Ep. 62: Musicnotes' Michael Sinshack and Joe Harris on the Human Touch Behind Digital Sheet Music

All right, guys. Well, welcome to the show.

Thanks for talking to me. It’s fun to be here in person in Madison. Why don’t you just introduce yourself and what you do for the company?

I am Michael Sinshack.

I am the Publications Administrator for musicnotes.com. And with me, I’m Joe Harris.

I’m a sheet music specialist. And what I do here is I prepare sheet music for our site.

I’ve been with the company for about 25 years now. I think I’m in my 26th year, somewhere around there. 1998, I believe I started, pretty much when the company started.

About six months out from its birth, I think.

You were the first transaction, right? We were talking about this earlier.

Yeah. Apparently, when this is before internet commerce, because Amazon was still selling books and we were brand new. When we finally went live with sales to test the site, they needed a credit card, so I happened to be in the room.

So I am the very first purchase or sale or interaction with this company. So that was one of the founders, Walter Bird, pointed that out many years ago and still cracks me up today.

That’s a pretty good claim to fame.

I guess so. We’re still here. We survived the bubble, so that was nice.

I started out as the same thing with what Joe is doing, is basically just engraving and typesetting and placing the music and making sure everything is kind of where it belongs.

We started on old Spark 2 machines, old Unix machines, because that’s what our proprietary software was written in for the program we use. And we have since, we’ve modernized a little bit.

We’re still using the same software, but we’re up to speed on operating systems and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s been just 25 years of learning how to annotate.

Stems go up, stems go down, you know, whatever we need to do and check and clean and edit, so.

How did you actually get things on the site in those early days? What did that involve?

Boy, let me see if I know this, because I was…

Because this is pre-PDF, right? I mean, that’s what everyone knows now, is just PDFs.

And it was our MTDs, which we still have available on our site, was the format that we delivered them in, that was developed for the purpose of delivering the sheet music.

Tom Hall, our founder, I believe, wrote Muse, which is our proprietary software. And he and Walter Burt at the time had the idea that, you know, people have printers, people have computers, the Internet’s a thing.

There’s a way we can encapsulate this sheet music and deliver it personally right into the room you’re in. So they went about whatever they needed to do to figure out how that went.

But in that process, I know, and you know, we had to have the rights to do that. So there were a couple of different hurdles we had to get over.

And thankfully, I believe at the time, Warner Brothers, who I believe is now Alfred, they had used Tom’s proprietary software as well. So a lot of their books were actually engraved in Muse.

So I think that was one of our early deals was with them, is they would supply us those files because we already had the software and the ability to clean it up or re-engrave or whatever we needed to do with it for delivery.

And they had, you know, a lot of big name books at the time. I mean, at the time, it was Alton John and Billy Joel and still all the big sheet music, you know, popular music sort of ideas that they were going for.

If Warner Brothers at the time had supplied us those files, as long as we kept everything exactly where it was as the published book, you know, they would send us boxes of books and, you know, and then we would get reams of files coming through.

And we would have the books in front of us, and we would, you know, look at the Warner Brothers publication and look at what we had on the screen and made sure that when we created our MTDs that we were delivering to the customer, that they matched

the books for Batem. And that was sort of the beginning of that process.

And what does MTD stand for?

Good question.

You get a different answer from everybody.

Like multimedia transfer document or music transfer document. I mean, there were all sorts of different, you know, what do we want this to stand for?

Walter is probably the only one who really knows what the original, and even he’ll give you a different answer every time you ask him. But yeah, the music would be, you’d be able to print. It was interactive.

That was the other aspect of the company model at the time, is that not only were you getting your sheet music, you know, you didn’t have to buy the whole folio if you really liked this one song from this book.

You could just get the piece, but you could also listen to the arrangement through the MIDI playback at the time, just to see if it was the arrangement you’re looking for, sort of what you wanted, and then browse through the site.

And that was the concept back then, and sort of the genesis of being able to deliver the sheet music.

And as that partnership with the folks at Warner worked out for us, you start to gain trust in the industry, and word gets out, and we do our best to focus on quality.

