you get more experience, you should get better at doing it.

Well, that’s kind of a nice segue.

Let’s say we finish editing, you know, we hang up the phone, you’ve said yes to another one of my pieces.

You’re so excited.

I send you the finale file or who knows what it will be by the time people listen to this.

Right.

But what happens next?

What do you do with those files?

I look at that.

I get it ready for the engraver.

I go and I do my best to get all the dynamics in place.

And, you know, we hopefully you and I have already worked through all the creative things.

And then I go back, I check punctuation, and I check the lyric.

If it’s a copyright, I’ll go online and just double check all of that.

And I get it where the engraver can take that file, and then they do their magic because they put it in a template that is the publishers, all right?

Because every publisher has a different template.

They like it a certain way.

They like the subtitle to be a certain way.

They do the lyrics a certain way.

Everybody is a little different.

The font might be a different size, whatever.

And we get all of that done.

There’s a lot of copyright information.

I’ve got a production form.

I fill out all that information.

I get that to the publisher.

They assign codes.

They assign job numbers that all the people have to build through those job numbers.

And it goes to the engraver after I’m ready.

Then I get it to the engraver who makes a proof.

And then that proof goes back to you.

And then you look at it.

And then we check it out, see if it works.

And that’s the first proof.

What can you tell us about these templates?

You know, how are they developed?

And who decides what goes in them?

And is there a meeting somewhere where people are arguing about 12 point versus 11.5?

I mean, I just, I’m picturing how this comes together.

Yeah, I think there are meetings.

It’s above me.

I’m usually given the like, this is what we do.

However, with Shawnee Press, we do a few things a little differently, but it’s generally how Leonard does, because if it goes to an editor, it does go to like an editor at the very end before it goes to print, and they look at everything one more time, just to double check.

And they like to look at it like, wait a minute, we want this to be a bit, you know, like what we’re used to looking at.

But, you know, Alfred has a certain template.

I know that they have a different font.

They, like, they don’t put, I don’t think, I don’t think they put duration of the piece on their music.

Allynor does, Shawnee Press does.

Other choristers do, they do.

Just everybody does different things, and it’s decided, and it’s, there might be a meeting, you know, that like, hey, you know what?

Let’s do this.

I know, I know with Finale, I realize that a lot of the template will be what Finale does, and it’s less work, right?

It’s already bold.

It’s already however the credits are.

That’s what I’ve noticed.

But yeah, the template, when they put it in a template, it’ll change and it’ll be what it needs to be.

But yeah, they just, everybody wants to have their own look.

Yeah.

Is that why the templates don’t get shared with composers?

Because I feel like that would save you a lot of effort if composers could just write in the template, then you wouldn’t have to necessarily re-engrave everything.

You can.

And I think those can be supplied.

Or it’s like, you know, I’m picturing like this vault at the CIA, you know, with the retinal scans and stuff.

It’s like, if you want access to this template, right?

It’s not that big a deal.

Here’s the issue.

You get the template out, and what if there’s a change?

Now it’s coming from a composer, and now you got to send everybody, this is the template.

It’s easier just to get it to the engraver, and they get it in the template.

And it’s just easier that way, as long as you’re using a notation that we can use.

And who are these mysterious engravers?

Oh, they’re everywhere.

And why don’t we know their names?

I mean, that’s a serious question, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, if you look at a movie, right, everybody who has every little job in a film gets credited.

But I feel like with publishing, we have all of these different jobs, editing, engraving, whoever’s doing the marketing, all these people behind the scenes.

And why don’t they get their name on it, too?

Well, I think it’s such a team effort because I’ll work with one engraver on this, I’ll work with one engraver on this one, and a publisher might be using 10 engravers.

And where is the room for all of that information?

And I don’t think the engravers, everybody’s kind of work for hire.

They’re not employees, other people are employees.

And there’s just a lot of people involved.

It would be very difficult, even though everyone deserves a little credit, it would be really hard to get that on individual music.

It would eat it all up.

