Writing About Music

Here are some subtle delineations between similar audio engineering terms, all meaning “without something.”

Flat: no EQ

Dry: no reverb; sometimes refers to absence of other effects, but it’s usually about reverb

No Effects: no true effects such as delay, chorus, or reverb, but it might include EQ, which is considered sound processing (except in extreme applications, such as using EQ to imitate a shrill, lo-fi phone call voice)

Raw: no effects or sound processing of any kind

(Thanks to Michael Hamilton and Rob Jaczko for their input on this.)

People use the word “groove” to mean different things. The perspective that many at Berklee take is as follows, though this is by no means universal.

A groove is a multi-dimensional musical device that generally serves as a bed for a lead melody (or other types of solo, such as rap), though grooves can also occur on their own. Grooves include recurring rhythmic and harmonic patterns, such as a drum beat, chord patterns, and melodic fragments or “background lines,” which are like melodic motifs (sometimes called “licks” or “hooks”).

Rhythm-section based music makes grooves relatively obvious. A rhythm section is generally a drum set, a bass, and a “comping” instrument (usually guitar, piano, organ—basically, anything that can play chords). It plays the groove. The soloist (singer, sax player, rapper, etc.) plays/sings a melody that “hooks up” (intersects rhythmically) with the groove, but does usually not play the same kind of recurring rhythmic pattern exclusively.

A groove is like a mobile, with different recurring parts played by each instrument, each fulfilling a unique role, repeating and rotating around. Most commonly, drums play a drum beat. There might be additional percussion instruments too. The bass plays chord roots and other important harmony notes, generally hooking up rhythmically with the bass drum of the drum set. Comping instruments (guitar, keyboard, accordion, etc.) play chords. Melodic instruments in a groove can offer short melodies.

The roles are the important thing, not the specific instruments. A bari sax can play the bass line. A string quartet can comp chords. You can strum a beat on muted guitar strings.

Single instruments can play grooves solo. Pianos and guitars are especially good at it. But it gets harder from there. Most grooves are played by multiple instruments in a rhythm section. The musical roles are the important thing, not the instrumentation.

Each part in isolation can be very simple and not sound like much. But when the parts are combined, the whole composite sound object is revealed. The parts fit together, complementing and reinforcing each other.

Not all music has a groove—certainly not an obvious groove. It’s really a sense of recurring rhythm, serving as an underlying accompaniment. People could argue that, say, Beethoven had his grooves. But in terms of modern usage of the term, that’s something of a stretch, and said with a wry smile.

Much contemporary classical music deliberately avoids having a groove, perhaps holding as important to the styles an avoidance of repetition in favor of constantly fresh or ambient sounds. So, drum beats are out if you are anti-groove.

But most popular music is groove-based. Some forms (dance music, hip-hop, funk) put the groove as the most prominent and obvious feature. You could just have the groove and never get around to an actual song. Rock, country, etc. use the groove as the bedrock accompaniment for a song, and the lyrics/melody are more what distinguishes the music. The groove still identifies the style, though.

Some people use the words “groove” and “feel” interchangeably, but I find it more useful to distinguish them. A “feel” is a purely rhythmic device, referencing the beat subdivision and emphasis. A “groove” has a feel, but also chords, instrumentation, hooks, and so forth. You could say, “A funk groove has a sixteenth-note feel and a strong backbeat.” (A backbeat is beats 2 and 4, in 4/4 time.) Or, “A swing groove has a triplet feel.”

Another way “groove” is used is as a verb. “That really grooves.” This means that it has momentum, and sounds distinguishable as its own object. It implies “musically good.” If it “doesn’t groove,” it means that the time doesn’t flow naturally and easily. Maybe it is too cluttered, maybe there is an awkward hesitation, or maybe it is just boring.

But if it is “grooving,” it cuts a line aligned with the natural gravity of the universe, and its resulting motion and momentum. Like a tire track.

In musical terms, it means it rhythmically well executed, cleanly orchestrated, and proficiently performed.

Groovy?

Discussions of imaginary barlines tend to get very mathematical. It’s easier to think of them in terms of clarifying syncopation.