I mean, every piece of music we’ve done that’s come through here, and Joe can attest to this, he’s one of the guys who really keeps everybody on their toes as far as proofreading and making sure everything’s in its place.

We paid attention to quality, so we would, every piece of music always has a set of eyes on it. We still do this. There’s no, we don’t have any AI, we don’t have anything saying that, we’re just reaming music through and sending it off.

At least two editors will look at a piece of music, and every time that happens, we always find that there’s always mistake, there’s always something a little out of place, and I’ll bet if we were to just grab 10 pieces randomly right now, either one

of us would look at it and we would still find stuff that needed to be cleaned up or edited. So there’s a lot that goes into making sure the products match what Warner’s wanted, but because of that process we had with them, our team has been trained

now to maintain that quality control and really try and focus on that. And then we also try to offer transpositions for every piece that we offer. Our main focus early on is obviously popular music.

We’re not going to transpose, well, we probably have it on the side. We have transpositions of Canon and Dee, don’t we? Sure, because it’s Canon and whatever key you want at this point.

Is this still Canon and Dee if you played an E flat or flat?

That’s the…

So, we try it with transpositions too. It’s not just an automated system.

We don’t just run it through and assume that the customer is going to pull down a transposition and the computer transposed it and it’s all going to be perfect because it’s not.

So, every one of our editors looks at every single transposition as well just for that quality, that aspect of quality that we try to maintain throughout the company.

So fast forward to today, you have obviously the music for print, you have the interactive music, like you were saying, you can choose your key signature, that kind of thing. You have the stuff on the app, you have all these different formats.

How much music you put out a day, would you say, for a week or how do you measure it? How much content is going on to the site?

For the most part, we, interactive or non-interactive, I’d say we’re still pushing about 200 files a week. We usually measure it weekly. And that’s, we’re down to kind of a skeleton crew.

We’ve got a staff of three actual editors that will actually look at interactive stuff. The stuff I just described, the transpositions, the interactive stuff. You know, our process is we get it in all different formats.

There’s so many programs out there, but we have to have it in our proprietary stuff. So we have to convert that.

And once that’s converted, there’s little mistakes and stuff from the conversion process that creep in, which is why an editor has to look at every single piece.

You mean from Sibelius or Finale or whatever?

Yeah, if it comes from Sibelius or Finale or something, yeah. And all of our editors are experts in at least one of those. And all of us have touched all of those at some point, so we’re familiar with them.

But for the most part, our product is delivered, our interactive product is delivered in the MTD format generated from Muse.

How do you edit 200 songs a week that you didn’t write? Like, what is your process? How do you approach editing?

Yeah, there are a lot of decisions that have to be made.

We don’t have a house style, per se. But Tom, my manager above Michael, he tells us, you know, you take things on a case-by-case basis, use your best judgment. But when in doubt, match the source, match what you’re given.

If you have a question and you just aren’t sure which way to go, match the original source. We have a ton of experience here. Everybody here, all of our editors have music degrees.

We’ve been doing this for decades. So if I can brag, we know music notation better than anybody on the planet. So we know what things are supposed to look like and what people expect things to look like.

And is it just a matter of having two screens side by side and going back and forth between the different versions or do you listen to recordings?

How do you make sure you catch everything?

Most everything we do is visual. People often ask me, don’t you have to have a good ear? You can’t listen to music when you’re doing that.

Well, no, it’s purely visual, really. Maybe in my head, I can kind of hear the music, but it’s purely visual. A lot of us here do have two screens.

You’ll have the original source on one screen and then the product you’re working on on the other screen. In the old days, a few years ago, we would often print off the original score and have a paper copy that we would refer to.

But recently, we’ve gone almost purely paperless. Back when COVID hit, we developed the technology to where we could use what we call a flip book method on the computer screen.

You have just the one screen and then you flip back and forth between the original source and the project you’re working on. That way, it’s extremely easy to see the differences when you’re doing the flip book method.

And we often use that method for proofing as well. Because, like I say, it’s it. Differences are very obvious when you do it that way.

Yeah, recordings come into play sometimes.