But isn’t that the engraver’s job to figure out?

How to find space for stuff?

Right, right, right.

But if you’re trying to make 12 pages of music and the first page is the title and the second page is music, there’s barely room for the copyrights sometimes, you know, depending on what it is.

So it’s just not what is generally done.

And hopefully, you know, through your podcast, everyone will know there’s a lot of people involved.

And how does one become an engraver?

And is that sort of a stepping stone thing where you like can work your way up to an editor position, or is it kind of a separate track?

You know, I think most of the engravers don’t want to edit.

They want to be given the info and they just love doing it.

They love, it’s like, it’s just like, they love making it look beautiful and taking something, all that information.

I think engravers like to be engravers.

As in editors and writers, I particularly don’t want to be an engraver.

I think it’s a lot of work, and you either do it or you don’t do it.

You have to be really good at whatever it is.

I think I’m better, and I’ve had compliments from engravers of my work going, oh, yours is so easy.

It’s so easy.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some engravers that are published.

And one of the engravers I’m working with is published.

She writes instrumental music, and she’s published instrumental music with different publishers.

So I’d probably be surprised.

There’s probably more engravers that I know of that are published, but I don’t think you do one to get to the other.

I think it just happens.

And think about this, engravers have relationship with publishers.

So they know the editors.

They say, hey, I wrote something.

Would you mind looking at it?

You know, it probably just works like that, you know, connecting like that.

All right.

So the engravers finish their job.

You have a finished, approved file.

What happens next?

Well, the engraver is never done.

The editor seems to be…

I can hear them throwing their phone against the wall as we’re talking.

I feel like they do sometimes all go back and go, oh, we have one more edit.

And, you know, some engravers are like, stop doing this.

Other engravers going, hey, it’s my job.

I don’t mind doing it.

You know, it’s like anybody.

But we try to keep it to one proof going back and forth.

Anyway, it goes to the writer.

We all proof it.

This is what I do anyway.

And then we do all the corrections.

It goes back to the engraver.

The engraver makes all the corrections.

And then it comes back to me.

And this is the proof that I use in recording.

So now I’ve got one more chance to catch anything.

We take it to the studio.

We figure out, you know what?

That doesn’t work.

You know what?

That note is wrong.

Or one of the singers may go, do you know I have a misspelled word?

And we’re like, oh my gosh.

And well, you know, it just gets more eyes on it.

Then that goes back to the engraver.

They make the final corrections.

That proof comes back to me.

I look at it again really well.

I try, and that is my final proof.

That is what is going to go to the main office.

It will get one more set of eyes on it.

They double check the copyright, all of that.

And here’s the deal.

I’ve always asked as well, hey, check the title.

Make sure the title’s not misspelled.

It’s so funny, all of us editors and engravers, we’re looking at all of these little things, and the title can have the misspelled word in it, and we’ve never seen it.

Nobody’s ever seen it.

And it’s so funny.

And I said, check those big things, because we’ve been looking at all the little things.

And then that gets to the printer.

Now, what happens when you email things?

They can get messed up, right?

So it can go to the printer.

We had one piece.

I remember one publisher, they had one piece, and the whole first page of lyrics were all missing, and it all went to print.

That’s because there’s no one proofing at the printer.

They’re just getting it, and email and the internet can mess up a file.

And so we always, it’s not like it used to be.

Did you know that engravers used to actually engrave metal?

And they used to put words that were in metal, and notes were metal, and they actually did it that way.

Like, when I was writing, in the 80s, at the beginning, it wasn’t any of these notation files.

We wrote by hand, and then the engravers were actually engraving with metal these templates.

Anyway, thought I’d throw that in.

It’d be cool to find those.

Do you think Cal has a warehouse somewhere with all these?

Is it like an Indiana Jones situation with the big…

I don’t know.

I don’t know, because they weren’t the engravers.

It’d be interesting.

A lot of engraving was overseas.

I know that.

Oh, I know when I wrote, like, Warner Brothers and Columbia and all that, they had engravers overseas.

