The “official” Gentle Giant Home Page has just re-released a revised, updated collection of 40 extremely detailed multi-instrumental transcriptions of Gentle Giant pieces, in PDF, Sibelius and MusicXML formats, for free download.
You can find the documents here:
http://www.blazemonger.com/GG/Wheat_Williams
They are listed under my name, but I'm only the editor.
The website, and its proprietor Daniel Barrett have been providing fan-submitted transcriptions of Gentle Giant pieces in printable format for a couple of decades. They claim to have the support of the former members of Gentle Giant and its various publishing companies in doing this, although these compositions are still very much under international copyright.
This set of 40 transcriptions was created by musician Phil Smith of Wisconsin over a decade ago. He spent untold hundreds of hours doing these transcriptions, engraving them in an early version, now long-obsolete, of the Sibelius music notation program. But up until now the website made these scores available only in primitive, very-low-resolution .BMP files.
This is where I came in. I’m a music copyist. I found out about the files earlier this year as I was looking for resources for an Atlanta club cover band in which I am a lead singer.
Although Phil Smith's transcription work is astonishingly good, the low-resolution documents were not up to the musical and technological standards of 2016. I felt compelled to re-edit these scores so that they could be more useful to musicians studying Gentle Giant’s music today.
I contacted Phil Smith and asked if he could dredge up the original Sibelius documents. He forwarded them to me, and over a couple of weekends I imported them into Sibelius 8.3, updated and reformatted them, and output the scores as up-to-date PDF, MusicXML, and Sibelius 7 documents.
Phil Smith approved my work, and we submitted my documents to Dan Barrett. He has now put them up live on the website.
These scores can now be freely downloaded by any interested musicians. They can print out “conductor scores” from the PDF files, or they can use the Sibelius 7 and MusicXML versions of the documents to import and open up the scores in many music notation programs (Sibelius, Finale, MuseScore, and others) so that they can do their own editing and formatting and further arranging, and so they can print out extracted parts (for instance, to extract just a lead guitar part or just a piano part for a given song). Depending on the software at one’s disposal, one could also use these score documents to generate MIDI files and virtual tracks for a DAW recording project.
I’m posting this because I want to get the word out so that interested musicians everywhere can access this amazing body of transcription work by Phil Smith, and study and better understand the compositions of Gentle Giant.
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Originally Posted by Jeremy Bender
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