If we’re asked to transcribe a new, you know, a new piece, you know, something Disney drops or something that comes out. If we’re asked to do that, we want the official, we want the finalized. We don’t want anything preliminary.

We want to make sure that whatever is going out in the world, we’re going to transcribe from that recording to match.

And the other time, the only other time we really rely on a recording is if, you know, a customer or one of us has a question about something we’re looking at, that’s not sounding right during playback. We’ll refer to the recording.

It’s just sort of a reference. Customer service all the time. They’re, you know, they send through things.

Customer doesn’t think, you know, this D flat belongs here.

It should be an E flat or something like, so we’ll go reference the recording and just kind of make sure that it was a misprint from the original publication or it was a misprint when we transferred it, you know, something happened somewhere.

And you know, and that’s the beauty of the digital product is no matter how long it’s been on the site, we can go back to it and still kind of tweak and fix these things.

So if there is something that someone purchased that, you know, they discover five years later, it’s like, wait a minute, this is this measure has been wrong this whole time I’ve been playing it. You know, somebody pointed this out.

If they let us know that, you know, something we missed, we can go back and fix it and their digital copy will be updated even today of the whatever purchase they made.

Those fixes, those edits, anything we tweak gets updated to the product that’s already on your machine.

So being involved in as many different file formats and programs as you are, what is your take on the current landscape for notation software?

Do you have opinions about this works great for this kind of music, this works great for this kind of music, or is it really just about the personality of the composer and how their brain works?

For me, I had just my personal work, not even with Musicnotes, but anything I had to score or arrange. I was a finale user since 1990. I mean, I think I remember some old Windows 3.1 machine.

I had finale 2.0 on it, and I was just plugging away at that. So my fingers and my muscle memory are still completely devoted to the way I’ve used finale over the years. So that’s gonna be a big adjustment for me at some point.

But you had to learn other things for this job, right?

You had to learn the music software. You had to learn, I assume, other kinds of formats.

Yeah, no, Muse would be my second go-to if I really need it, but finale right now, well, no, Muse is very powerful. We just haven’t used it to its full extent.

Well, and I guess the follow-up to that is there’s a lot of people in that situation right now that have to learn a new software, but you’ve already had at least some experience in picking up other programs in addition to finale.

So how do you do that? How do you retrain your brain? How do you learn a new set of shortcuts and a new set of menus and toolbars?

Right.

I’ll let you know when it happens because I’ve been using Muse for 25 years as well. I mean, Finale’s only got five years more on it in my experience. So it’s muscle memory for the both.

So I’m sure there’s room in the brain for more than one, at least my brain. I can hold at least two. But I have Sibelius, I have Dorico, I have MuseScore.

And I use Dawes as well, but I don’t use Dawes for notation at all. Right now, I’m more familiar with Sibelius than I am with Dorico. So I might even migrate that way.

But again, it’s going to depend on what we start seeing come in to the company.

Because if we start seeing more Dorico, I’m naturally going to have to navigate to that and make that the priority, just to stay on top of where the actual industry sort of migrates to. But for me, I’m open to learning those new things.

I just don’t know what my old brains can be able to retain.

So there’s learning the software, but then there’s also learning the notation itself. Do you have any thoughts on composers wanting to get better at notation?

Because I know a lot of composers have really great ideas, but it’s more flawed in the actual execution of putting things on paper.

Yeah, you have to learn the notation. Fortunately, any software program that you use is intelligent to an extent and does things for you, like figures out stem directions and such.

And if you’re lucky, your software will tell you if you have too many beats in the measure, things like that. Otherwise, it’s just a painful process to learn proper music notation.

Maybe a good exercise would just be to like take a score of Beethoven or something, see if you can put it in the finale or whatever, just as an exercise.

Yeah, I know all the time I run into situations like, I want to do this, how do I get the software to do this? What’s, go to online forums, how do you do this? Very often the question is, it doesn’t do that.

Or why would you want to do that? Because I wrote it that way.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it’s always a steep learning curve, learning the new software.

Now, you see a lot of scores come in from different composers. What makes you the happiest when you get a score and you open it up, and you see that they’ve done it a certain way? Like, what are some good practices for composers?