But anyway, yeah.

So once it goes to print, is your job finished and it goes to the marketing team, or are you still involved all the way through to the end?

I’m certainly helpful with marketing.

Marketing is very different now.

And I am certainly helpful, but I’m the guy now that goes out and does reading sessions or does workshops, and I’m trying to program those.

I go to the dealers and I present the new music and show them the music and try to sell them the music so that they like it and that they’re wanting to do it.

So the job just continues, and I’m usually looking at music.

I’m usually already thinking about next year when I’m promoting this year, which I’m doing right now.

I go to Alabama tomorrow.

I’m looking at this year’s music, and last year’s music, and this year’s music is just getting in the print.

And I’m already thinking about next year’s music.

I’m already editing that.

So, you know, it’s just constant.

So how do you balance all of these plates and all of these different pieces at various stages, and you have your own career, and you have your own music, and then there’s, you know, last year’s Shawnee and upcoming Shawnee, like there’s, like literally how do you do it?

Because that’s a big part of the job of composing that no one ever talks about.

It is.

It’s really, you know what?

I want to say you got to be good at it.

You’ve got to have a left brain going.

You’ve got to be organized.

You got to make notes.

And believe me, I’m sure there are people that I work with going, what is he talking about?

He’s a nightmare.

I don’t think I’m a nightmare, but you really do have to make notes and be aware.

And every day is different.

And I’ve got a to do list.

And I’ve got notes.

And I printed up music to take with me on trips to look at and edit.

It’s constantly being aware of what you’ve got and when you need to do it.

I need to give deadlines to engravers.

I need to give deadlines to myself on writing.

It’s just, it’s a lot of left brain, even though you got to work with your right brain a lot.

You got to have both.

Have you found something that works really well, like Google Docs or pencil and paper or just, I mean, what’s the most effective method that you found?

I have a paper calendar.

I have a, this is your paper, but look, I printed it up for today.

I got, I’m looking at right now a document on my desktop.

That is my to do list and it is organized.

It’s not just a list.

It’s like, this is more important.

This is less important.

I will print that up.

When I use Google Documents, I get a little weird with that.

I know it doesn’t work as well with me.

I also have a lot of people that will do that.

And then I’ve had singers or whatever come to me.

They go, oh my God, I lost everything on my phone.

Do you have the dates?

And I go, yes, it’s on a piece of paper.

I have all of this.

So you could always lose this as well.

But I backed it up.

I write, I’m writing things down all the time.

But I do email myself a lot, and I do on my phone, I make notes on a document there that I know is going to be up in the cloud.

So it’s a lot of everything.

Well, to wrap things up, let’s speculate wildly about the future.

Okay, please tell me, please tell me what it’s going to be.

I don’t know, but my big two question marks are, what’s going to happen with self-publishing, and what’s going to happen with digital music?

Because I think everybody sort of expected that by now, things would be a lot more digital than they are.

And I haven’t really seen that, at least not in the education space, maybe for piano and some other more individual areas.

And there are a lot of digital in band and instrumental.

I think everybody thought they’d be using an iPad in music, and it’s like books.

Everybody thought books were going to disappear and they didn’t.

And actually, there is now an increase in bookstores.

I still think people, I think kids, I think teachers still like, I wish I had a piece of music right here.

I don’t.

They still like a piece of music in their hands.

I do know that not all schools have iPads.

What do kids do?

I mean, they lose their iPads.

iPads have to be upgraded.

Brand new ones have to be bought.

The other thing is, on digital, you can download it.

But now, now you’ve got to play publisher where you’ve got to go photocopy all of this music and staple it.

And now it’s on paper that doesn’t last as long.

Now you can’t pilot as well.

And now you’re using a different budget, which is photocopying budget.

And I know that there are a lot of teachers have gotten trouble going, the administration is going, what are you doing all this photocopying?

Well, I bought digital music.

Well, you can’t do all that.

You’re spending all this money.

