Arranging for Steelband - Part 1

In this and the following posts, I look at how to go about arranging music for steelbands.

For many bands, I reckon that one of the biggest problems is having sufficient repertoire to keep the band and the audience entertained. Luckily it turns out that arranging isn't terribly difficult!

Music Theory

If you are already knowledgeable about music theory, then arranging is rather easy. If not, you have a bit to learn, but it is still within your grasp. I assume that we are going to be producing sheet music arrangements, although there are plenty of talented players and arrangers who do everything by ear.

To arrange using sheet music, you will need to have, at the least, the following fundamental abilities:

• Reading sheet music,
• Identifying and using major and minor scales, and
• Identifying and using chords.

These are the very basics, but they are not terribly difficult to pick up. There is a lot of free information that is easily available on the internet that can help here. To the absolute novice, scales might seem silly or unnecessary (why not just keep everything in C and use lots of accidentals?), but it makes your music less complicated to read, and more importantly helps you to understand the chords that have been used.

Software

Despite what some people might tell you, there are plenty of free and/or opensource options available to help with arranging and outputting high quality sheet music.

The aim of this post is not to provide a software review, so I'll leave that to the rest of the internet, but software that I highly recommend is MuseScore. It is an open-source program that allows you to enter sheet music manually, play it back to yourself, and to generate good quality scores. It can also import sheet music in a number of different formats, the most useful of which are probably midi and musicxml.

While MuseScore produces scores that look rather good, my personal favourite for high quality scores is LilyPond. This is open source music engraving software. It is not for playing back tunes or even for actually arranging music; it is only meant to produce high quality sheet music. LilyPond is very powerful, but has quite a steep learning curve. Luckily MuseScore can export to LilyPond's format (not too badly either, although I have encountered some problems that were easily fixed).

My workflow tends to involve working in Melody Assistant (or MuseScore) and then once I've arranged the tune, I enter it into LilyPond to produce a high-quality finished product. Melody Assistant is a commercial product that I've been using for a bit more than a decade, but I don't think that the sheet music it produces is as good as LilyPond. I've found that Melody Assistant has a number of advantages that are easily worth what I paid for it, but I would still recommend MuseScore for someone starting out.

Note that all three of these programs can be used in Linux/FreeBSD, MacOSX, or MS Windows.

Sources of music

I'm not someone who can work out tunes by ear, so I assume that we start with some existing music, such as a piano score or a lead sheet. There are a number of places to legally obtain free sheet music on the internet that can be used, although you may find that at some point you will want to buy music. While one can buy music for piano or another instrument and then use it to arrange for pan, it can be easier to buy scores already arranged for steelband.

When arranging a tune, the two most important parts of the music that you need are the melody and the chords. This means that, at the least, a lead sheet will be really useful. A website that provides a good number of lead sheets for free is Wikifonia.

A less obvious source of sheet music are midi files. You can read up on them more elsewhere on the internet, but it's enough to know that they are in a format that is related to sheet music. This means that you can generate sheet music from midi files fairly well, and as there are many freely available on the internet, this means that there is a lot of sheet music out there. Just be careful to make sure that you don't violate any copyright restrictions on any midi files that you download, although these restrictions should be placed somewhere on the website with the midi files. To generate sheet music from a midi file, all one needs to do is open it up in MuseScore.

This is the end of the first part of my guide to arranging music for steelband. In the next post, I'll look at the different voices in a small steelband and the ranges, as well as some of the basics of how the melody and chords get arranged for the different instruments.