An imaginary barline is a notation convention designed to help the music reader know what’s syncopated—off the beat—and what’s not. It’s not an actual notation mark; it is an understanding and a notation convention.

In 4/4, the imaginary barline separates beats 1 and 2 from beats 3 and 4. Only whole notes and non-syncopated half and dotted half notes can be notated as “crossing the imaginary barline.” No other note durations can cross them. Rather, they must be rewritten as pairs of tied notes, with beat 3 being shown. This makes the notation much easier to read.

So, these are acceptable:

The ones below are not acceptable. Again, the reason is that the notes crossing the imaginary barline disguise the fact that the music is syncopated.

Much easier to follow are the following revisions. The notes are tied, and the target note of the tie re-articulates beat 3, and thus clarifies where the syncopation lies.

In some Latin music, there is a notable notation exception to this convention: bass lines with the following syncopated rhythm. But this is a rare acceptable exception to the general rule.

Beams never cross imaginary barlines. Some publishers group beats on each side of it together, while others begin new beam groups on every beat. These are other ways to clarify the metric organization.

These are correct:

These are incorrect:

Similarly, beams are used to clarify other meters besides 4/4, and the other rules of imaginary barlines also apply to them. Many of these signatures can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and thoughtful beaming can greatly clarify how the music is to be performed. Again, it’s about clarifying subdivisions and which beats are emphasized. Meters have subdivisions every two or three beats, and more complex time signatures (e.g., 7/8, 12/8) might have multiple imaginary barlines to consider. Below, the beams show how some other meters are commonly organized. Other options are available.

This concept of clarifying syncopations also applies when you drill down deeper, into smaller divisions of the measure. For example, this notation clarifies beat 2, and thus the fact that the notation is off the beat. This is a clear way to write that rhythm because the relationship between the sounding notes and the meter is clarified, via the tie.

Here, however, the syncopation is more difficult to figure out, and thus, to be avoided.

These “rules” of notation help make music as easy to read, and thus, interpret. When the notation follows the music’s intent, it becomes much easier for the reader to understand, especially at a glance.

Are you all set with your New Year’s resolutions? Last year, I’m afraid I broke pretty much all of the ones I made, but I did make some progress on one: to be more organized. I’m definitely a convert to the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach by David Allen, though I’m more zealot than master.

David Allen likes to say that acceptable rules of hygiene evolve, and generally speaking, we tolerate less and less skuzziness in our lives as generations pass. For example, people bathe and brush their teeth more often than they did in former decades and centuries. Our tolerance for being dirty and stinky has decreased. He evangelizes for a similar cleanup of personal and professional work habits.

I’m not sure that computer hard drive hygiene has been similarly evolving, in these days where memory is so cheap and plentiful. Maybe we’re a few generations away from really being digitally tidy. But there are great benefits to being organized. You can find things, for instance. Other people can find them too. You can keep track of what’s the most recent version. You can see at a glance what’s missing or where things go. And you can generally escape the feeling (and perception) that your hard disk (and thus, your workplace) is a skuzzy place (different than SCSI!), and generally feel in control of at least part of your environment.

Here are some tips that might help you organize your hard drive—and thus, your work/art.

1. Only use the Documents folder for storage. Avoid storing your files on the desktop or in application folders. If all your personal work is in the Documents folder, you will have a much easier time backing it up, transferring it to a new computer, finding it, and generally living with yourself.

2. In most cases, try to have no more than twenty files in a folder. If you have more than that, additional layers of subfolders might help you. It becomes annoying to try to find items on lists greater than this. Only have more items in a folder if there is a logical sort of sub-organization that goes on within the folder, such as sequentially numbered file names.

3. If you have many projects of a certain type or logical classification, consider bundling them up together in a Projects folder. For example, in my work, I have a folder for Berklee Press projects (books and DVDs), which is part of a higher level of organization called Berklee. I have another folder for my personal compositions. And I have another for my community service activities. There are others, too, but for the sake of this blog, let’s say that there are just those. A snapshot of my hard drive Goose (always name your hard drive), then, looks something like this. Note that I have no files on my desktop. None. Nada. Yesterday, I had about twenty, but that was skuzzy, and it’s cleaned up now, as it gets cleaned up at least once a week (when I am behaving).

