Notes on melody notation

For the Ranch Songbooks, Sarlo and Para use this special notation. An example is the song I Surrender To You. Para has extended this usage in this site to many other songs.

Conventions for melody notation are as follows

Basically, the letters a to g have been used for the notes, one for each syllable of the words, separated by spaces. They have been written in lower case, to distinguish them from the upper-case usage for chords. (These letter-notes correspond to particular notes in standard musical usage. If unfamiliar with that, please refer to a more basic explanation below.)

Sharps and flats (# and b) have been kept to a minimum by transposing the songs to simple keys, so notes are relative, not absolute.

When they are for songs i have done chords for, they will be aligned with those chords.

In addition:

1. Where more than one note is to be sung with a given syllable, its notes will be run together without spaces.
2. To eliminate ambiguity regarding octaves, a + or - is used to indicate jumps of six or more semitones. The absence of these indications will mean the nearest note up or down (five or fewer semitones) will be the one.
3. The timing and length of notes is not reckoned with in this notation, but flows fairly naturally in most songs, making precise indications mostly unnecessary.

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For non-musician visitors to the Osho Music Archive / Sannyas Wiki, Sarlo expounds further:

For this basic orientation, the assumption will be that the reader can relate to the familiar do-re-mi scale. This scale is referred to as a relative scale and a seven-note scale, relative because it can start with do anywhere and the others relative to it, and seven-note because the eighth note, if one were to continue ascending or descending would be just a higher or lower repeat of the first note. Thus, do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do and so on. The second do is said to be one actave higher than the first, and is vibrating at exactly twice the frequency of the first. This ratio of two applies throughout, so a mi one octave higher than a preceding mi is exactly twice the frequency. In terms of sound, they can sound so similar as to be almost indistinguishable.

In most standard musical notation, when the letters a to g are used, they refer to an absolute pitch. The standard to which all the other notes relate is that the a above middle c is 440 hertz, or 440 vibrations per second. The next lower a is 220, the next higher 880. Middle c is 261.626 hertz, and so on. Sarlo and Para's usage departs from this absoluteness, as indicated above, because of the greater compactness in writing them (compared to do-re-mi), sometimes in small spaces, and the ease of changing them when necessary to other keys.

C is a pivotal note in this system because of the piano.

(The rest below is still under construction, the remains of an inadequate exposition cobbled together from emails:)

The 12-note scale goes thusly, starting at C:

C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B C ... or ...

C Db D Eb E F Gb G Ab A Bb B C ... where the difference is only apparent, since for all practical purposes, Db = C#, Eb = D# and so on.

The "distance" between any note and the next in the 12-note scale is always the same, one "semitone," or fret on the guitar, or the next key on the piano. The distance between a note and the next in the seven-note scale is either one or two notes, depending.

So for example melody for I Let Go could be, based on the audio given:

I let go, I let go              g g g #f #f ed

And I let thee guide my life    d e #f e d e b

And then the chords are

Em        D
I let go, I let go

(Bm)                    Em
And I let thee guide my life

where the (Bm) signifies that Bm is optional, ie the whole song could be done with two chords only and still be passable. (Bm sounds in many ways like D and can fulfill the same role on many occasions. Same is true for Am - C and other related pairs. You can see a parallelness here if you look.

And even a non-musician can hear a difference, if you listen with an intent to hear the difference, between a minor tonality and a major. Thus in this song, the minorness of the parts where Em is played can be heard, in the harmonic structure anf feeling/mood, as compared to the majorness of the parts where D is played. (And where the BM may or may not be played, it lies sort of in the middle. But the minorness of the Em passage stands out if you listen for it. And hearing minorness but seeing only single letters is another clue that only melody is being indicated."

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Compare Notes on chord notation.