Oh, proper spacing, proper score order if it’s a larger score.

Boy, piano scores, let’s see if it’s like a piano solos or piano vocals. Proper voicings, just, you know, piano stuff, you can have the right hand with upstem, downstem, depending on, you know, a busy piece, like a Bach piece, for example.

I’m not particularly interested in, like, the editor’s notes, like fingerings or pedalings or anything that might be added to it. But I like to see a very clean score, as few collisions as possible, even with accidentals and note heads.

And just proper voicings. I’ve seen stuff come in, and again, it is from amateurs. I haven’t seen any of this, like, from Peters or anybody, like, who really do know what they’re doing.

But from amateurs that come in where it’s a fugue and you don’t know which note is the second entrance of the fugue because they’ve stemmed it all the same direction or they put it all in the same way, and you’re like, okay, there’s a lower voice,

but there’s definitely some voice crossing in here. So now you really kind of have to piece it apart.

Just to take the time to learn that there are proper ways of laying out the music, just so that a performer can sit down and see instantly what they’re looking at. It’s another language, obviously.

Music is something you learn to read and look at, and what we do is, like he said, is purely graphical. It’s not really a lot of listening.

So to be able to see clearly what that music needs to represent is always something that’s like, you open a score and you see that right off the bat, you’re like, oh, good.

If somebody knew what they were doing, this is going to be an easy edit or an easy fix. Otherwise, I get stuff that’s also not pianistic. I have a pretty large hand, but my hand can’t do that, especially at that tempo.

Yes, if you listen to a recording, you hear those notes in there, but nobody’s going to play that. You have to have a nice balance of an arrangement. If it’s just like a piano version of a pop song, you have to make it piano friendly.

It’s not going to have that low sub-bass constantly banging away, as well as whatever’s happening in the mid-range, as well as we know what’s happening way up here.

You got to find, well, what notes are important, what rhythms are important, how do we make this work and sound like the original, still be a good representation of the original.

And when I see good piano transcriptions like that, that’s something that makes me happy, because I get them both ways.

Yeah, I’d like to echo some of the things that Michael said, like how do you know when you first open a file, that you’ve got something good, something that was done by something who knows what they’re doing.

And it’s nice to be able to see proof that the person who arranged the score really tried hard to make it look like a publishable product as is. They weren’t just expecting, okay, these guys will clean it up.

So one thing in particular is just layout, just make sure that everything fits on the page. And you don’t want to see, go to the last page and see like one orphan measure, you know, stuck in the upper left hand corner of the page.

You want to make sure that the person preparing the score took the time to make sure every page looked correct for the full page.

Yeah, and even if they go a step further, because a lot of people, a lot of things we get in sometimes miss this is be cognizant of page terms.

You know, if you have an accompanist or you’re trying to play this, if there’s something happening right at a page turn, it’s a really important part.

See if there’s another way you can lay out the music a little bit differently so that you don’t have to turn the page at that measure. You know, maybe give them four more bars or, you know, move stuff around or move that one over or something.

But if possible, try and be cognizant of where the page breaks actually take place, because that makes a big difference for a performer. I mean, if they’re actually turning pages these days, too, because that’s another way this is going.

You know, or you use a pedal to turn a page on your iPad. You know, that’s a possibility now for a lot of performers.

But it’s still, you know, for print music or for published stuff, you want to use people are going to print out and still throw on the piano. It’s a little detail, but it’s an extremely helpful detail.

So, like you said, you were one of the earliest people in the company. Both of you have been with the company a long time.

Real quick, we spun our company, like Cathy and Tom came from AR Editions, which is a publisher of like academic music and books and scores and stuff like that. Because that’s where Tom Hall was developing the software Muse originally for them.

And Joe had worked with AR long before Musicnotes. So Joe is probably like the most tenured person.

I was actually, I was a beta tester for this company before you were brought on.

Okay, so yeah. But yes, we both been here a very long time.

Has digital music turned out the way you expected? Like has, what surprised you about it? Or, you know, in those early years, you had all these predictions about where the future was gonna go.

What’s panned out and what hasn’t?