4. If you have projects of similar types, consider recurring folder names within them. For example, for book projects, I generally have the same folder types. I’ve found it easiest to organize these projects by the author’s last name. Recent project authors have included Jon Damian, David Franz, and Andrea Stolpe, so here’s what their folder setup looks like:

I currently have 42 active Berklee Press projects! That’s a big, horrible folder: far more than twenty items. I’m always trying to get stuff out of that folder and into my Completed Projects folder. That folder has over 150 subfolders! But since it is seldom accessed, that’s okay.

Note the “Drafts” folders. That’s one step away from the trash, and in fact, once a book is published and I’ve created a CD archive of all the files, I delete all the Drafts folders. (All drafts are still stored on CD.) But it’s helpful to me to have Drafts folders associated with each project.

5. Name your files carefully. When it’s logical, include a sequential number in your file, and a concise descriptor of what it is. Mix case.

For example:

The Chapter folders have numbered chapter files. (Some books, such as Andrea Stolpe’s Popular Lyric Writing, don’t really require separate files for each chapter. It depends on how many embedded graphics there are.)

For Dave Franz’s new edition of Producing in the Home Studio with Pro Tools, the chapter files look something like this (simplified, for the sake of this post):

Graphics files get numbered sequentially by chapter and by image within the chapter. For example, here, chapter 2’s first graphic is called New Session. The second graphic in chapter 2 is called New Track Dialog. Each chapter gets its own folder.

For notation, I used to think that there should be separate folders for Finale files and for graphical export files, but I ultimately found that too cumbersome, in practice. Now, I just have all those files in a Graphics folder, even among other graphical types such as screen shots and diagrams. So, in Jon Damian’s new book The Chord Factory, a typical graphics folder looks something like this, mixing Finale files (.mus), exported notation (.tif), and charts he made in Clarisworks (.cwk):

Keeping them sequential keeps them organized.

If you live like this, your life gets easier. I can’t imagine how many tens of thousands of files are on my computer. Lack of strict organization schemes such as this would make my work grind to a standstill!

If this is an alien idea to you, I recommend that you mend your evil ways, for your own sanity. Simplify! Organization will set you free. For all new work, try to come up with a simple, usable system for organizing your files. In spare moments, try to make sense of any disorganized areas you might have.

Make it a New Year’s resolution to get ALL data files off your desktop at least once a week. The first time you try this might be a painful procedure, but if you’ve got a logical hierarchical setup, it becomes easy to keep it all neat and organized.

Good luck, and happy new year!

Writers, like other creative artists, struggle with the relationship between two related, and often confused activities: expression vs. articulation. Navigating this is critical for creating effective work.

Expression means bringing something that’s inside of you out. Your soul stirs, and you write something down. This is an over-arching motivation for why creative artists spend their time creating. They perceive something they feel has value, and want to share it with others.

Articulation means crafting a communication object. It involves looking at an outpouring of raw expression and adjusting it so that a reader (listener, watcher, whatever) will understand what you’re trying to express.

Editing (including self-editing) is the process of honing the communication object for optimized communication.

I find three questions helpful, when editing, that help preserve the original intent while making communication as effective as possible. When I teach this in my writing seminars, I call it “Feist’s Trident.” Someday, maybe somebody else will call it that too.

Feist’s Trident

The questions I ask when reviewing something:

1. What’s the Big Idea?
2. What’s in?
3. What’s out?

Say that you are charged with optimizing the following sentence. (I made it especially horrible, just for you.)

“It is my opinion, based on my thirty years as an educator and performing pianist, that pianists at all levels of expertise and proficiency must remember to memorize all types of inversion—first, second, and third—so that they are to avoid creating musically ineffective and unsuccessful comping parts.”

First question: What’s the Big Idea?

It can take several readings to figure this out. Here, the writer seems to be saying that there is a body of information (inversions) that is important for pianists to learn.

Next, we go word by word, phrase by phrase, and ask the next two questions of each element: what’s in/what’s out? In other words, what supports the Big Idea? Ruthlessness will serve you well, here.

The first bit, from “It….performing pianist,” is a common sledgehammer, designed to inspire the sense that the point coming up is worth reading. But readers already think the writer is credible, or else they would stop reading. So, that whole first bit can be “out,” and we can begin “Pianists….” Omitting useless text like this generally helps articulate a point.

