Berklee Contemporary Music Notation A Comprehensive Guide to Music Scoring | Learn Notation for Staffs Lead Sheets Guitar Tabs and More | Create Professional Sheet Music

This book is not only thorough, it’s more than thorough. I’ve been playing the piano for 70 years and, as my title here says, I discovered things in the book that we’re new to me. My advice is, if you’re on the fence about a purchase of this, go ahead with it.

If you want the low-down on all aspects of music notation, this is the book. I love the layout -- nice big print, easy to read, gets right to the point, etc.. The book itself is large and the info is spread out smartly over the pages. Good use of tables, staves, etc. to get the points across in pictures. Really great insights into the best ways of creating useful musical notation in a variety of situations, along with plenty of examples of "OK" and "Bad" use of notation. The writing style is itself contemporary and conversational (that is, not overly formal and dry), which keeps the subject matter from being deathly boring. When reading the book, I feel like I am having a conversation with my music teacher. It has also made me rather critical of poorly laid out arrangements and horrible use (or lack of use) of proper notation. This matters, because I used to think I was the one with the problem when I found reading certain sheet music difficult. Since reading this book, I've become a more critical purchaser of sheet music just by seeing how much effort was put into the musical notation. I'd rather pay $10 for sheet music with great notation than paying $2 for sheet music with mistakes and confusing (or no) helpful notation.

I can not say enough great things about this book! It is even better if you take a Finale online course at Berklee, you get to speak in the computer classroom with the actual author! Even if you can not do that, it is all there in a very open, clearly laid out format. Even the paper size and paper weight and binding for orchestration, and other useful details that a less practical text might not mention, are included. I highly recommend it. It saved hours of scouring the web for info, as well.

Esteemed musicologist and editor in chief of the Berklee Music publishing arm, Jonathan Feist writes a lovely book on how to read and some common conventions for scoring music from key signatures to the order and abbreviations for common instruments.If you did everything this book tells you too, it would meet 90% of the requirements for basic music publishing.I appreciated Jonathan's self-deprecating comments indicating past overreaches and the fleeting nature of musical publications conventions.The book is not only a decent reference for music scoring and publication, this would also be a useful middle grade or first high school music appreciation course, study guide.All in all, the book is well written covers the topic at just the right level for the beginner and has enough humor to keep it an interesting read.I highly recommend it.

Learn notation

Got this for a class, and it was very useful!

Very informative book.easy to read and understand.great format.covers most important things.very well pleased.

Last year I took Mr. Feist's Notation and Score Preparation Class at Berklee Online and this book would have been a great companion work. I am currently taking some Orchestration courses and it is proving to be a very helpful handbook.