One detail I remember, we were talking at lunch today about the CD sync technology. I think back in the early days, we were really developing this technology where the product that we sold would synchronize with the CD.

It was a great technology because it really impressed the investors.

Yeah.

Yeah. Ultimately, that tended to be not so important. Right.

The CDs are even more.

Yeah. Well, let’s see. One thing I noticed and this is before I came to the company, back when I was a teenager just going to Carl Fisher and like in downtown Chicago, I’d go into the building.

There was still buildings and still like file cabinets full of drawers of these books of sheet music, and you’d pick something up and something says POP on it. You’re like, you’re never going to get this book because it’s permanently out of print.

Nobody’s publishing this anymore. That’s one of the things that I’m really happy about the technology we provide is we’re always in print.

Even if the publishers could still send us and Warner Brothers did do this for some stuff in the early days, those books were out of print, we can revive them. We can bring them back. We can bring songs out of them back to the consumer.

That’s one aspect I really like about what we do here. Everything we produce should remain for a while. One of the things that frustrated me about a lot of those books I would buy is I really wanted to learn the song.

I didn’t want to play something that sounded like the song. So a lot of them were piano and vocal, but if you played the piano, you were also playing the vocal part.

So you’re just hammering along with the singer or the melody, which is fine because people want to do that. They want to recognize the song and the melody. But I wanted to learn the song.

I didn’t want to learn the melody. I wanted to learn the guts underneath it.

One of the things I started doing when I started transcribing here, it became our Singer Pro product, or at least we tried to make it as professional and still piano friendly as possible, is to provide that, yes, here’s the part for the singer with

the melody and the stuff you’re going to recognize right away. But here’s a decent conglomeration of what the band is doing, the accompaniment basically.

That’s something I’m glad we began to offer and became one of our product lines, is because it was something I always looked for when I was going through those books. I want the accompaniment. I want to know what that synthesizer lick was.

I want to know what was happening in the music. And it didn’t always feel that way when I was getting the books. And I mean, I never felt ripped off.

I just thought that’s just the way music is. You know, I was at that time, 13, 14 years old, still learning how music worked too. But that was just something that carried over.

So, I was really happy to allow that to happen.

Yeah, just to kind of feed off that idea, yeah. It makes for a really great product, which could create some great spinoffs.

Because once you get that singer pro version, you just strip out the lyrics, then you can create versions for other instruments. You got like a concert piece from a movie soundtrack.

Right. And we offered that as well, the instrumental sets for a lot of stuff. If we find people are looking for it, because somebody wants to do it for a high school recital or something like that.

But they play the viola. It’s well, when we strip out our parts, we try and make them as accessible and generic as possible, but still fit within the range of any given instrument.

Like our part in C, we’re going to hope it might go below a flute range, because a violin can go a little bit lower than a flute. But for the most part, we’re going to try and bump everything within any instrument it can pick up.

Our C version, our B flat version, our E flat version, our viola, we offer that for people learning C clef, and bass clef we try and keep within the range of a trombone, or cellos can get a little bit lower sometimes.

So we’re very cognizant of trying to keep one bass clef version accessible to as many bass clef instruments as possible. But the Singer Pro version allows us to do that.

It gives them the accompaniment for that as well as the version they need to read.

You were asking about what sort of changed with the sheet music is just that the flexibility once we have something in front of us, what can we do to kind of twist it and mold it into an easy play version, or all the parts are right there in front of

us and boom, boom, boom, boom. I noticed that a lot of the stuff we would get from other publishers, a lot of those early books from the 70s and 80s, we’d engrave a piece that was first published in 1972 and be right here.

And then we would get a book of greatest hits from the 70s and we’d see it’s the exact same version that they were just copying and pasting because the work was already done.

We’re digital now, so we’ll only offer one version, so there’s no need to do that. But now we could take those pieces and use them to create just a little bit more variety for any given title at any time.

Well, let’s end with this. You have a very unique perspective on the industry. You’re sort of behind the scenes, but at the same time, you’re right in the thick of it.

And seeing a lot of stuff that the average musician has no idea even exists, right? This whole process of publishing and distributing and getting things out there.