“Pianists” seems an important word here, so we keep it in, for now, but “…at all levels of experience and proficiency” is redundant, so it’s out. “Memorizing” is relevant, so we keep it! “Must remember” is just bossy, “all types” with “first, second, third,” are unnecessary.

Let’s see what we’re keeping, so far:

“Pianists must memorize inversions, if they are to avoid creating musically ineffective and unsuccessful comping parts.”

That’s getting much closer to the Big Idea. But it’s quite bossy and negative. Here’s a more positive rendering, still keeping the Big Idea. I’ve done a bit more massaging to get more useless verbiage “out.” Now that we’re closer to the mark, it seems that “Pianists” is likely obvious, as we’re discussing comping parts, and the whole work is likely about “pianists” anyway.

“Memorizing inversions helps you create effective comping parts.”

Now, that’s a much more useful sentence! The Big Idea is now clear. Certainly, though, confirm with that author that you did, in fact, nail their intended big idea. When editing is as drastic as this, points are likely to be mistaken, somewhat. The author might say, “Actually, I want to emphasize that learning them is what’s important, not memorizing them.” Or “I meant memorizing inversion fingerings.” Omitting some of the chaff helps everyone focus in on what the main point to be articulated should be.

The goal in the process was to articulate a point. The raw expression object was hindered by words and thoughts that were distracting. Honing focus and gleefully eliminating words that didn’t serve the main purpose helped achieve the real goal: communication.

There are a number of ways to integrate music notation into text. See, you can do this:

Best practice, the text is set in a text-editing program, such as Word or Word Perfect. These programs are optimized for issues related to text, with features such as spell-check, text find/replace, and easy ways to edit the text’s font, style, and so on. For informal final products, such as exercises for students, a good word processing program might be all you need.

For more formal publications (books, ads, coffee mugs, etc.), you might eventually import your text into desktop publishing software, such as InDesign or Quark. These give much more control over placement. For Web use, you might use a Web design program. This blog is created using WordPress. But I always start my writing in Word, just because it’s optimized for editing text.

Then, you have to get the notation in a form where it can be imported into the software that will eventually house all the content. All these programs have ways to import graphic files. In Word, you can choose Insert > Picture > From File. Some programs use other terminology, such as Place or Set (even Browse), accessed from a menu called something like File or Import.

The notation itself has to be a graphical file: EPS, TIFF, PDF, JPG, etc. The different file formats have different strengths and limitations. EPSs provide best quality, but there are often font compatibility issues with them, which is an issue if multiple people are working with the file. TIFFs are very portable and predictable, but they distort if you change their size, and they are much larger files than EPSs. Not all formats are compatible with all software.

Anyhow, notation must somehow be converted into one of those graphical formats. Handwritten notation scan be scanned. Better, though, is to generate notation with dedicated notation software, such as Finale, and then render it as a graphic.

Finale has a Graphics tool that lets you define a notation region (drag a marquee box around what you want your graphic to be) and then “export” it from Finale (Graphics > Export Selection) to your hard drive. Then, that exported file can be imported into Word, InDesign, or whatever.

You could also use a screen capture program to grab your graphic. The Mac OS has a handy shortcut: Command-Shift-4, then drag. This lets you take a screen shot of part of your screen. I do that for this blog, mostly because it is very quick. The print quality isn’t so great (it’s a low res jpg), but it is handy for this relatively informal purpose, particularly because it is intended to be displayed on a computer screen.

Once you can integrate notation and text, you can write books, articles, classroom assignments, and much more. If you are writing for a publisher, discuss with them what the best delivery format will be, and if they have any file organization parameters. I’ll discuss some of the Berklee Press preferences for file organization in a future post.

Good writing optimizes the use of good words and minimizes the use of bad words.

Good words are expressive. They communicate clearly. That’s the goal of all writing, but especially so when trying to teach music, which is so technical.

One of my favorite words is “inspire,” just because of what it means, and because it hasn’t been ruined yet by overuse. Another word I like a lot is “disaster,” for its etymology: dis- (against) aster (stars). It’s not just bad, it’s a catastrophe on a grand, astrological, universal scale. Even the stars are against it!