So I think everything has its own problems.

And I think right now everyone’s just trying to figure it out.

And I think digital is finding right now where it belongs, in what music.

I think it’s great band, all the instrumental parts.

Yes.

Run up the flute and all that, and the kids had that because generally, it was an eight and a half by 11 anyway, when it was published.

Choral music, I think it’s going to be both.

I think paper is going to be around a lot longer, just like finale.

I don’t think finale is going to be like this.

Eventually it is, eventually it’s going to disappear.

But we’ve got finale another couple of years to be able to use it in transition.

And I think that is with digital.

I think it’s just finding where it works the best.

And right now, people still like a paper copy, you know?

And others don’t.

And luckily, we get to do both, right?

Yeah.

I know certainly it’s cheaper not to print music and warehouse it a lot.

Absolutely, you know?

And there’s less of that, like dealers.

Dealers aren’t warehousing music anymore.

When you, a lot of times, when you order your music, the dealer then orders it to the publisher, and it’s not immediate anymore.

It’s got to be mailed to the dealer, and then the dealer mails it to the teacher.

That is a little less efficient now, and digital can be better with that.

Well, speak to the composers listening and trying to figure out where to go with their scores.

What advice would you have for them?

Okay.

Composers, guess what?

You’re always going to be needed.

We’re always going to be needed.

Of all the people losing jobs, a publisher needs a composer, right?

We need to be paid.

We need to have worth.

And without that, and I speak as a publisher hat on, that’s why I want to be nice to my composers and I want to work with them.

And I want to have a good relationship.

We need composers.

And so I don’t think we’re going away.

Know, know your publisher, know the editor.

Be willing to be edited, all right?

A commission work doesn’t always, here’s another thing.

We could all, you know, all do a commission.

When I’m doing a commission, I’m thinking, I hope I can get this published.

I need to write it to where it can be published.

A lot of commissions may not be that way.

I’ve done commissions where this will never be published.

I’ve done others and I’ve received things, and I go, perfect, you know what you’re doing about getting it published.

Other commissions, I’ve gotten and go, well, this is great for that school, but we need to edit this.

It needs to not be six minutes.

It has to be four minutes or three minutes.

So be very open to being open-minded to editing, and that the editor knows what they need.

And you can always say no.

You can always go, no, I don’t want to do that.

I’ll pursue it another way.

That’s all right.

And know where you’re sending it, that it makes sense.

And then make sure that it’s as clean and notated and the lyrics, everything looks really good on it, that your idea is clear.

And that when we look at it, we open it up and go, oh, it looks beautiful.

I want to read this.

Maybe I want to publish it.

And that’s really it.

If you can do those, editors are going to love you.

You’re probably going to get something published.

Lastly, don’t think you’re going to do this as a living, that you’re only living.

It probably won’t happen.

You need to have other things going on.

But it certainly can’t be a good part of your living if you keep it up.

Well, thank you again for taking the time to talk to us.

This was a lot of good information.

And hopefully, people enjoy the behind-the-scenes look at what goes on.

I think there’s a lot more than people realize, and hopefully this gives them a better appreciation for the work that publishers and editors and engravers do.

Yeah.

And ideally, we don’t want you to worry about that part of it.

We want you to be creative.

But as you’re being creative, being aware that there’s a lot of other things that go on, just makes you appreciative of the people you’re working with, I think.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, I certainly love your music, Garrett.

Thanks, Greg.

I’m very excited about your music, and I’m excited about what else you’re going to send me, and what we can work on together.

And I know teachers love your work.

It’s been so fun.

I’ll go work with it.

Maybe it’s a show choir or whatever.

And you’ve written the whole program.

And I’m just looking at it going, look at that.

That’s fine.

It’s just great.

So I know you get it, and I know you get the idea of what works here doesn’t always work there.

And I know the publishing world might be a little newer to you, and it changes every year.

So that open-mindedness is really great.

Well, thanks again.

Really appreciate it.

You bet.

Thank you.

Bye, everybody.