Raw music scores

This post is to “show my work” in the making of Yearling’s Bobtail, starting with the original music scores that were handwritten on paper. This isn’t everything; I left out all the parts that ended up not being used, as well as several pages that even I can no longer make sense of.

I took piano and violin lessons for ten years as a child, then switched to learning guitar on my own. So by the time I worked on these scores, I could read music notation well; I just hadn’t formally studied music theory. That is to say, I was hardly a professional, but not quite an amateur either⁠— which the images below make clear, I think.

After the album failed to go anywhere the first time around, I decided to get a Master’s degree in music composition, once and for all. With no academic portfolio to speak of, I ended up typesetting these scores into standard notation and submitting that as part of my application. You can view those final results in the audio webcomic; just click on the treble clef icon.

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