While curse words are traditionally considered bad words, I actually think they are pretty good. They are charged with emotion and can be an effective way to communicate, when used well. If I were to write f— or s—, everyone would jump! That said, curse words often suffer from a boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. They are commonly used unnecessarily in contexts that don’t really demand it, and often inject anger into situations where love or calm would be more appropriate. Though they are our most energy-charged words, when used as generic intensifiers, they lose their oomph. So, if you cherish them as I do, handle them with care, and save them for special occasions.

In polite discourse, curse-word substitutes can be more effective than the actual curse words themselves. “Frickin’” (also “fricken” or “freaking”) is a good example. It means “accursed.” It’s a way of saying, “I’m usually too much of a gentle person to swear, but this circumstance is driving me to it!” I also like punctuation substitutions for swearing. I’ve standardized on @!!*&, over the years. Four characters might be better, but I like the excitement factor of the double exclamation points, and that assortment of punctuation just has a nice, balanced look to it. The unusual characters give the sense of the “word” being outside the parameters of what’s normal. That makes readers perk up. Similarly, words that are a little outside casual usage can give a text life. That goes for lyrics, too.

Truly bad words are those that distract from communication, and in the highly complex and technical world of writing about music, clarity is what makes the writing useful. Consider this sentence:

“You must practice these fingerings.”

In this context, the first two words, “You must,” are bad words. They steal the verb’s thunder and only add clutter, not real value. They are such common words that they essentially serve as filler here. So, in fact, what makes a word good or bad is its context. In another circumstance, “you” might be perfect!

Here’s a modified version of that sentence. It is so much more poignant with the bad words taken out:

“Practice these fingerings.”

Much clearer! Also, “You must” made the original communication unnecessarily personalized and bossy, and that’s another distraction, here. When giving instructions, avoid anything that diminishes the clarity like that. The tasks at hand are difficult enough to teach without cluttering up our writing with bad words.

Know what I’m frickin’ saying?

Writing books tends to drive musicians bonkers, particularly towards the end of the process when we’re fussing with minutia, reviewing proofs, cleaning up the final punchlist of details, and awaiting the final endlessly long march to the printer. Authors get crabby. There are two primary reasons why, in my opinion:

1. Books are persistent artifacts of an author’s best work and best thinking, and so getting books exactly right is intertwined with perceptions of self worth. At the end of the project, we feel stuck with its limitations, and are running out of time to make it the perfect, most holistic statement of who we are.

2. Musicians need to create actual music. Writing books about music is not the same as making music, and towards the end of the process, we get antsy because it’s been such an incredibly laborious distraction from what we need to be our primary life focus: making music.

(I won’t offer a third reason: that they are getting fed up with me torturing them…. That couldn’t be the case, could it?!)

An antidote to the first one, about identity, is to plan to write a series of books in your life that will collectively articulate a part of your persona, but more importantly to realize that no book could ever possibly do a soul justice. Books just don’t have that capability.

An antidote to the third one, if it exists (and I’m sure it does not), is to know that I will leave you alone very soon.

The middle one is what I really want to discuss. This past weekend, I took my boys to visit Sue (Gedutis) Lindsay and her family. Sue is a friend, musician, and fellow editor of Berklee Media projects. Here are Annie Lindsay and Forrest Feist munching on French fries, before we went to Plimoth Plantation.

We were catching up, and I was complaining about being generally crabby, and I mentioned feeling a bit far from music these days, when I seem to spend all my time talking and writing about music, rather than actually creating the real thing.

She offered a bit of wisdom that I feel is important to pass on. Cynical Sue said (and I paraphrase), “Musicians are special people, and we need to be creating music all the time, to feel normal.” She discussed her own journey through various distractions that were almost, but not quite, music, including writing books, research, teaching, and so forth. It’s not that these aren’t worthy, fun, and even necessary undertakings. We must call them “pseudo-musical activities,” though, and doing the real thing is where it’s really at. We must carve out time to create real music, for sanity’s sake, and be ferociously protective of this time.

