Notes on melody notation
For the Ranch Songbooks, Sarlo and Para use this special notation. An example is the song I Surrender To You.
- 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.
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:
- Where more than one note is to be sung with a given syllable, its notes will be run together without spaces.
- 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.
- Previously a system had been described in an attempt to reckon with timing and length of notes. As this came to be seen as unwieldy and difficult, it has been dropped in favour of this simpler presentation. FWIW, timing flows fairly naturally in most songs, making precise indications mostly unnecessary.
For non-musician visitors to the Osho Music Archive / Sannyas Wiki, Sarlo expounds further:
"Clues for the non-musician are:
1. An indication for every syllable is very/extremely likely to be for melody,
2. especially if the same indication is given for consecutive syllables.
3. Absence of any "qualifying" indications, eg Dm or D7 or D6 or D+ also would strongly suggest a melody. Melody concerns itself only with single notes, one at a time, and these will never be represented by qualifying things, except # or b, marks which are used to refer to the "missing" notes (in the western 12-note scale) which are not represented in the 7-note ABC scale. That scale corresponds to the familiar do-re-mi scale and leaves out five notes, the black keys on a piano.
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."
Compare Notes on chord notation.
