One of the things I've started doing with The Arpa Protocol is something I hadn't originally intended to do at all.
I'm making songbooks for the songs.
Normally, of course, the process is the other way around. You write a piece of music, work out the arrangement, record it, and then, if you want to publish the music as sheet music or a chord chart, you can create the notation from the music you've already written.
The Arpa Protocol doesn't always work quite like that.
The music can begin in all sorts of different ways.
Sometimes it starts with a lyric or an idea. Sometimes it's a riff, a piano part or something I've recorded in Logic. Sometimes an entire piece develops inside the software. Sometimes there are much older ideas that have been sitting around for years.
Conatum Humanum, for example, began partly with older musical ideas that I'd already notated in Sibelius.
And there are songs from much further back than that. Some ideas were recorded around thirty years ago and have stayed with me ever since. Modern technology has finally made it possible to take some of those old ideas and produce them much closer to how I originally heard them in my head.
That's one of the things I find most interesting about making music now.
There isn't necessarily a single route from an idea to a finished song.
Working backwards from the finished song
That becomes particularly interesting when it comes to making a songbook.
Rather than starting with a score and ending with a recording, the finished recording is sometimes the thing that needs to be turned back into a playable piece of music.
The process starts with the finished master recording.
That's important because, ultimately, the recording is what I'm trying to reproduce. Alongside the finished audio, there are the individual MIDI parts used to create the music. These contain a huge amount of useful information about notes, timing and the musical material underneath the recording.
There are also the lyrics for each song and the original song structure, showing where the different sections occur.
None of these things tells the whole story on its own.
The MIDI might tell me which notes were played, but it doesn't necessarily tell me exactly how those notes function in the finished arrangement.
The audio tells me what can actually be heard, but listening alone doesn't always make it easy to determine exactly what is happening underneath.
The lyrics provide important landmarks within the song, while the structure shows how those sections fit together.
So the interesting part is putting everything together.
The MIDI is compared against the recording. Chord changes are checked against what can actually be heard. The relationship between the music and the lyrics is examined, and the different musical parts are worked through to establish what is important to the finished arrangement.
And then comes perhaps the most important part.
It needs to be simplified.
The aim isn't to produce the most technically complicated transcription possible.
It's to produce something that a musician can actually pick up and play.
From recording to songbook
The format being developed for The Arpa Protocol is deliberately compact.
The idea is that a song should be playable from a couple of pages rather than requiring somebody to work through a huge transcription.
The first page contains the lyrics, sections and chord information, with the chords positioned alongside the words where the changes actually occur.
The second page provides a more compact performance map, showing the important chord changes, lyric landmarks, repeats and bar information.
It's really a bridge between the recording and the musician.
The original track can be listened to and heard exactly as it was recorded, but the songbook provides another way into the music. It shows how the song is constructed in a form that another musician can actually use.
And that's what makes the project interesting to me.
Technology is just another tool
Technology is a huge part of The Arpa Protocol, but it isn't the point of the project.
The starting point can be different for every song.
A piece might begin with something written thirty years ago. It might begin with a Sibelius score. It might start with a riff, a piano part, a recording in Logic, a lyric, an arrangement or simply an idea that needs exploring.
Modern technology provides more ways of taking those starting points somewhere.
Sometimes it allows an old piece of music to finally sound the way it was always intended to sound.
Sometimes it allows an idea to be explored in a way that simply wasn't practical when it was first written.
Sometimes it provides the tools to take something that exists only as an idea and turn it into a finished recording.
And now, with the songbooks, the same technology is helping take those finished recordings and work backwards towards something that another musician can read and play.
Music has always absorbed new technology.
The tools change.
People continue making music.
For me, that's really what the songbooks are about.
Taking something that exists as a recording and turning it back into something anyone who plays, or want to learn to play, a guitar or piano can pick up, and make their own.
The technology might be different from the way music was made twenty, fifty or a hundred years ago.
But the end result is still a song.
And now, hopefully, it's a song you can play too.