So, I’m looking at life, and counting directions. I have my family (including two little boys), an old/maintenance-needing house, endless yard work, I serve on three town boards (chairing one), there’s my full-time gig at Berklee Press, part-time teaching Finale online, a variety of neglected hobbies, a few assorted other obligations, plus protecting my flock of chickens/ducks/geese from that hungry fox….. Quite a lot happening here, which all conspire to create distance from that spiritual life engine called music, which is the primary force that can keep me relatively sane and whole, but which is now at arm’s length. And I feel it poignantly this November, as days grow short and the world grows cold.

Prioritization is increasingly a necessary life’s skill for me, and I would venture, for anyone, as life developments bring increasing directions without offering us more hours in the day.

Arthur Cunningham, my first composition teacher and life mentor, once said to me, “I promise you that if you write every day, you will improve.”

So, here’s my thought/recommendation:

Create music every day.

Even if it’s for five minutes, you need to touch that fire, no how busy you are, and no matter how deeply your daily life is embroiled into pseudo-musical or non-musical activities. An hour would be great, but five minutes is better than nothing. Recognize that pseudo-musical activities (writing, teaching, studying, copying parts….) are not the same as making music, even though they might be delightful experiences in their own right. We need to be constantly warmed by that real core energy of musical spirit.

Commercial success and even inter-human communication are secondary to being warmed by the fire of creativity. Consider it a life imperative to touch the real thing. See progress over weeks, months, and years, not over the course of a few minutes.

If this rings true to you, please stop surfing the ’net, and create music for five minutes RIGHT NOW. Close your door, then play your guitar, beat your drum, improvise, scat sing, write a lyric—whatever the real-deal-essence-of-what-music-is-all-about-closest-to-center activity is for you. Then schedule a time when you will do it again tomorrow, and repeat. Just five minutes.

Let me know how it goes.

A “pickup measure” is a running start to bar 1. Pickup measures contain fewer beats than a complete measure—often just one quarter or eighth note. Essentially, it is “measure 0.”

Measure numbers start after the pickup measure so that there is an intuitive relationship between bar numbers and musical phrases. If you’ve got a 12-bar blues, the first phrase is most intuitively referenced as measures 1 to 4, not 2 to 5. Or, in a 16-bar form, your chorus should start at bar 9, not bar 10. Most popular music is constructed in 4-bar phrases, and it is usually clearer for the measure numbers to support the song form.

In Finale, set a pickup measure via Document > Pickup Measure, and then choose the duration of the pickup measure. This will set the measure numbers correctly so that you don’t have to control it via Measure > Measure Numbers > Edit Regions.

Set a double barline between the pickup measure and bar 1, just to signal to the reader that the first physical bar is actually a pickup measure.

If your pickup note begins off the beat, perhaps on the eighth note at 4+ (subdividing sixteenths 4e+a), it’s helpful to your readers if you also give them an eighth rest, just to clarify that the pickup is off the beat. (Note that the measure number for bar 1 is generally omitted; I’m including it for illustration purposes only.)

Another issue at “measure 0” is whether to have an opening repeat symbol if the whole form repeats. Though you’ll find many examples in the field where this is omitted, best notation practice is to include it. This way, the reader has an immediate indication that the form is going to repeat.

Don’t leave it out, as below. Though you’ll see this done even by smart, caring writers, it’s not as clear as the above example.

In recent Finale versions, the contextual menu for the Repeat tool has made adding repeat symbols so easy. Just Control-click a measure or highlighted measure region, with the Repeat tool active, and choose the symbol you want.

In grammar and style guides, a tremendous amount of ink has been devoted to the topic of when to use words and when to use numerals. Many book publishers, including Berklee Press, use the Chicago Manual of Style as their guide for such things. Although CMS makes a valiant attempt at clarifying this topic, the needs of music writing are very specific, and other resources have been necessary in our quest towards clarity and consistency with this.

I found that the most helpful resources are ones devoted to the most technical forms of scientific writing. Fun reading, let me tell you. In this post, I will share some of the insights I’ve gained about when to use numerals and when to use words.

A guiding principle, though, is this: Numerals are different than words, and they are an interruption to the reader’s general flow. They can be a great help in clarifying comparisons and names, but they should be used thoughtfully because there is the danger that they can become annoying.

