Some possible improvements for a piano sheet (original composition)

[mikkop]

Hello,
After more than one year of "planning" (= daydreaming) of properly arranging some of my older pieces for piano, I've finally gotten a good start with three pieces.
This first one I finished is of a piece called "Jäidenlähtö / Ice Run" (original name is in Finnish), a melody I wrote in April 2014.
The arrangement has been already performed by a colleague and a couple of her students.

I'm quite happy with the arrangement, but I'd very much appreciate some feedback on the engraving quality.
I will be offering this sheet music as a holiday gift to my teacher colleagues, and very likely I'll also offer it on my website free of charge.

So here's the most recent edition:
Jäidenlähtö / Ice Run v4


Stylistically, the piece could be categorized as "contemporary Finnish folk music", heavily influenced by groups like Tsuumi Sound System, Värttinä and composer Timo Alakotila.

[Fred G. Unn]

A few stream of consciousness comments ...

There are several standard conventions regarding fonts that you aren't adhering to. Tempo indications are typically a bold Roman font. Dynamic text indications like cresc., dim., etc. are usually an italic Roman font. The systemic bar numbers are usually an italic as well, although that's more variable than the tempo and dynamic indications, which look odd here IMO when they don't adhere to their usual styles.

In bar 39, the eighth note in that metronome marking is awfully small. It really should be much larger IMO.

There's quite a bit of white space and the horizontal spacing feels pretty loose for piano music. I would think you could pretty easily get this down to 4 pages.

In bar 33, the pp is colliding with the barline. I would either have it erase the barline or just bump it to the right.

I'm not particularly a fan of that treble clef, but that's obviously just my opinion. If you like it, you like it!

I imagine your choice of winged repeats won't be popular around here. I actually like winged repeats, but it does look sort of strange when the wing doesn't touch the thin barline. I would adjust the heavy barline so the wings don't extend so far from the staff.

I didn't look that closely, but there seem to be some grouping inconsistencies, like bar 7 with a quarter tied to an eighth in the RH, but dotted quarter in the LH. If bar 15 is 2+3, then beam the last 3 eighths together and show that in the LH too. Or fix the G if it's 3+2. Etc...

You also aren't being that consistent with whether you show rests in other voices either. Most of the time you don't but sometimes you do? And sometimes you show them smaller? (like bar 59, 61-63)

Your stem length settings are quite long. Some publishers have that as a house style, but I would expect that first beam in bar 1 of the RH to be sit-straddle, rather than straddle-hang, for example.

The font issue is really the biggest one that jumps out to me as there's no hierarchy to any text. Some of the other comments may be nitpicking, but if you fix the fonts, I think it will be much improved!

[mikkop]

A few stream of consciousness comments ...

Thank you for the quick and very helpful answer!
Here's a revised version:
Jäidenlähtö / Ice Run v5

Funny how I had managed to totally ignore the font issues, on my previous scores the standard conventions you listed are usually respected as they are default settings in Dorico. It may be that while mixing and tweaking some of my own templates and Scoring express templates there has been some error and I didn't pay attention since the font hierarchy has usually been ok. But luckily this was easily fixed.

The slightly overemphasized spacing especially on the first two pages was done on purpose to emphasize the contrast between the two main parts of the piece. In bar 39 the rhythmic feel of the piece changes quite drastically (the ice melts, the river starts flowing). But it is true that overall there was lots of white space. With some tweaking I managed to fit the piece on 4 pages now.

The choice of winged repeats has been my default on rhythm section sheets and lead sheets for a few years now, mainly because people I reguralrly play and perform with have switched from paper to (dreadfully small) iPad screens. So I often end up using thicker music fonts, winged repeats and other tricks in order to make important things pop out. Winged repeats also seem to help when teaching sight reading to younger students.
But on this kind of piano arrangement which is more likely read from printed paper the winged repeats are unnecessary, so I removed them.

[John Ruggero]

The left hand would generally be beamed as follows to avoid rests, which would otherwise be necessary. Both versions of your piece are shown:

beaming.png (33.44 KiB) Viewed 1561 times

[mikkop]

Thank you for the suggestion!
Improved the overall look of first two pages significantly.

Jäidenlähtö / Ice Run v6

[John Ruggero]

You are very welcome, mikkop! In m. 43 etc. the last three eighth notes in the right hand should be stems up.

Then the next two notes in m. 44 are fine with stems up despite the lack of lower voices. Later you have then stems down which is OK but to me not quite as nice. But others might disagree with that.

[OCTO]

You have improved greatly your score, thanks to John and Fred.

One thing: why does the last page have a white bottom page. You need to spread the measures to fit it to the bottom. Either to reflow the spacing of the last page to get more systems or to increase spacing between the current systems.

[mikkop]

Thank you everybody for your comments so far!
For the latest edit I took a proper look at the stem directions and staff spacing.

Jäidenlähtö v6.1

[John Ruggero]

Looks great!

Something else to consider: page turns.

If you start on page 2 instead of page 1 (page 1 could be the title page) you would have two facing pages: 2-3. I see an excellent page turn in m. 38. Then the rest of it could be on two facing pages 4-5 with 6 systems per pages, which is standard.

Whenever possible, I start with two facing pages. This usually allows for the best page turns in what follows.

[mikkop]

Great point. The page turning points got a bit out of order after changing the overall layout, but m. 38 definitely is an ideal place since it's the biggest turning point in the music.
I hadn't thought about the facing pages thing (most likely since I'm used to reading from a 12" iPad whenever I use sheet music myself), but it certainly makes things easier for whoever ends up printing this piece out.

I made a rough version of a title page and arranged all the music on pages 2-5.

Jäidenlähtö v7