It’s a really cool side of the industry that I think most people don’t really think about. So I want to end with this. What do you wish people knew about the work that goes on behind the scenes to bring them their sheet music?

That an actual human is actually doing it.

Exactly.

That’s what I would say.

That it’s not just a machine spitting out, you know, somebody feeding it MIDI or feeding it XML or some other conversion format. We have real people in Madison, Wisconsin, and well, none of our editors are in Nashville.

We have an office in Nashville, but none of them are editors. But for the most part, it’s that we do care about the product we put out there. You know, we try our hardest with quality.

We used to have a staff of about 16 editors at one point, at our peak, somewhere definitely pre-COVID. So around 2014, 2015, somewhere in there was about the most editors we’ve ever had.

And we were pushing about, for interactive stuff, which takes more time, we were pushing about 300 files a week.

But every single one of those pieces, a person, at least two people looked at, two different people, sometimes three or four, because there’s questions that get passed around.

But yeah, I think it’s important to know that we’re not just a computer, we’re not just feeding something into a machine and saying, here’s your product, here’s your product.

And you met Mark and Luther, they touch everything, they look at everything and make sure things are in its place, and that it’s published worthy.

Yeah, I mean, it’s the human touch, I guess would be my answer to your question, my long-winded answer to your question. But that’s it.

Yeah, I consider what I do to an extent art, but it’s something I can be really proud of, something I put a lot of effort into. What I do relies on my years of experience as a musician.

And when I create a product, I’m always thinking about the end user. What is our customer going to think? How is our customer going to interpret what is on the page?

It’s interesting. When we get into, when the editors get into arguments, it’s typically not about, well, the book shows this, the book shows this. No, well, customers are expecting it to look this way.

We want it to, you know, we want the people are going to expect it, or they’re going to interpret it this way. So we’re always thinking about our customers and their needs.

Yeah, I like the concept of thinking with like art too, because I do, like you mentioned, you know, what makes you happy when you open a score.

And, I mean, you open a nice, you get a score from Disney or something that was on the sound stage from Disney.

And, I mean, the people that produce those things fly through those things in a day, like they’re, because they’re, you know, time is money and it’s this, but those scores are immaculate. They’re, everything is exactly where it needs to be.

Everything is crystal clear. And, you know, it’s just something you want to emulate, even though we’re just doing the little piano vocal version of it.

It’s still, there’s something inviting when the music is really clear and clean and precise right in front of you. So we’re happy to do that.

But I think that’s right now is something that only, you know, you can do if there’s a human touching it, you know. The software comes close, but you still got to, it’s never, it’s never 100 percent.

So well, this has been really fun. I appreciate you guys taking the time. And like you said, it’s a human touch and it’s fun to meet the humans behind that.

I’m glad you came by.

This is really nice. I mean, we haven’t had any real signature artists come through this office. We had Canadian Brass walk through one time about 20 years ago.

We had Emily Bear.

Emily Bear, who just finished the Moana score.

She did all the songs in the Moana 2 movie. She came through our office. We met her when she was five years old.

And she came through and she was playing someone for, because she had just been on the Ellen Show at that time. And she came through and played a bunch of stuff for them.

And then we met and I became her engraver, would work with her and her mom to go through her stuff. And then she signed on with Quincy Jones, got old enough to know what the music itself was and her career just took off.

So she’s another artist we’ve had come through here. Yeah, we don’t get a lot of, I mean, we’re in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s not Nashville, it’s not Los Angeles, not New York.

It’s nice and quiet, but we exist. We’re here. We’re happy to, you know, if you do want to come see us, we’ll let you walk through and look at our computer screens.

It’s really nothing much here, but it’s fun. Enjoy it. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t stay for 25 years if I didn’t really appreciate what I do and what they allow me to do.

And and it’s a good group of people. I mean, all of the turnover we’ve had over the years, you know, I’ve been lucky enough to witness that. And, you know, there’s hardly anybody.

I would have anything ill to say about. We hire good people here. We have good outlook on life in general.

So that’s great.

Thanks, guys.

Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you.