As with all matters of writing, clarity is key.

The CMS general rule is to write out all whole numbers from –100 to 100. A-hah, you say! You should have written “minus one hundred to one hundred.” Well, I wish I could have, but when quantities are set in close proximity, as in a range, it’s clearer to use numerals.

See the game?

Here’s a sentence that took a ton of research to construct, the process of which was extremely helpful to me in understanding how to render numerals.

1. “A 12-bar blues has three 4-bar phrases.”

[applause, please…]

Here, we have two types of quantities: types of musical constructions (12-bar, 4-bar) and a quantity of objects of these types (three). It’s clearer to have a distinction in how these differing logical organizations are rendered. Compare that above sentence to the alternatives:

2. “A twelve-bar blues has three four-bar phrases.”

3. “A 12-bar blues has 3 4-bar phrases.”

The eye has to puzzle out examples (2) and (3) in a way that it doesn’t have to puzzle out (1). Example (3) is particularly difficult, figuring out the 3 and 4. It’s an example of a numeral being annoying and disruptive rather than clarifying.

By the way, I set parentheses around example numerals because I don’t want to confuse the other numerals with my example numerals. So, each type of number gets a unique treatment, and reading comprehension is served, hopefully.

This gets hairy, hairy, hairy. One of the most difficult types of writing to do is writing about music theory for guitar, as in Jon Damian’s recent book, The Chord Factory. Why? Because there are a great many types of numbers involved. You’ve got:

String numbers
Fret numbers
Finger numbers
Interval numbers
Chord extension numbers
Scale tone numbers

With your first finger on the 1st fret of the 6th string and your third finger on the 3rd fret of the 4th string, play a fifth from the root, and then imagine the C9 accompaniment….

[more applause, please….]

It’s quite murderous, tracking these over hundreds of pages (not to mention, hundreds of books).

Beyond just specifying rule after rule, there are a couple principles that I find helpful to keep in mind.

1. If something is identified or categorized by its number, then use the numeral (or “ordinal” form of the numeral, e.g., 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). 16-track unit, 1st fret, fret 1, page 6. Cmin7(9)

2. If there are two different types of numbers that are likely to be discussed in close proximity to each other, see if there is a logical way to make them different, even if it forces you to violate some “rules.” “Put your first finger on the 1st fret.” Or, rework: Put your 1st finger on fret 1.”

3. If you are comparing more than two quantities, use numerals. I have 2, you have 6, and she has all 9.” That’s an example of numerals being clarifying.

It is a great challenge to make sure that these are stylistically consistent at the book and catalog level, and this is where lists of rules can be helpful. Again, though, you sometimes need to violate the rules to achieve clarity.

Here are the “rules” listed in the Berklee Press Style Guide, which have a specific slant towards music writing and are thus supplementary to CMS. Unfortunately, this list seems to be ever expanding. I think it was originally compiled by Susan Gedutis Lindsay.

Words

Whole numbers (zero to one hundred, including negative numbers)

Numbers that begin a sentence (Three thousand fifty-five people…)

Intervals (Play both notes of the minor third in measure 3.)

Also note: In labels in musical examples, intervals are abbreviated using the numeral and its quality. M (major), m (minor), and P (perfect), as in M7, m3, P5.

Note values up to sixteenths (whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note, but 32nd note, 64th note, etc.)

Beat quantities (A half note lasts for two beats.)

Measure quantities (Vamp for sixteen bars.)

Inversions (first inversion)

Finger number (Third finger)

Numerals

Numbers with decimals and fractions (1.56, 2 1/2)

Measure numbers (measures 3–11)

Item names where numbers are important (16-track recorder, 12-bar blues)

Model numbers (DX-7, Hammond B3 organ)

Money ($25)

Note values larger than a sixteenth note (32nd note)

Beat numbers (beats 2 and 4)

Scale degrees (Degree 4 of C major is F.)

Chord degrees (A major triad has a major 3rd.)

Chord numbers (Substitute VI for II at the coda.)

Metronome markings (Set the quarter note to 88 bpm.)

String number (First finger on the 3rd string.)

Fret or position (7th fret or fret 7)

Time signatures (4/4)

Forms (12-bar blues)

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