I’ve been holding off making this announcement, but I’m going to go ahead and post it: I am now the musical engraver for the magazines “Soundboard” & “Soundboard Scholar”!
A few years back I became a member of the Guitar Foundation of America and from that time forward I was thinking about how I could contribute to the GFA. My answer came as a combination of my specific talents and knowledge. Who better to typeset music and musical excerpts than a guy who’s taught rudiments and music technology? Combine that with a deep love of the guitar, aesthetics of scoring, and a complete computer nerd and you’ve got me in a nutshell.
I’ve submitted all the scores for the next issue of Soundboard and am now just doing some work on Soundboard Scholar. How am I doing this typesetting? Open source of course… I’m using Lilypond as the vehicle to typeset. Unlike other notation programs like Finale/Sibelius it is rules based and it creates the layouts itself (everything right down to the arch of a slur and how far the end points are from noteheads). I’ve spent the last 6 months working on my own ‘house rules’ and creating a cheat sheet for classical guitar. I believe the result to be something truly special.
All this has happened while I quietly launched a new link in this site’s menu called ‘Stella Pulvis’ (Ok so I’m not only a computer/guitar geek, but also a space guy…. the name is Latin meaning ‘space dust’, from a famous Carl Sagan quote). ‘Stella’ is my freelance typesetting service. I’ve already been very busy with 10+ scores this summer. Since Lilypond is open source software and free, I will donate part of any income I make from this endeavor back to the developers of the software as my little thank you to them.
I’ll be posting examples of the notation here soon under the ‘Stella’ link, and I encourage you to take a look when they appear and if you like my work and have something you’d like notated, get in touch!
Eugene