Hello, friends!
Thank you for your patience as we work to get all our Patreon benefits in order. The tier you are at includes sheet music for the songs we release on Patreon, and we are a little behind in getting those together, so we apologize for the delay. There are a few songs we won’t be able to publish because we don’t have the rights to print them (the Phil Ochs songs, for example) but we are working hard to get the other pieces ready for you.
You may already know this about Windborne’s process, but when we arrange a song, we do it all by ear–it’s a process of listening, experimentation, refinement, and repetition (A LOT of repetition!). We use the voice memo app on our phones to record ourselves while we brainstorm harmonies so that we can go back and listen to the ideas we had, and when we find a chord or a line that we love, we work it into the arrangement. This process is quite time-consuming, but we think it is a key aspect of what makes Windborne’s sound different than what any of us individually might write while composing solo.
It’s a process that works really well for us, but one side effect is that our arrangements usually don’t get written down or notated until well after-the-fact, so it’s always been a game of catch-up on the sheet music front. Our performance pieces often have different variations on each verse of a song, so we make Will’s task of notating as difficult as possible. 🙂
For each song that we deliver to you, our goal is to provide two versions:
1. The simplified version: we refer to this internally as our “harmonization” version, and consider it to be the standard harmonies for the song, before we get into all our variations, so it is the same parts for each verse. In workshops, this is usually what we’ll use for teaching.
2. The extended version: we refer to this as our “full arrangement” version because it includes all the harmonic variations, as well as our artistic choices about when each part comes in or drops out. This is pretty much what you would hear in concert or on our CD.
We wanted to give you both versions because we know you may have different desires and goals for your own use of this music. Feel free to teach and perform any of this music, but if you end up wanting to record our songs, please do get in touch first. Let us know if you have any questions!
Attached, you’ll find the harmonization and full arrangement of Earth’s Burdens. The post with the the audio track and background info is here.
